Vinnie SPIT and Mistress Jacqueline

from Carbon 14 Magazine: Issue #15, May 1999

Vinnie SPIT and Mistress Jacqueline bring new meaning to the term power couple. Coming from the ever-intertwining worlds of music and porn, these two partners-in-crime have joined forces to create not only a new kind of sexrock (from Vinnie's existing band, SPIT) one that's genuinely musical, with a well-thought out sexual visual element that ties into the porn side of their lives but a burgeoningly successful company (Pacific Force) that produces not just adult videos and fetish tapes, but fetish magazines as well.

Vinnie's been in music biz for almost two decades (if you include high school), and Mistress Jacqueline has established herself as one of the more well-known dominatrixes of the 90s; once these two got together, their combined energies have jump-started both their individual and mutual careers by leaps and bounds.

When we first got the Porn to Rock compilation (which is basically stars of the adult world fronting bands or playing in their own bands and singing about sex) a couple of months back, we immediately noticed how much more genuinely musical Vinnie & Mistress Jacqueline's track was in comparison to the rest of the disc. As we found out more about these two specifically that they're a husband and wife team in both the porn and rock realms we realized how appropriate an interview with them would be for our pages. I interviewed Vinnie, then Mistress Jacqueline, then both of them together, but things start off with me & Vinnie (who's originally from the Philly area and floated in the periphery of the same circles I floated in) in an unconscious recreation of that old American Express commercial.

[intro and interview by Larry; asides by me, Leslie, because I transcribed the tape]

Larry: Do you know me?

Vinnie: I was gonna ask you the same question!
[Vinnie and Larry trying to figure out if they know each other. Larry name checks the Serial Killers of course.]

Larry: So what bands were you in when you lived in Philly.

Vinnie: Well, SPIT. I was on NTS Records, which is a Delaware/Philly label, and I was also the drummer in Batz Without Flesh and I was involved in Sinister Attraction.

Larry: I saw Batz Without Flesh at Revival once.

Vinnie: Yeah, I used to play Revival all the time. We used to pack em in there. We would do these double bill shows, with Batz Without Flesh opening for SPIT; we would do a show in the early evening for the underage crowd and then they'd clean everybody out, close the place and open it again, and we'd do two more sets. So I ended up playing four sets in a night; it was pretty grueling but we made a bunch of money so it was all right. It was a good time.

Larry: Cool.
[More talk about Philly music lore circa 1986-90 and of course that winds back to more talk about the Serial Killers.]

Vinnie: Who did you guys used to play with? There were so many bands around at that time it's hard to remember every one I've seen.

Larry: I guess the bands we were most associated with or who we played with a lot were the She-Males and Deadspot. Do you remember either of those bands?

Vinnie: Very well; both bands. First off, I love Deadspot. You know, when I moved here, a lot of stuff didn't make it and one of the things I lost is my Deadspot record. [More Philly punk chat; the Serial Killers are brought up again but this time by Vinnie and eventually they get back to talking about SPIT.]

Larry: So you said your first album came out in 86?

Vinnie: Yep.

Larry: When did you move to L.A.?

Vinnie: Around 93. I've released 11 albums total.

Larry: Are they self-released, most of them or do you put them out through record labels?

Vinnie: The first two I did, I did on my own label. Then by my third album I got picked up by NTS, which is that Philly label I mentioned earlier. That was when things really kicked in (for me). That was Claude Willie's label, he was in Batz Without Flesh; it was a whole very incestuous thing I played in his band, he played in my band. He ran the label during the day and we would play shows at night; he ended up releasing maybe twenty records in the span of the label.

But that's when things really kicked in because we had killer distribution and were selling a lot of records; that's when I started getting more attention, even in Europe. So he was real instrumental in helping get me out of the gutter. After that I got picked up by Cargo and I did a record with them; I also did one with Vinyl Communications, so I was hooking up with these San Diego labels. I would do a giant United States tour every summer; I was a school teacher so I had my summers off. That's how I met Jacqueline, on tour when we were out in Los Angeles, and a couple months later I moved out here.

Larry: So did you have to rebuild the band or did anyone come out with you?

Vinnie: Basically everybody followed me within about a year so

Larry: Well that's good.

