- Music
- 20 Mar 01
BLOODHOUND GANG might not be paragons of good taste, but they do live out the rock n roll lifestyle like no other band. JIMMY POP talks to STUART CLARK about swearing, drugs, porn stars and amusing Germans! Pop Pic-er: Declan English
The Latino Student Union, the NAACP, the Gay And Lesbian Anti-Defamation League, PETA, the Jewish Student Union, Women s Circle... oh yeah, and the Asian American Student Union.
Jimmy Pop is listing all the organisations that the Bloodhound Gang have managed to piss off over the past year. He s particularly perplexed by that last bunch of do-gooders who recently picketed their gig in Minneapolis. The reason? A romantic little ditty called Yellow Fever which contains the couplet, Chinky chinky bang bang I love you/Chinky chinky bang bang, I hope you love me too.
The whole song is about how I want to bang an Asian girl, the 24-year-old explains matter-of-factly. I just don t know how something like that could breed hate. It s all in good humour.
The lapse in taste is far from momentary, with the likes of Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny , I Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks and A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When The Stripper Is Crying ensuring that the American frat rockers get up as many noses as Vick s Sinex.
This is an equal opportunities band, Pop insists. Jews, niggers, spicks, honkeys, homos, straights, retards all of them have been insulted by us for commercial gain. If we were only picking on one group Koreans, say then it d be offensive and racist. As it is, we re a rainbow coalition of bad taste. A United Nations of grossness.
Thank you, Kofi Annan. While it s my duty as a hotpress scribe to condemn such political incorrectness, part of me is dead jealous cause they re getting to live out every adolescent rock n roll fantasy in the book.
Twice nightly, he agrees. There are no rules. If you turn up for an interview unshaved, and people are taking pictures, they think you re being cool. Whereas Steps, they ve got to shave. Especially the girls. Basically, we ve turned what we used to do round our houses drinking beer, masturbating and listening to cheesy disco tracks into a multi-million dollar industry. We re perpetually stuck at age 15 which is A-OK by me.
You can see just how A-OK life is for the Bloodhound Gang in the New Year when they release their on-the-road video. Eschewing the Julian Temples and Jonas Akerlunds of this world, the band have shot it themselves on a $1000 camcorder, and are promising something that will make Pam n Tommy s aerobic workout look like Barney The Purple Bastard Dinosaur.
That s who we were hanging with at Glastonbury, Tommy Lee. He came on stage with us and showed the crowd the weenie that drove the boat. We ve got some even better stuff than that on tape. At a festival last year in Sweden, a girl came back and said to our guitarist, Jared, that she wanted to be a porn star. By way of an audition, he bent her over a table, poured Frosties and milk into the small of her back, and banged her while having his breakfast. It was really perverse, with the two of em laughing all the way through.
The only person who s turned down a role in it is Joe from N Sync, he claims. I wanted him to watch as two girls did a 69 in the bathroom, but he went, Aaaaarrrgh, I don t know about that. Here s something really shocking for you despite all the evidence to the contrary, N Sync aren t tossers. Neither are the Vengaboys or John Taylor from Duran Duran. Someone who is a tosser is Iggy Pop. We were on tour with him for a month and a half and not once did he say hello , goodbye or fuck off. On top of that, he flipped cause we had a bigger bus than him.
Iggy isn t the only punk rock legend they ve encountered recently
Want to hear something sad? Joe Strummer came up to me at a festival last year and said, Hey, my name s Joe and I enjoyed your set. Not recognising him, my reply was, Thanks, do you want me to sign something? Cue a whack on the back of the head from our tour manager who growls, Do you know who the fuck that is? Here s me talking to royalty and not realising. I felt such a wanker.
While enjoying rock n roll life to the full Pop says he s lost count of the porn models he s bedded the Bloodhound Gang have managed to stay out of the Betty Ford Clinic. Indeed, given their penchant for partying, they re still in remarkably good nick.
The secret of our success is sticking to gay drugs. It s quite simple ketamine makes you horny, heroin makes your dick shrivel-up. A while back, I got a little too fond of ketamine so now I only do it when we re in Las Vegas. When you ve got someone in the room below you pooping on a glass table for $600 a hour plus tips, no one cares if you re off your head on cat tranquilliser. Except your parents. The first time I did it, I rang em at four in the morning and said, I m all fucked up on this Special K stuff. My Mom goes, Special K, what s that? I tell her, and she s like, You re snorting cat tranquilliser? That s that s that s for cats! Y know what? I couldn t argue with her.
