Hi. Just finished a story for Classic Rock about the Jimi Hendrix sex tape. Interviewed Cynthia Plaster Caster, who is Vivid Entertainment's resident 'expert' on the 8mm loop's authenticity, since she did, after all, make a mold of his penis in 1968 or so. If you think that sounds tenuous, I should mention that the other expert on-hand is supergroupie Pamela Des Barres, who never actually saw Jimi's penis, but heard plenty about it from Cynthia.

The DVD itself is pretty interesting. Most of it's running time is dedicated to a half-hour documentary about sex in the 60's. It's got lots of cool pix of naked hippy girls. I've got one for my wallpaper now, it's fantastic.

Cynthia was a lot of fun to talk to, very witty and frisky and flirty. Calls you "Doll", which I like. Here's an excerpt:

"The first thing you see is this long, purple dick flanked by two girls. You can't see the guy's face yet. And a couple of seconds later, it was all sinking in to me who this was, because I recognized the cock. Turns out it was Jimi Hendrix's face peeking out from behind!"

Here is a still from the movie. Does it look like Jimi? You decide.

The DVD is available now from Vivid.

Look for my brief but extremely compelling story on it in the next ish of CR.

And stay sexy!

Ken

Hi. I recently did a story on American death-rock pioneers Christian Death for Metal Hammer. I have no idea when the story will appear, because Metal Hammer doesn't usually tell me anything. It's always a surprise. Soon, I'm guessing. Anyway, this story didn't fit, but I thought it was pretty funny, so here it is. Christian Death are on tour, by the way. So, check 'em out, if you go for that sort of thing.

Above: Valor (vocals), Maitri (vocals, cleavage)

Maitri: So many things have happened to us that seem like they couldn't even happen to a person.

Like what? Bombs? Fire? Fights? Valor, didn't that dumb band Red Lorry Yellow Lorry have you arrested when you toured with them?

Valor: Yeah. Playing with other bands is never an easy thing. Bands are always in competition with each other. Who's going to have the longest soundcheck, or the most time on stage? It was a co-billed tour where one night they were the headliners and one night we were. We were doing this all over England. One night their sound engineer was having a war with us, he was changing the calibrations on our side of the mixing board. So I confronted him about it, and we got into a shoving match. It escalated to me giving him an open-handed slap to the side of the face. And then he called the cops on me. Anything like that in England is considered assault, so they carted me away and locked me up.

Maitri: That's a really boring story. There's way worse stories, like getting stopped at borders. They'd check the entire bus and make us stand outside for hours. One time John from Cradle of Filth was playing with us and he got arrested, and they wouldn't let us see him, so they started chasing us with baseball bats.

What? Who was chasing you with bats? The cops were?

Maitri: Yeah. Cops. They invent things, they inspect the soles of your shoes. It's crazy.

Valor: Well John, he's in Cradle of Filth, so he had this real rock star attitude he wasn't taking shit from anybody. But it was because he brought this book from his house. He used to smoke a lot of hash and he had this book where there was a tiny bit of hash pressed between the pages and they found that shit. And he was busted.

Yeah, but where the fuck were you where cops had baseball bats?

Valor: At the Croatia/Hungarian border.

Hahaha, say no more!

Hi. I just did a "Welcome Back Everclear" story for Classic Rock, and this amusing anecdote from my interview with Art Alexakis was left on the cutting room floor. So to speak. Dig.

What's with your feud with Australia? They threw shoes at you?

There's no feud, that got blown out of proportion. Here's what happened. We're playing a show in Wollongong, which is this blue collar town outside of Sydney. Australians are wonderful people, they just drink a fuck of a lot. They drink and have sex, because there's not all that much going on. I'm singing this one sensitive part of a song, and it's dark, and there's a spotlight on me,  and all of a sudden a boot comes flying through the air. It hits me square in the mic, drives the mic into my mouth, breaks a tooth, cuts open my mouth, and I'm just like, 'You know what? I'm done for the night. If you wanna throw something, thow panties and bras. Hurting me isn't part of the deal.' I say to Craig (Montoya, bass), 'Let's go', and he says 'No, I want to stay', and I say, 'You want to stay without me? Fuck you.' So we got into an argument. People say they saw me hit Craig. I didn't hit him, I just called him an asshole. So I get off stage and then he gets off stage, and he says 'I'm sorry', and I go 'That's cool, let's go out and play an encore'. We get off stage and we're still pissy with one another. We get to the hotel, he calls his girlfriend and decides to go home. That cuts the Australian tour short. I say, 'Are you quitting the band? Because if you are, that's cool, but let me know'. He says 'No, but I just want to go home. I'm done. It sucked, because we had to cancel our New Zealand dates. He was being a big baby. So he went home and we did a European tour without him. And that was it.

