A website that appeals to the boys in the band and a big band of boys
by Mike Gibson
"Can playing "hide the salami" ever last too long?"
—Rock Confidential editor Jesse Capps
"Why would you want to hide it?"
—RC pin-up girl Heather Betts
Jesse Capps remembers fondly a time, not so long ago, when rock stars wanted to rock 'n' roll all night, and party every day; a time when a still-fresh MTV network teemed not with lame reality shows, but with actual music videos, most of them rife with leggy vixens in bustiers and leather G-strings; an era when preening rock idols wore as much mascara as the porn queens and strippers who were their groupies and girlfriends. He remembers a time when the music was loud, the hair was long, and the guitars were pointy. He remembers all of that stuff, and dammit, he misses it.
That's why in May of 2002, Capps, an everyguy manager at a local retail record store, founded rockconfidential.com, a website devoted entirely to rock 'n' roll, mostly of the big-hair and big-guitar variety, and girls—strippers, models and model wannabes, but mostly members of the adult film industry. And by doing so, he's now living out his own conception of the single-white-male American Dream, a version engulfed in a fog of hairspray, and soundtracked by wheedly guitar solos.
"Sometimes I feel like a cross between Hugh Hefner and Howard Stern," Capps says with a chuckle, relaxing in his pin-neat but provocatively decorated apartment off Middlebrook Pike. "This has definitely been the best thing that ever happened to me."
A native of Middlesboro, Ky., the 27-year-old Capps is an enterprising fellow who during his rock-obsessed teen years founded his own publication, Spit, a KISS-oriented fanzine that evolved into a full-fledged music magazine (Free Music Press) over the course of eight irregularly-spaced issues.
Capps eventually let FMP fall by the wayside when the responsibility of keeping up with a thousand-strong press run proved too much for his schedule.
But upon moving to Knoxville in 2000, the life-long hair-metal aficionado once again felt the need to lay burnt offerings on the altar of Rawk. With a song in his...heart and a few key phone numbers still in his Rolodex, Capps learned basic HTML computer code and recast his heavy metal dreams for the Internet.
"It was eating me up to get back into something," Capps says. "It wasn't just the music and the interviews; I loved doing the magazine, the lay-out, and the design and editing. I started out with a real basic design, with not a lot of content, and it snowballed from there."
Saying that RC "snowballed" is much akin to saying that the guys in Motley Crüe have a couple of tattoos. Rock Confidential fairly exploded, to the point that it now garners about 600,000 online hits every day. What started as a labor of love is now a money-making proposition, as Capps boasts a healthy stable of advertisers as well as a team of around 10 freelance contributors from both the music and adult-film industries—people like porn kittens Callie Cox and Jesse Jane, KNAC.com online radio host DJ Will and blue-movie producer Mike South.
"I'm still not what you'd call a porn connoisseur," says Capps, who began including interviews with and photo features of adult film stars in July of 2002, mostly as a means of increasing site traffic. "I'd only seen a handful of the movies when I started. Since then... hey, you've got to do research.
"Getting in touch with the industry turned out to be much easier than I thought. I'd email the movie companies or sometimes even the girls directly, and I almost always got a call back. I have more porn stars' phone numbers than I have of friends who live here in town now."
Truly, Capps' site is a source of boundless pleasures for those of us who wish the last great era of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll had never ended. Rock Confidential features all manner of deliciously juvenile nonsense, stuff like porn actress Jill Kelly holding forth on marriage, motherhood and her missing dog; Black Metal vocalist Dani Filth (of the English outfit Cradle of Filth) propounding his vision of the coming End Times; and W.A.S.P. frontman Blackie Lawless discussing his on-stage predilection for acts of simulated copulation with nuns.
And though the ubiquitous presence of chesty porn stars is no doubt a linchpin of the site's appeal, Capps handles the adult-film element with about as much "taste" as one could reasonably expect; the girls of RC are often scantily clad, sometimes topless, but rarely nude. And anyone looking for raw porn "action" shots will be sorely disappointed.
