Supercult

An Interview with Chase Lisbon
by Scott Hefflon

Supercult is an altporn site based in Boston. Lollipop is a rock mag, and Supercult.com is rock porn. The site is about a lifestyle as much as it’s about naked bodies. It’s all about the context: The posters on the wall, the clothing and hair styles, the tattoos, and the type of girls on the site. Chase Lisbon is quite a character. A distinct personality with a history and a rock’n’roll story that’d put to shame most Behind the Music episodes. This is his story.

Three weeks of “interviewing.” 10 sides of those little micro-cassettes. More empty bottles of Jim Beam than I care to count (tequila and Knob Creek worked in there somewhere too, it’s all kind of a blur). The real story of a guy like Chase’s life (who luckily trusted me almost instantly cuz I’m a lifer myself), comes in bits and pieces filtered through the drunken rambling that is Chase’s way of speaking, my way of interviewing, and the way shit happens in real life.

Chase’s knuckles are tattooed “Cult Life.” Chase hasn’t had a “real” job in years, but he stays up all night editing (on a Mac, of course). While he knows lots of beautiful women and photographs them in various stages on undress, there’s a lot of planning and setting-up involved in the obsessive mind of The Photographer. Not to mention heavy drinking.

You’ve lived in a lot of places, what brought you to Boston?
I wanted to come here forever, but I never really had a reason until my girlfriend at the time, Siri, came here. This was in ’96 or so, and I kept hearing about the Boston Mod scene, and I was a Mod, and there weren’t really any big scenes except San Francisco and San Diego and Boston. Cities come in and out of style, and Boston sounded like the place. Similarly, before I met Candi (his partner in love and business), I knew I was moving to California. I really can’t stand the weather in Boston. I’m from the deep South…

The day I moved here from Baltimore was a Sunday, and you can imagine me, an alcoholic, driving eight hours in a moving truck, and the first thing I want to do is hit a liquor store to buy booze. First I find that the nearest liquor store is a mile walk down the most ridiculous hill – which I’m willing to do cuz I’m an alcoholic – but liquor stores aren’t even open on Sundays in Massachusetts! Busted me up.

You were already doing the merch business, right?
Yeah. And last I heard, Siri’s dating Tommy from the Oi! band Tommy & the Terrors on Bill from Toxic Narcotic’s label, Rodent Popsicle. When I was 18, I woulda been pissed cuz I knew him, and I’m a really jealous dude, but I like him a lot.

What was the name of the merch company?
Action Reaction. I started as a bootlegger doing buttons. It was really underground, really D.I.Y., and only ska geeks and rude boys and Mods from back then even remember it. I was really into The Cure and The Smiths in ninth and tenth grade. In tenth grade, I flew to Atlanta to see Morrissey, so that was, like, ’91. Then I really got into Two-Tone ska, like The Specials. I got into scooters and the whole Mod scene. I graduated from high school in ’93, and I started the merch biz in probably ’95.

How’d you team up with Rama (Mayo, who runs Big Wheel Recreation)?
We knew some of the same people. I had a big screen-printing machine that I didn’t know how to use and had no place to set up, and he’d been doing tee shirts on a little hand-made press. He owed a band a lot of money, and because he’s a smart dude, he was going to pay them off in merch. So he was going to give them a real low price on merch, but he’d only be paying cost. So he paid me a real low rate to do the work with him, and that was that. Then we just went into business together. He had all this room in a loft and I had all this equipment and nothing but time on my hands. I was living off $350 a month at the time from the merch business. For all the shit that came later, I learned a lot from just watching him for six months.

This was just before Big Wheel “got big,” right?
About three or months before they blew up. You could see it happening. When we first met, he was in the same position I am, a guy you can tell is about to go somewhere. He was in an apartment with three other people… But by the time we were done with each other, he’d become a Caesar.

The whole time we were doing the tee shirts, I was talking about the porn site I wanted to start, and he was like (in a classic, chopped-speech impersonation) “Yeah. What? Great. That’s great.” We worked together and were best friends for almost a year. Well, eight months. I spent every day with him.

What was your original idea for a porn site?
It was never about starting a porn site, but I’ll get to that… The initial impulse came when I first moved to Boston and saw my first DVD, which took us (roommates in the apartment) four days to watch, which was Boogie Nights. I know that’s like watching The Commitments and then starting a band, but that’s the way it was. I’d always thought about it and entertained the idea of doing it, but after watching Boogie Nights, that’s when I realized I could do it. When I saw Burt Reynolds play the director, I saw me. That part is so much me.

I wanted to make DVDs, made by and starring kids like us, kids that maybe went to college, maybe didn’t, but people filled with ideas and skills and more talent than you can imagine. I said once that the thing I liked best about Boston is that there are all these ideas here, all this untapped talent just sitting drunk on couches all over the city. The two of us, sitting here in this room right now, can cause a ripple that’ll be felt all the way to the West Coast. Boston has such a wealth of talented kids who came here for school or just to be here. That’s the only thing I’m going to miss about Boston.

