"It's like we all move in the same world, you know? Same booze, same drugs, same easy attitudes to sex, same weird schedules, all hanging out in the same after-hours joints. And those girls do have an income, which is never a bad thing. In fact, some of them make a whole lotta money, more than the rockers. It makes sense when you think about it."
The conversation took place a few years ago, in a bar where - I think in the wake of the Pam Anderson/Tommy Lee video and online download - a guitar player friend of mine was attempting to explain why so many musicians ended up in relationships with porn actresses, strippers, and topless dancers. The explanation was delivered with the kind of patience that is reserved for fools who ask dumb questions, but have to be tolerated because they might just buy you a drink.
The question was dumb because it doesn't take a musicologist to know that sex and rock 'n' roll have always gone together - ever since Little Richard (if you believe his version of history) invented it a half century ago. Early denunciations of the music, by everyone from the Ku Klux Klan to Frank Sinatra, talked in terms of rock being a form of musical pornography; how it was little more that simulated copulation; jungle music corrupting the morals of white youth, leading to promiscuity, degeneracy, and delinquency. And, in many respects, the moralists were right. Those of us who grew up listening to and watching the first generation of rock 'n' roll knew instinctively that the music was a force for change, a wild weapon against the sexual repression of the Eisenhower era.
By powerful coincidence, rock 'n' roll saw the light of day at approximately the same time as the first TV sets were arriving in the living rooms of working Americans. Cameras very quickly became part of the package, and all manner of interesting things started to happen. When Elvis Presley first appeared on TV on The Milton Berle Show, his bump and grind routine for the song "Hound Dog" so shocked both viewers and network censors that Ed Sullivan, the king of Sunday night family television, insisted Elvis only appear on his show shot from the waist up. Sullivan made same mistake as so many others who thought censorship could be used to hold back primal energies like sex and music.
When filmmakers joined the rock 'n' roll party, the obvious connection was made between rock and erotica. Long before MTV was even a gleam in corporate eyes, bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors, started making mini-movies as visual interpretations of their songs. At around the same time, cheap Polaroid cameras became all the rage, and something of a fetish for traveling bands with both time and infinitely malleable groupies on their hands, and tedious hours to pass in a procession of near-identical hotel rooms. Sex Polaroids were snapped, collected, and passed around like trading cards, and girls with backstage passes seemed willing to act out just about any erotic scenario, no matter how grossly undignified, if got it them close to their idols. Rod Stewart and The Faces even had a fold out poster of their more innocuous road Polaroids as part of the packaging of one of their albums.
Next came the early reel-to-reel video recorders. As they became more widely available, the Polaroid took a back seat, and the superstar hot ticket was to have one's sexual adventures recorded on videotape, if not for posterity, at least for later viewing, either as private narcissism or for the amusement of the road crew. According to rock 'n' roll legend, one of the first to score himself a video-cam was no less than Elvis Presley, and, for a while he was obsessed with taping everything that moved in his bedroom and elsewhere. After the death of the King in 1977, a number of his entourage - the infamous Memphis Mafia - swore that an extensive cache of tapes existed of Elvis having sex with a veritable galaxy of TV and movie stars, as well as anonymous fans. Since such tapes would now be worth millions to video packagers or online content providers, it has to be assumed that, if not a tall tale, they were either destroyed by someone who wanted to prevent sex tapes being added to the drug and other scandals that followed Presley's death, or, for once, Elvis used a modicum of discretion and the combination to the vault died with him.
The stories of Elvis' rock 'n' roll sex tapes weren't the only ones, however. In the wake of the Manson Family murders, it was rumored that worried musicians and movie stars scoured Hollywood for crude orgy tapes that might become public during the investigation of the sensational Tate/La Bianca killings. But the first band to ever make their on-the-road sex tapes public were the Rolling Stones. Almost as soon as VCRs became generally available, grainy, black & white bootleg cassettes of outtakes from the 1975 concert documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones, that featured an in-flight orgy on the Stones private jet, began circulating under the title Cocksucker Blues. It should be noted, though, that the Stones themselves managed to stay carefully out of shot.
The advent of MTV and commercial rock videos seemed to temporarily halt the trade in rock 'n' roll amateur porn, although doubtless stars still taped their boudoir and hotel room antics. But, by the 1980s, suburban couples were doing it, and it hardly came with any risque cachet. On the other hand, a number of stars seemed highly motivated to see just how far they could push the erotic content of their videos and still have them played on MTV and the other cable TV music outlets. Billy Idol leaned toward leather catalogue S/M, while Madonna tried just about anything to shock and sell records. Closer to the present, the erotic content of rock videos was further pushed by Marilyn Manson in one direction and Christina Aguilera in another, while a hundred rap acts have all but gone for broke.
On the other side of the erotic coin, the commercial release and pay-to-view downloads of Pam and Tommy Lee forged a strange link between rock videos, commercial porn, and home celebrity sex tapes. That Paris Hilton, although not a rock star, could enhance her career on the strength of a widely-circulated sex tape, and that Fox should use it as under-the-radar promo for the TV show The Simple Life, took things a stage further, stretching the line between porn and the mainstream transparently thin. Surely it can't be long before some musician, courting a new level of wild-one reputation decides "What the hell? Why not go the whole way and make a totally explicit, full-blown pornographic rock video?" So it won't be played on MTV, but it can be distributed on the Web, either free, or as part of a subscription package.
That will be the point when everything those in authority feared, back in the 1950s, when Ed Sullivan censored Elvis, will have come wholly true, sweaty and naked, and, having spent my life watching the drama play out, I will be laughing my ass off.
Mick Farren, commentator, novelist, free speech defender, and veteran punk rocker runs a Weblog at Doc40.blogspot.com.