"Surprisingly, I haven't really had any complaints about the girls on the website," Capps says. "That's good, because I don't want people to see my name and relate it to pornography.
"Of course," he adds with a guilty flush and a roll of his eyes, "I already know that's what happens most of the time."
The perks of Capps' hobby are manifold—the hormonally over-saturated stuff of any '80s-bound metalhead's wettest dream. Since founding Rock Confidential, he's had occasion to meet any number of his rock idols, Metal icons like guitar virtuosos Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen, Motley Crüe vocalist Vince Neil, and infamously garrulous Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider.
An interview with former RATT singer Stephen Pearcy last year went so swimmingly, in fact, that Pearcy and Capps made plans to start a record label to capitalize on RC's burgeoning notoriety. Their first release, a compilation of celebrity interviews interspersed with cuts from up-and-coming hard rock outfits, is due in March.
"Stephen said he liked what I was doing with the website, and he thought we could do something with the name," Capps says. "To me, it's all about promotion. If someone wants to start something that has merit, I'll go for it."
On Capps' bedroom wall—right next to the nearly wall-sized poster of porn actresses Jenna Jameson and Silvia Saint standing breast-to-naked-breast—hangs a personal check in a bronzed frame, signed by none other than Hustler magazine magnate Larry Flynt. The infamous publisher hosted Capps and a coterie of lovely blue-movie starlets at a special promotion for his Hustler retail outlet in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Besides meeting the Flynt family, Capps spent the day hob-nobbing with the aforementioned Jameson, an architecturally astounding blonde bombshell who is perhaps the adult film industry's biggest star. "It was a very good day," he allows with justifiable smugness.
And last year, his Rock Confidential work earned Capps a trip to New York to appear on "All Access," one of VH-1's many vicarious celebrity-leering television specials. Capps appeared on two episodes, providing "expert" commentary on the subject of "Hot Babes, Ugly Guys," a thoughtful look at the phenomenon of visually unappealing rock stars who still manage to date preternaturally beautiful women.
Capps, who had never been to New York, arrived on the day of the massive multi-city blackout, and spent his first morning in the Big Apple bereft of lights, hot water, and subway service. "It turned out to be unbelievable, though; it more than lived up to expectations," he says. "Before I went on the air, they handed me a list of 180 questions. I marked out the ones I didn't know anything about, and we just rolled with it."
Yet another of the many perks of the Rock Confidential editorship is that Capps receives endless streams of "RC Girl" submissions—jpeg photo layouts from beautiful wannabe models and starlets, most of them in varying stages of undress. Every month, Capps posts a slew of his favorites on the website's "RC Girls Directory," complete with email info and links to the girls' own homepages. "I don't ask for nudes, but if that's what they send, I don't complain," he says.
But at heart, Capps is a rocker, as evidenced by legions of autographed 8-by-11 promotional glossies of assorted metal stars pinned to his apartment walls; by the hundreds of classic cock-rock CDs in his expansive record collection; and by the looming presence in his bedroom of a massive Marshall speaker cabinet and its accompanying menagerie of five electric guitars, including an Ibanez Iceman (the model favored by KISS's Paul Stanley, natch). "People I grew up listening to are asking me to interview them now," he says. "That's the biggest thrill for me; it's the real reason I do the website."
But given his not-infrequent congress with various comely representatives of the adult film industry, it's not a stretch to imagine there might be other kinds of thrills to be had as chief of Rock Confidential. Capps—a single guy—says he's been asked time and again whether he ever has a chance to know some of the ladies featured on his website more...intimately. His reply is always the same—he dodges the question, laughing it off with the twinkle in his eye that seems to answer it just as surely as any kind of direct response.
"What do you think?" he grins. "Let's just say I never kiss and tell."
February 12, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 7
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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