Times have changed for Rhodes. Once on the cover of Billboard and in the pages of People magazine, playing guitar before tens of thousands in the 1980s and jamming with Joan Jett and Stevie Ray Vaughan, she now lectures before classrooms of students enrolled in introductory American studies. She doesn’t perform much—though she did pick up the guitar for the faculty Christmas party last year—and the superstars she admires most are academic heavyweights doing research down the hall. But Rhodes, a lecturer at Temple University and a member of the Temple Association of University Professionals (TAUP)/AFT, uses her backstage savvy in her book, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture, bringing to life women’s roles in rock between 1965 and 1975.

Since then, times have changed backstage as well, though not as much as Rhodes would like. Women may get more attention, and press coverage in magazines like Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, but it still frequently focuses more on how they look than how they sound.

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, women were a relatively rare breed in rock. Although Rhodes first played guitar when she was 9, inspired by her older brother’s garage band, it was another three years before she saw another girl holding a guitar. For her, it didn’t matter. “I loved doing it,” she remembers. “I was a really big fan of Janis Joplin and I knew she was really out there, and did whatever she wanted.”

Rhodes’ book focuses on female singers and musicians as depicted in the popular press, as well as on groupies, whom she views not as sublimated followers but as a power-wielding part of the rock ’n’ roll firmament. Growing along with the feminist movement, female musicians and those making the scene at rock concerts and backstage were expanding women’s place in society, even in the face of male domination in the field. Rhodes examines the press on influential musicians like Aretha Franklin, her hero Janis Joplin, Cass Elliott and Karen Carpenter, as well as the journalists who covered them, and groupies like Cynthia Plaster Caster and Pennie Lane.

Rhodes’ own experience began in high school and took off when she quit college, after three semesters in the honors program at the University of Texas. Once she’d had her 15 minutes of fame—actually 10 years—it was natural for her to re-enter academe. She took the LSAT and the GRE, decided to teach, stumbled on American Studies at UT and found it a perfect place for her to study and teach popular culture. At Temple for three years, Rhodes teaches media classes as well as gender and censorship in 20th-century film and music, television and American culture, and the history of American sexuality. Her next book, But Can She Play, considers women instrumentalists from 1965 to 1975.

Rhodes’ work as a lecturer in a field that frequently explores the rights of women has made her especially appreciative of TAUP’s “great job” negotiating partner benefits, among other things.

As a colleague of Lewis Gordon, a Temple philosophy professor pilloried in David Horowitz’s recent book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, Rhodes also applauds AFT’s leadership against the Horowitz-led “Academic Bill of Rights,” a move toward government oversight of academia. Gordon’s work “is respected worldwide and he’s aiming to expand people’s rights,” says Rhodes. “If that makes him dangerous, then I guess there are a lot of us who are dangerous, too.”