Having lavished $40,000 on their Jimmy s college education, the Pops were understandably upset when he joined a band whose first demo was called The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack To Hitler s Handicapped Helpers.
A totally underrated piece of work which will one day be acknowledged as the 20th Century classic that it is, he proffers. They were a little, um, concerned at first, but once we got on to MTV, they realised that I wouldn t be bumming off them for the rest of my life. Actually, German TV shot a Bloodhound Gang special recently at the camping resort they own. The intro is my mother standing next to the sign and saying, Wir lieben muchie. I told her it meant we love music , but really it s we love pussy. We got a ton of e-mails from places like Frankfurt and Dusseldorf going, Zat ist ze funniest fink ve hef ever seen. We re doing another show in Croatia which will only feature videos with the word bomb in them. The reason we get away with it is that people in those countries don t mind laughing at themselves. If we took the piss out of the French like that, fuck me, we d be beaten up by the police and deported.
Something which very nearly happened the other day in Moscow.
The first couple of times we played there, no problem, we didn t have anyone keeping an eye on us. Last month, though, word had gotten round that these Americans had no respect for authority, and the militia and fire people were out in force. The bit where we pay someone $20 to come on stage and puke had just bombed, so in the interest of livening things up, I said to Jared, You ll have to strip. Trooper that he is, he was butt-naked in seconds and the crowd went mental. We re congratulating ourselves afterwards on a job well done when these armed police burst in to the dressing-room and say that they want to arrest him. There are some building materials next door which Jared manages to hide under, so they try to arrest me. The ex-KGB heavies who are guarding us eventually persuade them that we re stupid, not malicious, and we get the hell out of there.
Little did they realise that they d have to pay for their indiscretion when they got back to the States.
My Mom was furious: These people are having a hard enough time trying to be a new democracy, without you going there and spoiling it for them!
If Jimmy Pop is the brains behind the operation it s a relative term Evil Jared Hasselhoff is most definitely the brawn. Although unrelated to his namesake David, he s got the same pecs of steel as the Baywatch star, and attracts the bulk of the Bloodhound s groupies.
If you have a song on MTV or the radio, it s really pretty simple, the 6 4 man mountain reflects, you get laid. If you work for Burger King, you don t get laid.
There s plenty of incident, but sadly no full-frontal nudity, when the band later play their first Irish show in Vicar St. Having limbered up with a spot of fire breathing, Hasselhoff executes a perfect swan dive from the PA, and then front-crawls his way over the crowd s head to the balcony. Whatever you think of them musically, it s a piece of rock n roll theatre worthy of the great Kiss themselves.
It s nice coming to a place like Dublin where you don t get fined for saying Jesus Christ or Godamnit on stage, Jimmy Pop resumes. In Oklahoma, that costs you five bucks a curse. Worse still is the $500 and/or imprisonment you get for going fuck in front of women and minors. We did a show there with Sponge and The Reverend Horton Heat, which started off with the Sponge singer shouting, I don t fucking care about any fucking rules , and being thrown into jail. Not wanting to be thought of as pussies, the Horton Heat boys did the same, but only got fined. Being smarter than the average grunge band, we went on with these idiot boards that said fuck , supplied a drum beat and got the crowd to do our dirty work for us. We totalled over 30 fucks and it didn t cost us a cent.
No Bloodhound Gang interview would be complete without discussing their favourite subject pornography.
I m so into it that I recently moved from Philadelphia to the porn capital of L.A., Woodland Hill. One of the people I hang out with is a porn actress called Nikki Dial. Nice girl, but not exactly the brightest. As for who s exploiting who, they re being paid vast amounts of money to do stuff i.e. fucking that you and I would do for free. I m sure it s different at the bottom end of the scale, but the $250,000 a year porno stars are in no way victims. Brain dead or not, they re enjoying that money.
Connoisseurs of the genre that they are, their Hooray For Boobies album not only pays tribute to uber-vixen Chasey Lain (You ve had a lotta dick Chasey/But you ain t had mine), but sports a cover shot of the Bloodhounds in flagrante delecto with three of Woodland Hill s finest. It must have been particularly tough for Jimmy Pop, having to lie there with his head on a gorgeous brunette s groin.
What you can t tell from that picture is that she d just come from an all-night porno shoot and smelt of gone-off tuna. Man, I just wanted to chunder.
The Bloodhound Gang s The Ballad Of Chasey Lain single is out now on Geffen