As for porn, I love porn. I’ve always loved porn. But I don’t think that to make porn you have to be mean or degrade girls. To me, the reason I’m successful as a pornographer is not because I have “an eye” – that’s the second most important thing – it’s because I have a great respect and appreciation for the models. I don’t look at the models and think, “Oh, I can fuck them, they’re loose…” Because they’re not. Even the models I’ve seen naked a bunch of times are not necessarily going to show me their tits if I just walk up to them and say “Show me your tits.” And I wouldn’t ask that anyway. This is my job, and I do it well. The models know that I’m devoted to my girlfriend and that I’m not trying to get laid. The more they understand that I’m here to take pictures and they’re here to model, the more comfortable they are.

Right on the main page, it says “No one involved in Supercult has been involved in the adult industry in any way. Period. No strippers, no hookers, no hoochies, no mamas.”
When I talk to models, the first question I ask is why they want to do it. The only girls I want to work with are people who like to pose, or have always wanted to pose nude. People who like the attention, who get a kick out of it. They want to be a pin-up girl. If they’re doing it for money, they shouldn’t be doing it. Even if I were paying $50,000 a shoot, two months or a year later, they aren’t going to have the money anymore, and they’ll end up with a bad feeling about what they did cuz they did it for money. If a girl needs $200 for rent and she doesn’t have it, I don’t want her to model for me because once the rent is paid, it’s just going to be something else. I pay the models, of course, but the money should be the last thing they’re concerned with. And with the DVDs, the models are making a percentage, just like real actresses. And they’ll make a lot more money this way, because these movies are going to be big.

When I started, I kinda knew – and a year and a half being a pornographer has confirmed this – that there are a lot of girls who fantasize about being a pin-up girl. And before Supercult here and Suicide Girls in the Northwest and RaverPorn, wherever they’re located, there was no place for girls in our scene to pose like pin-up girls without awful captions like “Watch Daddy’s little girl get a mouthful of cum and raped up the ass.” So there are lots of girls who want to pose nude and want to be pin-up girls like Bettie Page, but they don’t want to be degraded in the process.

Plenty of exhibitionists and nude models have done photos and they get sold to hundreds of places, and then they pop up everywhere with 900 numbers and awful slogans on them. So in my contracts, as a favor to the models, it says that these photos are only for use by Supercult. If one of these models becomes the next Cindy Crawford, I couldn’t sell the pictures to the National Enquirer or anything like that even if I wanted to, which I don’t. I want to be straight-up. I don’t want to be one of those guys who sugar-coats everything, but as soon as you take a bite, you get a real rotten taste in your mouth. If you model nude, you will be seen all over the world, and you will someday be recognized on the street and that person might be disrespectful to you.

But that’ll happen anyway, regardless of nude photos. To anyone who ever says “Heh-heh, I’ve seen you naked,” the answer is “No, you’ve seen photos of me naked.”
That’s a good one… I look at modeling nude like getting tattooed. Neither are a big deal once you get into them.

Not to make too much of a comparison, but in True Romance, the hitman played by James Gandolfini says that the first time he shot someone, he threw up, but you just get used to it, and you learn to like it.
That’s a good one: (in gruff pimp voice) “The first time you pose nude, you’ll throw up. But after a while, you’ll get used to it.” When you get tattooed, you’re making a decision for life. If you pose nude, you better be able to deal with that and live with that for life. Once you get into it, you realize that “your permanent record” really isn’t that important.

That’s a Violent Femmes quote, right?
“This will go down on your permanent record.” That’s such a great album.

What’s your take on the fact that, before the Internet, nude photos might be run in one month’s Beaver Hunt in Hustler, but chances are they’d either stay in a shoebox in the closet or beneath a guy’s mattress. But now with digital cameras and DV camcorders, every drunken shirt-lifting can be immortalized on Girls Gone Wild videos or a “Priceless”-type website (take offs on the MasterCard commercials that go “Short Black Dress: $200, Round of Drinks: $40, Your Beaver on the Internet: Priceless”).
But that’s the way it is with everything, not just nude photos. Everything is out there, and therefore nothing is as scandalous. Some big CEO recently had photos of himself nude surface. He’s a guy and was like “So? You’ve seen my dick.” (I suspect that’s not a direct quote.) If a nude model has the strength and smarts enough to become the CEO of a company, I think she can handle someone finding nude photos of her. The only people I think it’d come back to haunt are politicians. They can’t do anything. Bill Clinton can admit to smoking pot, but not inhaling. Some day we’ll get beyond that hurdle.

Tell me about how you became a photographer.
I’m self-taught from Eighth grade. My dad handed me a Hi-8 video camera, which no one owned at the time, because his company was doing sound for Pink Floyd, and when they left America, they left all this equipment behind. So I got their video camera. And before that, I had a PXL 2000. It was a black & white video camera that taped onto standard cassettes. It was made by Playskool, it ran off AA batteries, and the resolution was like an early Atari game. Apparently, a lot of kids who are now in video started with one of those. A friend of mine, a video major, says those things go for three grand on eBay. They were $100 at Toys “R” Us at the time.

