Absolute Mayhem (20 page)

She also said that I kind of 'swing between needing
people and not needing people, and also between
needing to please people and not needing to please
people'. That's not atypical of many of us who work in
entertainment. I am oft en very conflicted about my
social relationships and I find myself second-guessing
whether certain people can be trusted. Los Angeles is a
city where you have to learn very quickly who you can
trust or else you'll waste precious time dealing with the
wrong people. As one famous movie producer, Lynda
Obst, once said about working in Hollywood, 'Nobody
has friends, we all only have alliances.' This is almost
impossible to explain to anyone who hasn't lived and
worked in LA, a city that's actually much less laid-back
than its legend claims.

I think, ultimately, it's that peculiar trait of my
personality that makes me realise I'm not meant to stay
in this business much longer. The thought of leaving
porn crosses my mind every now and then. I do sometimes
think, though, that since I do take care of myself
and my body, and everyone keeps telling me that I look
better than I've ever looked, it means I still have a few
more good years left . And, if the MILF craze continues,
I'll have plenty of years of work left .

In the past few years, any girl who's 25 or older qualifies as a bona fide MILF, and you can film her acting
like she's a hot, sexy mother who'll want to fuck anyone
behind her husband's back. (There's an even sillier subgenre
called GILF – yes, grannies – which I think is just
ridiculous.)

But every girl in this business has a shelf life and
the parts definitely get fewer and further between once
you've hit your 30s. Because of the constant influx of
new girls, the agents and managers and producers want
fresh faces and younger girls all the time. That's partly
why my music is starting to become more and more
important to me. I've been writing a lot of songs over
the past two years, with the aim of releasing my first
album some time in 2010. That's my immediate goal,
anyway, even though some people think I'm crazy.

Admittedly, this isn't the first time I've set my mind to
becoming a rock star – far from it. Back in 2004, I did an
interview with
Rock Confidential Online
. The headline
of the story read, 'Monica Mayhem: Hot Pornstar on her
Way to Being Hot Rockstar'. That was after they'd heard
my demo song 'Take This Away', which I had written
with a friend (who shall go unnamed here), who had
previously written for the band Korn.

It was a very hardcore song, and my friend even
screamed during the chorus to give it that extra edge.
We wrote a lot of great songs together, but all unfinished
– because, as usual, he wanted more than just to make
music with me. All I wanted was to work together, and
we could have gone so far with the music we had created,
but he wouldn't even let me keep any of the ideas. I tried
working with other musicians after that, but the music
just never came out the way I wanted it to.

I spent a lot of money recording songs, paying
musicians to play and having the songs mastered. But
I didn't like any of them. I also had many meetings with
managers and people in the music industry, all of which
(yes, as usual) were talking to me because they were
trying to fuck me. Or, worse, were telling me that I had
to sleep with the chief executives of certain record labels
in order for me to get a deal – which, obviously, I did
not do. I didn't believe for a minute that they would give
me a deal just like that.

It wasn't until 2006 that I finally found that successful
writing chemistry again. This time, it was with a
great guitarist, Cordell Crockett, formerly with the band
Ugly Kid Joe. I met Cordell through a woman I'll call
Jane, a friend of my tattoo-artist friend Maxx. Jane was
a drummer and introduced me to Cordell because she
thought we might be able to write some music together.
And she was right.

We got right to it and wrote some awesome songs.
I then met a producer who was dating one of my flat mates
at the time, and I played him some of our demo
songs. He said, 'You'vet got potential here. If you can put
together an all-girl metal band, I'all set up a showcase for
the labels.'

And that's exactly what I did. First, there was Jane, who
was such a great drummer. However, she sometimes got
distracted – by doing lines of coke in the middle of a song
during practice! (Admittedly, I was similarly distracted
too, at times.) Then, Jane introduced me to another girl,
who was a bass player and who was, to put it mildly, a
wee bit crazy. (I won't name her here.) This girl was all
over the place; she would jump from one thing to another
and never finished a whole song during practice. We also
had Cordell's friend Deralyn, who became our guitarist.
She was technically great on the guitar, but jamming (in
order to come up with song ideas, which is how I prefer
to work) really wasn't her thing.

And the drama began. Most of our practices consisted
of drinking beer and doing blow. (For me and Jane,
anyway.) However, our crazy bassist was shooting up
speed, and after I found out I told Jane she needed to
tell her that I didn't want to be associated with someone
who did that. Because, to me, that was crossing the
line. That girl was just a loose cannon ready to explode.
When Jane told her, she lost it. She said she was going
to come after me and shoot me in the head! (See? That's
why I didn't want to mention her name!)

To cut a long story short, there were all sorts of
dramas with this all-girl band, including changes of
personnel that were just as unsuccessful and dramatic
as the previous line-ups had been, and the whole thing
eventually fell apart.