So, you've been to Australia since then?

No. That was the last record that did well over there. The next record wasn't rock enough for them.

In order to do well in Australia, you really have to rock? That's fucking awesome.

Apparently with our fans, yeah. I'm not really worried about it.

Read the rest in next month's CR!

-Sleaze

Hi.

Just wanted to check in and mention some of the latest goings-on in Sleaze-land. But first, the lasting lines from some of the movies Stacey and I saw last weekend.

Young @ Heart, a pretty great documentary about an elderly chorus group in western Massachusetts who sing, like, Clash and Sonic Youth songs.

"Well, that's just troopership. Or whatever you call it."

- 80 year old chorus singer Fred, who learned both parts of the Coldplay song he had to sing at the next Young @ Heart gig, just in case his duet partner Bill couldn't make it.

"We have a marriage based on faith and trust. I have no faith in her, and she doesn't trust me."

 - Fred again, talking about his 54 year-long marriage.

Zombie Strippers, which has plenty of both. Starring Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson, who is hilariously skinny at this point. She wears zombie quite well.

Army Sargeant, giving orders before zombie attack:

"Ok, so we get them all in a circle, and then we give them the Big E!"

New recruit:

"Elvis?"

Stripper-from-the-old-country:

"Vaya Con Ronnie James Dios!"

Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Latest naked penis-intensive comedy from the Apatow laff factory.

Paul Rudd's stoned-immaculate surfing instructor, offering some sage advice:

"When life gives you lemons, you say 'Fuck the lemons', then bail."

Bonus Paul Rudd quote (dude stole the show):

"I like her red hair. I wonder if the carpet matches the pubes."

Jonah Hill, as creepy guy who works at the hotel and moonlights as some sort of musician:

"I have a quick question for you. What did you think of my demo? Did you 'get' it?"

British rock star dude:

"I was gonna listen to it, but then I decided to just go on living my life."

Funny movie. Too long, and they cheated on Mila Kunis's boobs, but still, worth a ticket.

Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? Morgan Spurlock's latest film is a travelogue to the middle east. Morgan goes to all the Osama-related places he can – Afghanistan, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia (easily the scariest place I've ever seen) looking, not so much for Osama, but for what it is that so divides Westerners from Middle-Eastern Muslims. What he found, instead, was that we have much more in common with them than we think. It's great stuff. Anyway, best line was when Morgan was learning some basic phrases to use when he got over there.

Morgan:

"How do you say, 'Don't take me, take the cameraman'?"

So, here's the last page of this month's issue of Classic Rock, announcing Songs of Guns III, the latest in the annual compilations of new bands I put together for them. I felt a swell of pride that they called 'em 'legendary'. That's pretty cool. I will say that this is easily the strongest of the three. I compiled the entire list in an hour and amazingly got all the bands on there. You'll be able to pick it up with the May issue, out April 30^th in UK and Europe and the end of May here in the US and Canada. I hope every body likes it.

Loyal Sleazegrinder.com readers have probably noticed by now that the Sleazegrinder message board is no more. I decided to get rid of it because, well, it's $8.00 a month I can save. Social networking sites like this one make message boards sorta moot anyway. Everybody that was on there is on here, so if anybody misses one another, write an email. Or call. Or just show up unannounced for dinner one night. People love that!

It is a good idea to spend more meat-space time with friends, though. People are getting way too virtual these days. You know what the number one social activity was in the 1970s? Hanging out on stoops. Everybody did it. Sat on stoops and talked to each other. It was wild.