So I was making movies all the time. Me and my friends, that’s what we did. Like some kids are in a band, we made movies. I did some in-camera editing, and then I’d put it on the Beta editor that my dad had, and I would edit it to analog for VHS piece by piece by piece. We made Kung Fu movies a lot. We’d do it live-action, with the video coming from the Beta, and record the audio live. We’d punch meat and stuff, like early radio or something. I made my first porno movie, of course, with Barbie and Ken dolls. I made some still-action, too, but mostly live-action, all edited. Barbie was in a dress and she’d say “Oh, I dropped my keys.” And Ken would come up behind her all “Oooh, hey” and touch her, and I had her outfit on a string I pulled, and she’s like “Oh, I’m naked,” and Ken says “You must be cold” and starts touching her. I’d made a penis for Ken out of a straw, and my friend got down behind Ken and spit milk through the straw so it splashed all over Barbie. Ya know, good raunchy shit like that. I got in a lot of trouble with that camera. More trouble than I’ll ever admit on record.

Nowadays, probably every 18 year old guy is trying to hide his parent’s video camera they got for family trips in the closet while getting laid. Cuz if you’re like me, the first thing you do with new technology is try to use it for porn.

My senior year, when I was living in Maryland, I was supposed to go to vocational school to study film. I was supposed to intern for the local cable station. I’d spend half the day in class and half the day at the cable station. It woulda been shit work, totally uncreative, but it would’ve given me experience working in video and led me toward film school. In my school, if you got good enough grades, you could do your senior year studying one topic, and at end the end of the year, you do one project to show what you’ve learned. When I was junior, I got that edge you get, and I kinda fucked off a lot. I had this one teacher, a real fucker, and he was the one who was supposed to give me the recommendation so I could do the internship. Not only did he not recommend me – he was the only teacher who didn’t like me, the only teacher I ever really had a problem with – he wrote a letter to the cable station unrecommending me. This guy totally fucked me. I thought of putting a big “Fuck You” to him on the opening page of Supercult. I think every entrepreneur works so hard at what they do to give a big middle finger to the people who said they couldn’t do it. And it often comes down to one person.

I believe that everything you do leads you to where you need to be. I’ve always known I was going somewhere big. Even when I “gave up” for four years because I couldn’t see the path I was on leading me anywhere, I knew I was going somewhere. During those four years, I was just “getting’ by” – working in pizza shops, drinking, with all these ideas for schemes but no money to put behind them. I went to a convention in Vegas with my mom, who runs a body piercing shop, and there were all these guys there, just a few years older than me, doing their own thing and selling it right there on the floor. I talked to a lot of them, and they were all like me, but they were doing it. I was in a rut. I lived in a place that was so easy just to get by in, and I was surrounded by people who were completely unambitious. If you want to succeed, you need to surround yourself with people who are doing something.

But I’m getting ahead of myself… So this teacher completely fucked me, so I ended up going to votech for culinary arts. I decided that after I graduated, fuck college, I was going to go to New Orleans to learn how to be a chef so I could open my own restaurant. So I got out of school, went down to New Orleans, went to school for one day, and that night I went drinking with some new friends I’d made, and I borrowed someone’s cell phone to call my dad. I told him “Dad, since you’re paying for my school, I wanted you to know that I’m going to drop out, you’re going to get your refund, but there’s no fuckin’ way I’m going to go to this school because I don’t want to be a chef. I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do down here, but I don’t want to waste your money.” Another friend decided the same thing, but he never told his mom. He just kept telling her everything was going great, and when mid-terms came, he got a C in one class, and he’d never gone since the first day! So we were two kids, studying to be alcoholics – you could drink at 18 in New Orleans in ’93 – and going nowhere. I met a girl, she moved down, we got in a fight with my roommate, and so we moved back to Maryland. New Orleans was bad, but Maryland was limbo. My camera was broken and I was real broke, drinking Nightrain and shit. I took three semesters at a community college, all the business and computer classes I could get. Then I got job at Pizza Hut, doing dishes on the weekends, and delivered pizzas for another place at night.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time from 19 to 23, but I got nowhere. We rented seven houses in a row on this one street, and we were all Mods, skinheads, rockabillies, and punks, and all of us rode scooters. We had 15 bikes out front, with two to three people living in each house, so it was a block party for four years. In the end, like any commune, I couldn’t stand all the people around me cuz they were always in my hair. I couldn’t even jerk off without someone banging on the door or climbing through a window saying “Chase, I know you’re there… You locked the door so I had to climb through a window.”

I met a girl and we fell in love and she was moving to Boston at the end of the summer, so I came up here. It wasn’t so much that I was following her, it’s that I knew I had to move to Boston. There are so many people here, people our age, all doing their own thing, all helping each other out doing their thing… After four years of living here, doing the merch thing and working with Rama, that’s how I had the money and the contacts to start Supercult.

What did the merch business consist of at this point?
Half of it was buttons for bands, the other half was bootlegging old skinhead, ska, and punk band buttons. I had a catalog of 500 buttons, but it’s a lame, awful job. Basically, I wasn’t being creative, I was punching out buttons. I had a rule as a bootlegger than I wouldn’t make merch for bands that were still around to make their own merch. Main problem was that every old punk band I used to bootleg ended up getting back together!