Vinnie: Yeah. That was cool but, it's interesting since a lot of them, they're still here and I still play with them and hang out with them but a few of them have moved on. Like Chris, Chris Budd, my bass player is playing with Helios Creed now.

Larry: That's weird cause Paul Della Pelle [ex-member of Ruin, another old school Philly punk band] was playing with him for a while.

Vinnie: A very good friend. That's kind of the hook-up there. We were all friends and when we came through San Francisco, I guess it was, he [Paul] came out to the show and brought Helios Creed and they saw Chris play and he's really good they noticed that, obviously and were like, hey come play with us. I didn't really have much going on during those few months so I was like, go with Helios Creed. And that turned out to be a permanent thing, but there's no hard feelings at all I mean that's a great gig.

Larry: Have you always done a big stage show?

Vinnie: Yeah. From the very beginning. I used to have like a one-man show and then I slowly kept adding people til around 88, when I had the whole full band thing. I've always had back-up singers too, that's always been a big thing for me. I always have two female back-up singers that sing and dance.

Larry: So how many people are in the full band, eight?

Vinnie: Yeah, that's how it used to be. What's going on right now is I'm doing this punk/swing kinda stuff and OK, well, here's how it started: I had the full band and then a couple of people from that band started their own band, Clone, so now what I do is if I'm gonna do a big show, like a decent show with money and everything, then I use the full band. So Clone becomes my back-up band. If it's just a local thing that we're doing, then it's just the five of us; we play around town here a lot.

Larry: Yeah I looked at your web site, it seems like you play somewhere every other week.

Vinnie: We're up to almost once a week now so that's been kind of cool. What we have now is a five-piece thing where I sing and I have another guy who plays harmonica and then I have three girls who do choreographed dancing and backing vocals so it's more like a Broadway or cabaret type thing, where the band isn't as necessary anymore. And of course if there's a big time show somewhere I can pull the band out of my ass cause they know all the material, all we need to do is run through the set a couple days before.

Larry: So what does the stage show entail when you do a big show?

Vinnie: It's kind of the same stage show, that's was I was trying to say earlier; the band isn't really necessary anymore because the stage show is the five of us. When they play with us all they do is play the music.

Larry: OK so what do the five of you do then?

Vinnie: All kinds of crap. I'll send you out a videotape, we've got a whole documentary thing; you get to see a lot of the shit. There's tons of nudity in it [laughing a bit]. The show doesn't have a lot of nudity but the videos do. Anyway, there's choreographed dancing but it's all very sexual like the girls do a lot of stuff with dildos and whips you know, that whole scene. You've probably seen something like it before but it's different the way we do it. And I've been doing that stuff since the 80s, it's just gotten more refined and polished.

Larry: Are you still doing national touring?

Vinnie: Right now we're just focusing on the local thing but we've certainly gone out on the road. Probably this summer we'll go out again; we haven't, since 1994, just jumped in the van and headed out. But we have more money now so I can put everyone on a plane; we can fly and do a show at one place for a weekend and come right back. So that's nice. we're certainly not opposed to going and playing other shows, we've just been really busy here. We do Vegas and Palm Springs, we'll go out to San Francisco so

Larry: You're doing stuff regionally.

Vinnie: Yeah, pretty much the last year we've been sticking to this area but we'll go out again, I'm certain. And these Porn To Rock guys want us to go out [The conversation turns to the Spo-it's, who work a sex angle into their live show as well, which then leads to a discussion of another old Philly band, Sink Manhattan, who were kind of like Neubauten.] I used to hate to follow them. They're the dirtiest band. You'd come out on stage and it would just be full of shit everywhere; just a total mess.

The first time I ever opened for GWAR I came out and I didn't even really know who they were, it was at the Trocadero (in Philly), and there was like plastic and shit all over everything, like the monitors and amps. I was just like, what is this about? and the soundman said to me, do yourself a favor and get all your shit off stage before they go on. And I said, OK man, whatever. I'd never seen anything like that before. That's another thing, we're not trying to be outrageous like that not that I don't like bands like that, I do but we're very different from that. People try to compare me to the Mentors or the Genitorturers or the Impotent Sea Snakes but we're nothing like that cause...

Larry: You can actually play music?