So, one thing I'm pretty excited about these days is Boobs! the book. Paul and I have been talking about working on a project like this for years, and we're finally knuckling down to do it. It's going to be a history of the teenage sex comedy, from the beach blanket movies of the 50's all the way to Superbad, with most of our time devoted to the 70's and 80's, when teenage T&A flicks were all the rage. However, it is becoming apparent to me as we go along that this book is about much more than that. It's about culture war and the death of innocence and love and longing and it's about celebrating life, all of it, even the parts that make you squirm. And it's also about boobs, of course. I think it's going to be a splendid book. My good friend David Kerekes will be releasing it on his Headpress imprint. David put out my Gigs From Hell book a few years ago, and we've been talking about working together ever since.

We put together a Myspace page for it and we'll be doing a fairly regular blog there, so please drop by, become our friends, and subscribe. There will be lots of cool stuff happening over there.

In other news…

I don't even wanna talk about it anymore, but I had another bike stolen not too long ago. That makes four, if you are counting. Stacey heard a rattling outside, and by the time she got to the window, the bike was gone. Those rat finks. So, this time I took a different tact. See, the reason they get stolen is because I have to leave them outside. Our place is too small to have one inside. So, here was my very European solution: a folding bike. It's not as stupid as it sounds.

It folds over in the middle. The handlebars fold down as well, and the seat detaches. The wheels are only 20", so they take up less room. The whole thing takes about 30 seconds to put together or take apart. It fits neatly into the trunk of our compact car.

How does it ride? Well, just look at the thing. It's a fucking nightmare to ride. It ain't easy getting anywhere on tiny wheels, man. But at least it's safe!

In other news I'm tired of talking about, I got a haircut. My first one in 18 years. I have not taken a picture of said haircut yet, but will soon. I just couldn't live the balding-dude-with-a-pony-tail lie anymore, man. Even George Carlin cut his off. I opted for a closely-shaven aging action movie type cut, and I'm pretty happy with it. I was sorta worried I would lose some of my superhero powers if I looked more like an average citizen, but so far that has not happened. I am still masterfully cool.

Speaking of cool, I picked up a Pearl xylophone with vintage mallets and I'm bangin' away on them in preparation to write a couple songs. You know how kids listen to Led Zep or the Rolling Stones or Pablo Cruise or whoever and decide they've got to form their own band? Well, I'm almost 40 and that's never happened. Until I heard The Incredible Bongo Band. More about them later. Suffice to say, they were the best bongo-fuzz band of the early 1970's. I listened to their first record and was so inspired, I called a bunch of my screwball cronies and got 'em to join me on a one-single musical adventure. It's not gonna be a rock n' roll band, necessarily. Quite frankly, I'm a little too cool for rock n' roll at this point. It'll be more like a jazz-funk-bossa nova sort of affair. I lifted a name from an IBB song – "Raunchy '73", and over the summer, I will write two incredibly groovy songs, which we will record over the fall and release as a single in the winter. And then we will break up by Xmas.That's the plan. I look forward to seeing how far we get, but already, there's snags. My trumpet player is a Socialist and wants political lyrics, even though I told him the songs are mostly going to be about air travel in the late 60's (you could smoke on the plane! And the stewardesses wore miniskirts!). We compromised, and he is going to paint his trumpet red, in a sort of quiet protest. We may even exploit his Commie-ness, and get him a blood red tuxedo. The rest of us will wear pale blue ones. Anyway, it's gonna be some fucking scene, believe me.

Here's Apache, by the Incredible Bongo Band. Incredible! Bongo-y!

It's finally starting to warm up around here. Trees are budding, the sun is hanging around a little longer than usual, and sometimes, you can even stroll around comfortably. It's nice. Unfortunately the housing market is in such a tailspin at this point (Thanks, W) that it doesn't look like we'll be able to sell our condo and move to Arizona any time soon, so a little warmth goes a long way to cushioning the blow. We've got film festivals coming up and summer tours and hopefully beach days and long, lazy afternoons feelin' groovy. Sweet.

So that's where it's at, man. Boobs, xylophones, summer on the way. Who could ask for anything more?

It's a kick-ass life, isn't it?

Talk more soon.

Ken