I gave a friend of mine a couple hundred pins to sell at a ska show, and Neville from The Specials came up because they were playing the next night, and he’s like “You know you can’t sell these.” He just laughed and took all The Specials pins.

Do you still hang out with or work with any of the people from “Mod Row”?
Well, U.S. Romance (AKA USRO, token guy on the site and photographer for many of the Maryland shoots)… And one of the other guys, one of my best friends ever who I worked with at Pizza Hut, he got into Ninjitsu or Tai Kuando, and started taking it four or five times a week, like other guys play guitar or something. Two years later, he quit working for my dad’s sound company and became an instructor at the school.

St. Paul’s Street was my crew, I have a St. Paul Street tattoo on my leg. I still go there all the time. A new school of people moved in – a couple famous tattoo artists who’ve done work on me – so the tradition continues. It’s not a party street anymore, but it’s all undergrounders. So we built what’s basically the SoHo of that town. I say I’m from Baltimore, but it’s actually Old Ellicott City. It’s a half-mile district of preserved housing, that’s protected by the historical society. So I got to live in an antique district with all my buddies, and my mom has a body piercing shop there. That town’d make a great TV show. There’re a ton of Wiccans, a few tattoo shops, and everyone else are antiquers. Antique people are pretty eccentric themselves. So the whole town has this history, and everyone says hi to each other.

You mentioned in the beginning that your goal was never to create a porn site…
I didn’t start an Internet business, I used the Internet to start my business. That’s what a lot of the kids who start rival sites don’t get. Most of them are techie kids, and I don’t think they’re going to get passed the Internet. But that’s ok, you can make a decent living and make a good site, but that’s not what I want to do. You have a print magazine and that’s so much more powerful than a web ‘zine. Magazines are something people read, something you leave on your coffee table and your friends read. Like that (gestures to Haley who was sitting on the couch with a copy of Lollipop and While You Were Sleeping). The Internet is the most powerful tool ever created for underground business. But it’s just a launching pad for what I want to do. Supercult is going to be a real brick-and-mortar business making physical products people buy and own. Even when the Web goes completely broadband and people can buy and download movies, I’m still going to produce DVDs people can own and touch. My goal has always been to produce “erotic” movies. And only on DVD. Fuck VHS. Supercult has always been heavy on the visuals – big images, lots of images, and lots of flash design – and I cut out the whole dial-up market. Fuck them, let them catch up to me, because they will.

Tell me what a Supercult girl is.
Playboy says that their girls are the girl next door, but 99% of us have never lived next door to a girl who looks like that. I wanted models that looked like the kind of girls you hang out with, that you see in clubs and cafes and stuff. Pretty normal girls that you can relate to. Any time I saw a porn star with a Black Flag tattoo or something, it always attracted me, so I decided those are the girls that I wanted to see more of. I wanted to make porn with the type of creative people I hung out with anyway.

How’d you originally get started?
First thing, and I can’t stress this enough, is that most guys start out and ask the sluttiest girls they know, and most of the time those girls aren’t interested in posing nude. The two aren’t necessarily connected. Some models are sexually free, and others would never go to bed with you, but they like the idea of posing nude. Party girls usually know they have a reputation, and the last thing they want to do is confirm it and up it.

I finally figured out what approach works best for me, but I never tell anyone because it might not for them. Especially in the beginning, no one could see what I was talking about, and there was nothing to compare it to. So at first, it was a free site, I had a few girls I was friends with in their underwear, and it said that soon there’d be nudity. When we switched to nude, some of the models got into it and did nude shoots, and others didn’t want to, but that’s cool because they did the underwear shoot, they got me started, and that was the end of it. And now the models come to me. I get model requests every day. But I’m very selective who I work with. And a lot of the people, honestly, I don’t think they really want to model, they just want to see if they have what it takes.

Thing is, I could have a lot more girls up than I do, but I’m not interested in having so many girls that they get lost in the mix, I want to build up the girls that I have. I don’t want to have 20 girls with one shoot apiece, I’d rather have five girls with four shoots apiece. Each girl then builds up a style and a following. I want to work with gung-ho models, girls who are into the whole family thing, going to the events, hanging out, being a part of it. I don’t want people to come in, do a shoot, get paid, and disappear.

You provide themes and setting and context to the shoots.
I get bored taking and editing the pictures otherwise. I don’t want to go through 1,000 pictures of a girl in her bedroom, even if there are 10 different outfits.

The skateboarding and slumber party themes were two of my favorites.
Those shoots are my 16-year-old fantasies. The concept of mixing what boys are into most: Skateboarding and naked girls, and getting an inside look at a slumber party. All guys know the feeling of the girl they have a crush on being down the block at a sleepover with all the other hot girls in school. I make porn that I’d wanna see. We also did an ’80s heavy metal shoot that was really kitchy and fun. It’s two girls in a room that took me six hours to set up. All these records everywhere and all this ’80s memorabilia, like this dart board for the throwing stars we all used to have.