Vinnie: Yeah, we're really into trying to make good, tight music.

Larry: Are you self-taught?

Vinnie: No, I had lessons. I used to be I'm actually pretty schooled. I was in the Lancaster Symphony Orchestra in high school for four years, and I was jazz band all through high school and college; so, I've got a lot of chops. And also I was one of those kids that picked up a number of instruments really young. So I kind of got lucky. It's funny that people say to me, a lot of your stuff sounds synthetic, and I say, well, it is. Because even though I can play all the saxophones pretty fluently trumpet and trombone I can play but I wouldn't say I'm great, I can just play em so what I do is, I play the line or the riff that I want over and over again until I get it right, and then I sample it and compress the shit out of it. Then I play the actual sample, so that way everything is really tight.

I'm kind of into that synthetic sound and also I come from an industrial background where I love those real electronic sounding drums. I love when everything sounds real tight and almost a bit robotic, that's totally in my background. So when I'm doing swing, everyone says, oh you need a big band, and I just thought there's already a million people doing it that way; and this is more the sound I'm going for a cross between the industrial, punk and swing. That's my explanation of why some of it sounds the way it does.

Larry: So is Mistress Jacqueline in the band?

Vinnie: Yeah. She actually plays the drums and she's really good. So on a lot of the stuff I'll have her come in and do percussion parts on the recordings but mostly in the stage show she does the dancing and things like that.

Larry: So how did you get involved in porn?

Vinnie: I've always kind of been interested in this. Like I'm really interested in doing music and making music sound good but when you start writing songs you kind of write like other people you've heard or bands that you know; do you know what I mean?

Larry: Yeah.

Vinnie: And to me, the best stuff, I felt, came out when you were honest; so the stuff that I started singing about, like my sexuality you know, back in the 80s no one was talking about spanking and S&M that much. It wasn't nearly as popular as it is now, and I was very young too so it was really like, should I even do this? Do I really want to be talking about this stuff and I started doing it and I felt very comfortable with it. So that's what it is. All five people in the act right now make their living in the adult industry.

We're all currently working in the adult business so if we're going to do material or a performance it should be an expression of who we really are. We're not really into piercing or the heavy duty power exchanges or cutting or that stuff; we're just into screwing around. We've all fooled around with each other, Jacqueline and I have a dungeon in our house and we get together with other couples all the time and play around in the dungeon; this is our lifestyle and it's a fun thing.

So is the show, it's a fun celebration of sexuality and we invite people up on stage with us although our show is very structured, it's not a loose show where anybody will just jump up and run onstage and act stupid. It goes over just like any other Broadway musical kind of thing. But that's what the sexual nature of it is and people are always like, "Oh. You use a dildo in your show." Which we do, but it's not like we have sex onstage or people come up and we have sex with them, it's not like that; it's just that the scenes are sexual, the girls dance sexy and of course they're all really hot looking which is a plus. So the question was?

Larry: When or how did you get into the porn industry?

Vinnie: OK, it all started when I was pretty young, I was about 11 or 12 and me and my best friend used to go rooting through trash dumpsters to find porn. We were both way into it and we amassed this huge collection. So we decided we had to get rid of some of them cause we couldn't store them all, so I said, why don't we sell them at school? And we both went to all boys Catholic school so it was a super place to do that and we just started selling our magazines.

Our deal was twice the cover price, and that's what we'd do. First we started selling off our own collection, the stuff we didn't want and then we found this one store, this guy who had a small Mom & Pop shop who would sell us magazines even though we were underage. So by this time we were in late junior high getting into high school and we'd buy several copies of the same magazine, take them into school and sell them for double the cover price. And so we both bought brand new electric guitars and everything, so I've always been interested in it.

Even when I was a school teacher I was working on projects that involved spanking, and I always wanted to get more involved. I had known who Mistress Jacqueline was and she knew who I was, cause this magazine SpankHard had done an article on me on one page and one on her on the facing page so we looked at our own articles and saw each other.

Larry: You were fated.

Vinnie: Yeah, we knew who each other was so when I came to LA we hooked up. I had wanted to meet her cause I thought she was really cool and I also kind of thought maybe she could help me get into the industry a little bit and we really just hit it off. I knew we would like each other but I didn't know it would go like that. We both had interest in porn and music and it's worked out great.