Fortunately, throughout all this Cordell and I never
stopped writing together. I got invited to play a gig in Las
Vegas in 2007, so Cordell brought in his friend Harley to
play drums. He was a really awesome drummer. Cordell
would play the riff and Harley would get the drum parts
right away. We couldn't find a bass player in time for the
gig, but we did it anyway by splitting the signal on stage
so that the guitar would also produce the bass line. (It
was very complicated, and I really don't know how they
did that!) We went by the name of Sweet Avenge and
did an awesome show in front of a bunch of bikers, who
even cheered on my love song 'Never Again'.

I then played our demo songs to an exec at Roadrunner
Records, the label behind heavy-music bands like
Dream Theater, Megadeth and Slipknot, and he said that
we needed live drums (true, because they were computerised)
and more lead guitar. I honestly didn't think we
were hardcore enough for that label, but the music exec
said to come back when I had the songs recorded in a
studio, and this got me feeling all pumped up.

However, this band was also doomed. Perhaps we
were not meant to be. It started with Cordell and Harley
getting into a big fight one night. From that juncture,
Cordell and I continued to work together, but Harley
was out.

We managed to find two new musicians just in time
for another Sweet Avenge gig, at the FOXE Awards in
2008. There was Sara, a great make-up artist whom I'd
worked with on Playboy TV and who turned out to be
a great bass player too, and her boyfriend, Charles, who
was an amazing drummer. By then, Cordell and I had
written and recorded eight songs together – all, in my
own estimation, great songs – but we were only able to
do three songs at the gig, as we really didn't have enough
time to get the band together to practise doing any more
than that because of all our clashing schedules.

I also landed us a gig performing in a music video for
my 2008 movie
Rockstar Pornstar
. This was a porn film
written just for me, as everyone in this business calls me
the Rockstar Pornstar! It was basically a mockumentary
about my 'amazing' double life, including interviews
with the band, me fucking groupies, groupies fucking
each other, and, of course, the music video.

The only thing was, Cordell didn't have ID, and you
have to show valid ID in California to appear in a porn
flick, regardless of whether or not you are performing
music or sex or just playing a janitor. In the end, we had
to use Charles's friend Cyrus in the video. Cordell was
not happy about this, of course, but there was nothing
I could do about it.

Cordell was having some personal problems around
this time, which weren't getting resolved. And my band
members wanted nothing to do with him, so again I'd
lost all of my musicians – eventually including Cordell
himself. He went away to Hawaii for a while and came
back with a new outlook on life. However, he is now
involved with another female musician and is currently
working on a project with her.

This leaves me with all these unfinished songs and
a ton of melodies I've written that are just waiting for
a musician of his calibre to come and put music to. If I
could do it on my own, I would, but I'm not good enough
on guitar – not good enough, I would say, to write music
on my own at the level that I aspire to.

So here I am once again, trying to find that next musician
to share that great writing chemistry with. Cordell
has assured me that he still wants us to work together,
but he just needs to sort a few things out first. I can't
wait forever, so I'm on the hunt right now for new
musicians to work with. Maybe, I'm now thinking,
I'll save myself a lot of headaches and just hire
musicians.

The music business, everyone tells me, is even more
twisted than the porn business. Yes, I know, it's full
of conniving tricksters and sleazy scumbags. Dyanna
Lauren, who was a singer before she became a porn
star, once explained her career change this way: 'I
decided that if I was going to get screwed, I would
at least get paid for it.' But I'm going to give it my
best shot.

I've already had meetings where I know that these
guys know I'm a porn star trying to get a record deal,
so at first they're all thinking, 'Oh, whatever.' Then
they actually hear my music and my voice and they're
shocked. It's kind of a nice surprise for them, and I'm
treated way more respectfully after that. You can't bag
on someone if they actually have talent.

There have been porn girls in the past who have
tried to break into the music industry but probably
didn't have talent, so I naturally get stereotyped. And
then there have been those who had talent and didn't
make it anyway. Heather Hunter scored a deal with
Island Records when she was a Vivid Girl but her
album bombed. Lorraine Lewis, who was a stripper,
had a great band called Femme Fatale and managed to
release one album on MCA Records, and that stiffed
too. Traci Lords made a great album,
1000 Fires
, but
it just didn't work beyond the electronic-dance/trance
niche market.

I wonder if I'm going to be one of those casualties
in today's music wars. Usually, I try not to tell people
I'm a porn star, just to see how they react to my music
first. I do come from the country that produced Chrissy
Amphlett, after all, so I hope there will always be a place
for sexy Aussie sirens who can rock.

If nothing else, as a singer I'll be able to become the
object of men's fantasies in a different context. I have
no problem with that at all. The radical feminists will
hate me for saying this, of course, but I think it's a huge
compliment to a woman if you think of her as attractive
enough to be fuckable. That's one of the key reasons
why I became a porn star in the first place. It was such
a relief for me, to be allowed to express this in an open
way rather than by stealth and subterfuge – which is
what you do when you work in financial markets and
are forced to be a secret slut in a corporate uniform.
I did that for six long years.

Of course, becoming a porn star has brought its
own share of problems unique to the profession, but
that applies to any line of work. I can say, with a clear
conscience, that I don't regret one bit what I chose
to do after I left Salomon Smith Barney in London,
and not a lot of people could say the same about their
career path.