How many girls and shoots do you have on the site?
(Avoids the question by leaving to taking a leak) One of the things I do, is unlike most porn sites where they promise you the world and then their sites kinda suck, I show a few early shots – fully clothed – per shoot, and then show obscured thumbnails of the rest of them. I don’t even update the guest section, the free stuff, so there are a bunch of shoots that aren’t listed there. So when you pay the $6.35 to become a member, you find out there are more girls than you thought, and probably about 600 additional pictures than listed in the guest section. So you get more than you thought. I keep the membership price low so people stay members. I don’t charge $40 a month and then have people cancel the day before their month is up and then they never come back. I get the nicest cancellation letters you can imagine. People really like the site, but they lost their jobs and are trying to save money so they can eat. Many of them I see again later, so it’s cool.

Do you have package plans?
No. If you have a site that’s not going to retain members, you go for as much money as possible upfront. They sell people a year, knowing they’ll lose interest after a few months. I have a lot of members that have stayed on since the first day we became a pay site. And we have very, very few cancellations.

Honestly, I don’t spend a lot of time online. I’m a real-life guy. The whole idea of Supercult is showing the style of the underground, that there’s this whole world of people and things going on that people look up to. This is what’s hot and new and whatever. This is where you find the stuff that’s going to get big in the next few years. I don’t do anything thinking others will like it, I do things that I like. We don’t have to fake anything or try to anticipate anything, we just show what we do and how we live, and people respond to that.

Do you provide a way to reach the girls?
People email me and I forward them. Well, actually, Megan forwards them. I know Izzy and Haley have talked to a few people, and maybe some of the others have as well. I leave that entirely up to them. I don’t want the girls getting crap like “hey, you dirty whore.” With all the freaks out there who feel the need to belittle others to feel good about themselves, I don’t want to upset the girls. They’re my friends. I very rarely get angry or hateful letters, but when I do, I really take it hard.

I notice you don’t use remote models and other photographers, you shoot pretty much everyone yourself.
I don’t like using remote photographers not just because I might not like the look, but because I’m not there to supervise the shoot. I’m very protective of my models. Also, preparation for the shoot is my favorite part. I go through her closet and her drawers picking out stuff. Unless Candi is there to do the make-up, I pick out the make-up for them. I pick out their bracelets and rings and earrings. I pick out their shirts, their bras, their underwear. I pick out their shoes, even if you’re never going to see them. The entire shoot is a unit, and it has to match for me. I change the sheets on their bed and I redecorate their rooms. I’m insane about the details. I don’t want to use a photographer if they don’t get the whole thing. They really need to do their homework, and both the model and the style have to be Supercult style, and that just hasn’t happened.

Tell me about being “out front.”
Most people can tell that this is for real, because it’s just too personalized to be faked, but I like to get out there and show people that I’m one of them, not some guy with a bank roll hiding behind an underground porn site.

Rumors have spread, partly by your own bio on the site, about your upbringing and your family.
Like most people in this position, I come from a middle class family with money. I don’t mean money the way they say around here, I mean the way they say it in the South: If both your parents have a car, you have money. So my family had money, but they were always complete outsiders. They were straight-up 100% rock’n’rollers. So I come from that background, hanging out with middle class kids in the suburbs, while moving around. I lived in seven different states growing up. I was hanging out with normal kids who played baseball, and their dads smoked pipes. And they all had more Transformers than I did. So as we got older, it was natural for me to get way into underground culture, and all the kids I hung out with to go their own way. A lot of those people later got into the underground, but five years later, they got back out of it.

My dad, who’s done more crazy shit than I’ll ever do in my life, gave me shit when I got my ear pierced at 13. And last year, after I’d been working for myself for four years and making X number of dollars a year, I finally got my knuckles tattooed. Cuz I always wanted them done, like Jake and Elwood from The Blues Brothers. I tattooed my knuckles as a sign of commitment to the underground, knowing that I was never going that straight and narrow path. Anytime I saw anyone with tattoos on their hands, I always admired them, because I think that’s one of the ballsiest things you can do. It’s wearing who you are on your sleeve.

Like once you become a pornographer, really do it and make a living off of it, you’re tattooed for life. If you don’t want that, then you shouldn’t get into it. I’ve been getting tattooed for nine years, and people sometimes ask “Well, what are you going to do in five years?,” and I’m passed that, I’ve already made my decision.

Straight people check out Supercult to be a part of the lifestyle, just like people read spy novels because they’re attracted to that life. Or action movies. It’s living some kind of Mountain Dew “extreme” lifestyle.