Larry: When did you do your first video?

Vinnie: 1992. We didn't start doing them for ourselves right away. We worked for other companies, saving up money to bankroll our own projects. It can be quite expensive to produce a decent movie; we're talking $10,000-15,000 when all is said and done. So we worked for other companies and saved money; the first video I did was for Shadow Lane.

Larry: How many have you done since?

Vinnie: About 70 now. Jacqueline has probably been in like 400. So then we started our own company and we're producing as well; our company has done about 70 titles.

Larry: Cool. When did that start?

Vinnie: 1993. It started pretty slow, just the two of us in the garage and now we've got a big office and two employees. Hopefully when I'm talking to you three years from now we'll have 10 employees.

Larry: Yeah hopefully by then we'll be out of our basement.
[I happened to be in our basement at the time, as was Larry, and broke in to defend the basement since it happens to be the coolest thing about our apartment.]

Vinnie: I really like hearing that you and your wife are doing this yourselves cause that's like what we're doing; you know, it's me and my wife doing this thing that we really enjoy, and you just can't beat that.

Larry: Yeah I know. It rules. Maybe I'll ask Mistress Jacqueline some questions and then I have some for both of you.

Vinnie: OK.

Larry: So Vinnie was telling me how you guys met, through the magazine when was that?

Jacqueline: That was in 92.

Larry: And were you already active in the industry then?

Jacqueline: Oh yeah. I've been a professional dominatrix for many years and I was also doing videos for a number of companies, plus I wrote a book, called Whips and Kisses, so at that time I was doing all the major talk shows. That was the stage I was in my life and when I met Vinnie I was looking to sort of transition out of well, I'd still do sessions but I wanted to do a little bit more; I wanted to reach more people. I had started producing some of my own [videos] but with Vinnie's skills I was really able to do what I've always wanted to do, which is mass produce videos and magazines and work with all kinds of multi-media.

Larry: It seems like you two have definitely tapped into something good together, and since you're producing a lot of it yourselves people can probably tell that you enjoy it and that you're concerned with the quality of it.

Jacqueline: I think that's true. We really care about what we do since we're really into it ourselves; we're very meticulous, everything's got to be written exactly right. There are some companies that just slap a magazine together but we make sure all the pictures are scanned in just right and that they go with the stories.

Larry: I can see how they'd be separate things.

Jacqueline: A lot of people don't. When I got into this back in the early to mid-80s there really wasn't a separation, and personally, in my own life I was really more interested in spanking and there really wasn't anything around. I got involved with S&M groups in L.A., and for the most part they really didn't understand it too well.

Larry: So how long were you involved with Vinnie before you got interested in performing with the band?

Jacqueline: Once he moved out here and started doing shows I really wanted to get involved with it. I'm really not the kind of girlfriend that wants to be in the audience, and I've always had a lot of the performer in me.

Larry: Yeah, Vinnie told me you're a drummer.

Jacqueline: Yeah, that plus doing the videos, so getting on stage was always a dream of mine and he's worked me into the shows slowly. Actually he was pretty cool [about it], he always had things for me to do right away but now I'm much more an integral part of the show than I ever was before. And it's fun, I really like doing it; this is something that I've always wanted to do so I got involved pretty quickly.

Larry: How did you get involved with this Porn to Rock compilation?

Jacqueline: We were approached by them. Jack, the producer, called us up and told us what he was doing and the project sounded right up our alley. I mean I've always thought porn and rock seems like such a natural connection, like how come nobody's done this before? And the SPIT music fit in really well because it is about sex and sexuality so it totally fit on the record. Plus Jack is very cool, he let us do exactly what we wanted, he asked us which song we wanted to use, and that's really the kind of thing we look for we're not sell-outs and we don't want to cheapen or compromise the music in any way.

Larry: I've got some questions for both of you if you don't mind.

Jacqueline: No, not at all, I'll get Vinnie.
[They switch to speaker phone.]

Larry: Since everyone in your band is in the adult industry, it seems like that is more flexible of a job situation than most rock bands are faced with so do you think it's easier (having everyone in the band be in the adult industry) as far as touring and stuff?