Tell me more about your family.
My grandfather was a truck driver from a really, really small town in Arkansas. When my dad was 16, he met up with Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas. He grew his hair long, put his dream of being a truck mechanic on the back burner, and became the keyboard player for the band. He’s a straight-up hillbilly, but he’s one of the most charismatic people you’ll ever meet. When the band started to get big, they realized that he really had no musical talent, and he became their tour manager. He met mom when she was 15 and working as a waitress in Boulder, Colorado. He was probably 20. He invited her to the show, she got backstage and was treated like a celebrity. They hit it off, and on her 18th birthday, she started crying, saying she had something to tell him. She said “I’m not turning 21 today, I’m turning 18,” and he’s like, “Oh, is that all?” So they got married, and I was the first kid born in the lodge built by Black Oak Arkansas in the Ozarks. When I was born, it was written up in rock mags cuz Black Oak was really, really big at the time. Later, my dad had a big falling out with the band, got ripped off, and then met up with Foghat. I was two when we moved to Long Island, New York, because Foghat had a studio there. Steve Perry from Journey lived right up the street, and I hung out with his kids. And I hated them, because they were brats and a lot better off than we were. I only had one friend, the girl who lived next door to me, who was four years older than me. That would become the story of my life. I never had many friends, but they were always older girls, and I was always in love with them. Even at three years old, I was in love with girls. I never went through a cooties stage, and I never thought girls were icky. I had a girlfriend in preschool.

My picture’s on the Foghat live album. There’s a picture of the band in an elevator with my dad holding me, and I’m sucking my thumb. My mom’s looking hot as shit, and my dad’s hair is down to his ass with a handlebar mustache down passed his chin.

From there, we moved to Tennessee and were broke as shit cuz my dad worked with local bands, trying to get them picked up. Somehow my family is connected with Tommy Matola, who married into Sony, signed Hall & Oats, and my dad went on tour with them to Japan. There’s a tour video that my mom has with my dad walking down the streets of Tokyo with Hall & Oats, and my dad had permed his long, straight hair into an afro, and he’s wearing a white leather jacket with the collar turned up. He brought me back a pair of those ‘Roos sneakers – the one’s with the pocket in the tongue – and a pair of parachute pants. I was the first kid in school to have them. So I wore those, my fluorescent yellow and pink Hall & Oats shirt, my hair moussed up, and jelly bracelets up to my elbows. All the girls loved me, and all the guys hated me.

My dad got kicked off the tour for having a cocaine problem, and this is in the ’80s when everyone had a cocaine habit. My mom stayed with him, even knowing he was a mess and was cheating on her, and he went through a really bad slump. We moved to Maryland and he worked for a sound company, but he kept cheating on my mom until they finally got divorced. When I got older – and after my parents got divorced – that’s when you find out all the stuff that happened when you were too young to understand it. Evidently, my mom was asked to be in Playboy, and my dad fucked up the deal. She was a stewardess, which is what any hot woman did in the ’70s, and she did some billboards for Johnny Walker and stuff. She was offered a deal and my dad negotiated hardball and lost it for her. That was the deal of her lifetime, and my dad, through his jealousy and general insanity, fucked up everything. His infidelity fucked up everything else. So I came into this business, the pornography business, with the stern promise that I would not cheat on my girlfriend. It simply will not happen. When my dad cheated on my mom, he wasn’t just cheating on my mom, he was cheating on me, and my sister. While people may think he’s a real charmer, he was so rock’n’roll, he was an awful father. He only played baseball with me once. He tried to buy my love, and he did that until I was 22 when I wanted to get my life started on my terms and I cut him off. Now at 27, we’re trying to connect again. He doesn’t have any power over me, but he’s my dad, he’s half of me, and you want to make peace with that.

My dad grew up in a one room house in Arkansas, with all these brothers and sisters, and most of them I’ve never met. My mom’s older sister was a junkie, has Hepatitis C, went out with Miles Davis, and had a kid with a bodyguard of The Who. This is why I never write this shit down and why I make up stories about my past and my family… So this Aunt was into drugs, was suicidal, got sent to a mental institute, and escaped with a guy who went on a fuckin’ killing spree while she was in the car. And this woman, one of the only relatives I know, looks down on me, not because of what I do, but because of my tattoos. And her son’s been in prison for most of my life! One more story about her… Her second husband, a really, really bad guy, “died.” He “died” in a weird accident, left a million dollar insurance policy to her daughter, and ten years later, the FBI called her asking if she’d seen him. She’s like “No, he died ten years ago.” And they say no, he was in the witness relocation program, because he was a coke dealer and ratted out one of the biggest cocaine dealers on the West Coast. So he snuck out 10 years later, and she gets her brake lines cut, and now she calls my mom because she’s on the run because he’s trying to kill her again. My mom confesses that he once poisoned her by putting rat poison in her coffee, and my mom drove her to the hospital.

But for all that shit, the one thing I have to say about my family is that I come from a long line of do-it-yourselfers. Until I came along, no one in my bloodline had ever stepped foot in a college. I went for those three semesters, and honestly, I probably could’ve condensed it into one semester if I’d just bought the books.

Tell me the story of getting your first place in Boston.
Well, I told you about the girl I’d just started dating that was moving to Boston… And I was friends with a Mod band from Connecticut called Johnny Too Bad who’d moved to Boston, and they had a room open. I paid rent in August even though I wasn’t moving until September, and I moved up here having never seen the place or been to Boston, just knowing this was where I needed to be. People had told me this was a bad neighborhood, and while Mission Hill four years ago was sketchy, I’m from the South and was expecting a bad neighborhood. If I’d been 18, straight from the suburbs, that might’ve been different, but by then, I’d moved around and seen some shit, so this was ok. And I’ve been in the god-awful house for four years.

I’m from a small town, and I lived in the South, and even if you don’t like certain people, you say hi to them and they say hi back. That’s the way the South is. I come up here, I get out of the truck after driving eight hours and I really needed to piss, and I kept ringing and ringing and ringing the doorbell. So I’m standing there, and this black guy and girl walk by me and I say, “Hey, how’s it doing?” They just look at me and start laughing and kept walking. Welcome to Boston.

Tell me about your entrepreneurial background.
I’ve been scheming all my life. When I was like five or six, I realized that lunch was 85¢, so everyone had 15¢ leftover as they came out. So I started asking people if I could have it. My mom would take me to the grocery store and I’d buy a Star Wars figure with my own money. After a while, she asked where I got all the money from. She said I couldn’t go around asking people for change cuz they’d think we were poor. Later on, I bought packs of Bubble Yum – you couldn’t buy gum in our school – and I used to sell the cubes of gum to people after lunch. Everyone wanted gum cuz they had the taste of cafeteria food in their mouth. Then I started an underground lottery. People bought the raffle tickets for a buck, and the kids had a one-in-300 chance of winning the $50 prize. Those are way better odds than the real lottery, but it’s totally illegal. On a whim, we sold a ticket to this one substitute teacher, ya know, the cool substitute teacher… Well, it turns out that when we pulled the winner out at the end of the day in front of a crowd of about 50 people that he won. But he was a substitute and we had no way of getting in touch with him, and people started chanting “Draw again, draw again,” ya know, because they lost. So we drew again, and the guy who won was one of the votech guys no one knew, so no one believed he existed, and it got ugly. The substitute freaked out when he subbed the next week and found out. He told the principle and we got into a lot of trouble.

Later, after I got out of high school, I had this idea to put pencil vending machines in every library in the state. Because they give you these little shitty pencils, and no one likes them. They have no eraser and they’re these stubby little things that suck. So I was going to put vending machines in because kids always have change in their pockets. The libraries would make money because they’d get a cut, and they wouldn’t go through so many of those shitty pencils. So I had brochures printed up, looking all legit and stuff, and I bought a vending machine for, like, $400 from delivering pizzas, but the person at the library didn’t work there anymore and the whole idea fell apart. I still have that vending machine somewhere.

Then I started doing the buttons, bootlegging bands that were no longer around to make their own merch. I saved up a thousand bucks delivering pizzas and washing dishes at a bar – I have no problem doing grunt work – and bought a computer and scanner and a 1″ button machine. This is before the Internet when you could just type in “1 inch button machine” and find out all the companies you could buy from, I had to go to the library and look in the Thomas Register – most people don’t even know what the fuck that is anymore – to find suppliers for all this shit. I started making ashtrays with logos on the bottom, stickers from Sticker Guy, chain wallets, and got the 1″ button machine. I sold them in Smash and Reptilian and made up a catalog I mailed out all over America. Again, this was before the Internet, so kids still had the energy to order stuff from little mail order places.

When I turned 21, I quit my other jobs, got all the equipment and supplies, and I lived off my credit card. I ate and smoked and drank off my credit card, which I don’t recommend anyone ever try. You accumulate so much debt so fast, just from the expense of living, and then when you’ve maxed out a ten thousand dollar credit card, you say to yourself, “I should’ve just bought a car.” Ten thousand dollars worth of cigarettes, nachos, and beer.

I realized you can’t just quit your job and start a business, so I built up Action Reaction while working at one pizza place after another. The 1″ button machine I had was really hard to find, so I was doing work for all these underground bands up and down the coast. And bootlegging. I’d go to shows and sell 100 pins at a dollar apiece with materials that cost me $5. I’d drink $40 and go home with $60 in my pocket and I was on cloud nine.

Where’s the silk-screening machine work into all this?
I was living off of $350 a month from buttons and stickers, but my girlfriend bought most of the groceries, and I drank only 40 ouncers and rolled my own cigarettes. I sold a computer and got my tax returns from the pizza places and saved about $500. I have this theory – especially in a city like Boston – that if you ask around for long enough, anything you need can be found in someone’s basement. Three months later, this friend of friend of a friend sold me this big old silk-screen machine for $400 that would’ve cost over a thousand new. It was so big, I couldn’t move it or put it anywhere, so I left it at his warehouse. Two months later, The Explosion – who I’d done buttons for – put me in touch with Rama from Big Wheel. He’d been making shirts for his bands on this piece of shit wooden thing he’d built. It looked like a carnival ride. He was in a predicament – as he always is – and he needed to print up 600 shirts in two days. Right before I went to Vegas for my sister’s wedding, we moved the thing here, cleared out a room, and I learned how to make shirts by watching him and fucking around. Then he got a loft space and we started doing shirts together. We changed Action Reaction to Allied Printing, and I went from making $350 a month to making a thousand bucks a month. It was obviously great for me, and he was making tons of money because he was paying his bands in shirts. For $1.50 shirt, he was giving bands tee shirts for $5 instead of paying them, and then the bands sold them on tour for $10, and everyone was happy. He was really connected around town, and that was great because my scene – the skinhead and ska scene – was starting to die out. And I was getting out of it anyway.