Vinnie: It is easier. On the one hand it's tricky cause it's hard to leave your own business but at the same time we're all financially able to do it. So I mean we would have to plan for it, Jacqueline and myself; we have the two girls that work for us to handle it and we'd just have to keep doing daily upkeep so that if we left for a month it wouldn't collapse. I mean, I'd definitely bring the laptop with me.

Jacqueline: We do have the luxury of owning our own business, so in that sense, yes, it's a lot easier.

Vinnie: But as I'm sure you know, it's tough to leave your own business; I still think it's better than having to ask for time off or even having to quit a job to go on tour. And everyone else [in the band] is in the same type of situation so we can all get time off.

Larry: Are you considering going back to touring more regularly?

Vinnie: We're considering it. We just don't really want to go and play places where there's not gonna be anybody, we've all done that and you know

Jacqueline: We'd like to tour though.

Vinnie: We're really working on a European thing right now.

Larry: I was gonna ask if you ever took the show over there or were going to?

Vinnie: I would love to. Back in 1988 I actually charted on the John Peel Festive Fifty and we talked about going over, but in 88 I was still in college so we didn't have the money to go. Recently, September Films did a documentary on us that's going to air sometime in May or June; on a regular channel, not cable.

Jacqueline: And also Peep in Germany.

Vinnie: Yeah that's another show that did a thing on us, so we've gotten a bit of exposure over there but I'm just not sure who to go through to set up shows. I've tried contacting a couple booking agents recommended by some friends, but they mostly deal with street level punk bands and they don't really know what to do with us.

Larry: So I also wanted to ask you both what you're working on right now and what you've got planned for this year.

Vinnie:Well, Pacific Force with probably do 15-20 movies this year, we've already got about 5 shot and we're editing those now. We'll release a few more issues of the magazines (Power Exchange and Spankasm) we also have a fanzine called Mistress Jacqueline Magazine and we might do another issue of that.

Jacqueline: And our web sites, we're really doing well with them and building them up a lot.

Vinnie: We've got our hands in a lot of things. Musically, we're still gonna do a lot more promotion for G-String Swing, Crude Rude Dude and the compilation.

Larry: What is Crude Rude Dude ?

Vinnie: That's a compilation of all my dirty stuff, I was approached by Hot Entertainment, they're like a disco label but they did put out that one Divine record [Born To Be Cheap ], and they approached me about taking the dirty songs off of my records and making a compilation. They have killer distribution so that's in all the major stores, which is great for me.

Larry: Just out of curiosity, when you two shoot a movie, does it work like any other adult film, like you shoot for a full day and can get three or four movies from that one shoot or do you do things more specifically?

Jacqueline: We're very specific about it, especially because it's our own company, we're very involved in it and we don't like to just mass produce for the sake of doing it. We figure out exactly what we want to shoot; and we might only get one scene in a few hours but that would only be used in one particular movie, we don't mix and match and patch things together later on. We're very specific as to what we're shooting, we shoot from a script and everything is very well thought out and planned.

Vinnie: Yeah, when I say we're going to do 15-20 movies, keep in mind that maybe eight of those will be big releases and the rest are all these specialty tapes. So to answer your question and clarify things a little, we'll release an S&M movie for example we're doing one called Mistress Jacqueline's Dungeon Pets , and that has a whole story line where she has girls in the dungeon, it's a girl/girl video and that movie we'll really push because it has more of a mass appeal. So that will have a full color box cover and go out to all the stores and distribution companies; then maybe that day [the day we shoot] after we're done I might pay one of the girls a little more money and have her go out on to the porch and smoke a cigarette or let me videotape her feet for a while. So they get paid extra and that's really a totally separate thing; then as I collect different girls' feet, when I've got twenty or so girls on tape I make a foot fetish video but those don't sell nearly as much. There's still a little money to be made though. So I will grab some extra footage in a day if I can but that's not the main focus. So I would say eight of the videos a year are the big releases, like the ones we really push, and then another ten or so that are specialty ones like smoking, foot fetish, face sitting, all kinds of stuff. There are people out there we've gotten all kinds of requests, cannibalism like put em in the pot and cook em kinda thing, like on Bugs Bunny.
[snickers from both]

Vinnie: Yeah, just the most bizarre things, stuff you've never heard of.

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