What was Media Whore?
Originally, the porno business I was starting was going to be called Media Whore, which is from a Smiths song. Rama liked the idea, but I think he thought it was more of a daydream you think about while spending 12 hours a day making shirts. But then we had our falling out, and I did my own merch company called Media Whore, and decided to call the porn company Supercult. I had a goal that by the end of 2000, I’d have the porn company started. I made an incredible website for Media Whore, my first website design, and I realized I was working 16 hours a day on the computer and really dreaded making shirts. So I bought the Supercult name and just put up a message about what the site was going to be like with some cool graphics. We made that gangbanger poster that said “Robbin’, Rapin’, Straight-up Apin'” and posted it as a profile in the girls section of MakeOutClub with a link to the site, and we got people coming to the site and asking what it was all about.

And you had no site, no models, and no idea how to get models?
We had nothing. This was when Gibby first started MakeOutClub, so he was small and he helped us out. We got a ton of emails saying “I don’t know what this is, but it’s great.”

Then I took all these awful pictures with this ridiculous $100 digital camera, and I started putting them on the site. The first girl that I photographed – aside from girlfriends, just for fun – was a girl I was friends with. Her Supercult name is Betsy. She didn’t want to be photographed nude, and her pictures aren’t up anymore. So she was one of the first five or six girls I got to pose in their underwear to keep the buzz going and kinda show what we were going to do. That same night, I photographed Madison, and she’s still a Supercult girl. These original underwear models developed a huge cult following. The other models were Charlotte, Ana, and Kit. Charlotte and Ana did nude shoots later, and Kit is supposed to do one soon.

Those original pictures were really raw, like Polaroids, but those kinds of pictures sometimes have a quality about them that shouldn’t be made fun of. What I’m doing now is still totally amateur and underground, and I’m still only using one camera, but I have more lights and the pictures look a lot better. When I went live on September 5th, 2001 as a pay site with nude pictures, it was an instant hit. I remember talking to an operator at my billing company six hours into the site going live because we had a problem, and I told her we’d gotten 15 subscribers in the first six hours, and she couldn’t believe it. And this is someone who works with major porn sites. I don’t charge a lot for memberships because I want to build a steady, loyal fanbase for when I have DVDs and real products to sell.

You put the underwear teasers up and then waited until September 5th to launch nude content as a pay site?
Yeah. I took hundreds and hundreds of shots and stocked them. I wasn’t going to take money from this huge base following and then offer them two girls and have them get pissed. So the timeline is that in December I bought the name and launched some graphics, in February I put up the underwear models, and by March I was taking nude pictures. And I was dealing with all the Internet buzz and backlash about the idea.

What was the backlash?
Mostly just from people saying no one’s going to pay money to see nude pictures because you can get so much stuff for free. And to an extent, of course, that’s true. But I knew what I was doing wasn’t run-of-the-mill porn. Sure, you can see tons of bleached blonde girls in high heels with fists in their asses for free. But it’s the same lame shit you see everywhere. So I bit my tongue and took my own photos from March through August and when the site went up September 5th, it created such a stir that Gibby called me at 11 in the morning saying “What the hell did you do? I have a thousand emails in my in-box.”

What was your first experience with porn?
When I was six, down in Tennessee, I used to run with this pack of kids in the apartment complex we lived in. Behind the singles – the one-room units – there were always porn magazines in the bushes. And later, when I lived in the suburbs, my friends and I would find porn out in shacks in the woods. Which didn’t make sense to me then, and still doesn’t now. I’ve never gone out to woods to a shack to jerk off, and I’ve never stored my porn collection there. So back at the apartment complex, we used to steal the porn and hide it in this big pile of manure. Mulch, whatever. Because no one would ever think to dig into a big pile of mulch to see if anything was hidden there. So I grew up looking at stinky porn when I was so young, it didn’t make any sense to me. But I liked it. I remember seeing Invasion of the Body Snatchers with my parents when I was in first grade, and a guy said “I want to lick you from your toes all the way up to your head.” And I thought that was the most erotic thing in the world. Two months later I was French kissing girls. I was always trying to date my babysitters. I wasn’t really trying to get play, but I was a very sensual kid. And my babysitters would crush on me, not that they wanted me in that way, but they thought I was adorable, and they were really flattered. Basically, I love women and I respect women, and I associate with women far more than I ever will with guys. I was raised by my mom. She devoted her life to raising me. My dad didn’t teach me how to play sports or shave or jerk off, he bought me stuff once a year. I may’ve been the dude who was picked last in baseball, dodgeball, kickball, and basketball my whole life, but it’s really worked out for the best for me. I’m not a guy who has to fake getting along with women, I was brought up by a woman, I love women, and I get along with women.
(www.supercult.com)