Roctober #46 features in-depth coverage of Soul Train’s Chicago roots, trucker music, and my days of having tortillas thrown at me while I wrestled women + plenty of comics!

JAKE AUSTEN DON’T TAKE NO MESS. While such zines as Psychotronic and Punk Planet have folded in their tents due to the corporate rape of their distribution system, Austen still grinds out hard copy of his Chicago based music and pop culture zine Roctober, has them printed on pulpy newsprint that deposits a healthy amount of ink on your hands, stuffs them into envelopes and mails the mags to subscribers. He’s not giving up and becoming a blogger. The sheer volume of info on psychedelic freak outs, proto metal bands, Midwest soul and blues musicians, forgotten garage rockers and strange yet fascinating pop cultural phenomena lovingly packed into each ish of the Roctober cannot be broken down into one line bullet points on Twitter or lost to the flotsam and jetsam of the blogosphere. It was relatively recently (this century) that Austen embraced the scanner and computer as a means of delivering his pages to the printer. For him the medium is truly the message and that medium is the ‘zine.

Austen called me “the dynamic wrestling, seminar conducting, kung fu fighting, rock and roll genius” in his review of the last Count Dante and the Black Dragon Fighting Society CD Fat Power in Roctober #43. While that was flattering as all getout, what was even more awesome was that review of my most recent trash rock opus was in the same mag as an in depth interview with Paul Williams about the ghoulish rock musical, Phantom of the Paradise (1974). Not only is Brian DePalma’s Phantom one of my favorite films but, watching it recently, I realized that the glam numbers in it informed me of what a rock band should be at a tender young age. It didn’t help that they showed clips of it in the intro to Creature Features every week on KTVU Channel 2, reinforcing the message that rock bands should play distorted pentatonic riffs, wear outrageous costumes and be electrocuted on stage. Un-characteristically, the interview with Williams is available online by clicking here.

The newest ish of Roctober (#46) has a flip cover. One side is cartoon of a trucker barreling down a highway with his trusty ape (pictured). The flipside has a photograph of Don Cornelius wearing what can only be described as a low cut blouse and an accessory that closely resembles a dog collar interviewing a very well dressed B. B. King. In the corresponding article, Austen delves into the locally produced, almost DIY Chicago Soul Train that ran parallel to its LA based nationally syndicated show.

But amidst the pages and pages of record, book and DVD reviews is a rollicking four-page interview by Dan Kelly with yours truly where I not only discuss Beer, Blood and Cornmeal but also get to spout off about my band like we really did something. I even start quoting The General’s lyrics to the still unreleased Sgt. Rock and talk about Steve Leialoha (the Fat Power cover artist), comic scribe Doug Moench, Shang Chi Master of Kung Fu and those really weird DC Shadow comics from the late 1980s. In all, it’s the kind of Filmfax or Psychotronic interview that I’ve always dreamed of doing. Reading it made me feel a little bit closer to H.G. Lewis or the late Ray Dennis Steckler talking to Fangoria or V. Vale. Thank you Roctober.

And if that wasn’t enough to inflate my already dangerously enlarged ego, the magazine also sports what may be the last interview with country picking legend and Smokey and the Bandit co-star Jerry Reed, an essay on Sam Pekinpah’s movie version of the hit C.W. McCall tune Convoy and a crazy comic spoof of 70s cosmic Kirby comics called The Internals.

It’s Roctober. There isn’t an online version. You have to buy it. It’s worth it even if you don’t want to read about me. You can click here to order a copy. In fact, get a three issue subscription. You’ll be glad you did when those 100+ pages of glorious newsprint arrive in your mailbox every now and then. You really will.

THEY’RE GOING TO DO IT. They’re going to hand the little gold man to Brad Pitt for Benjamin Button at the Academy Awards this Sunday. The Academy voters are programmed to lavish Oscars on any film that reminds them of Forrest Gump. Pitt sounds kinda’ loopy in the movie but he doesn’t go full retard. He’s odd but oh so folksy. Members of the Academy will keep pressing the button for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Many of them won’t even know why.

This will leave Mickey Rourke no choice but to hit Brad Pitt with a steel chair. “You people need to give me the respect that I deserve,” Rourke will yell, giving a time honored (and honed) bad guy wrestler refrain that has existed ever since the invention of the microphone. The Tinsel Town hoi polloi gathered for the event will start to boo Rourke more heavily than they booed Michael Moore when he said that George W. Bush stole an election.

The orchestra will start to play the outro music in a futile attempt to stop the violence. Pitt, floored by the initial blow, will struggle to his knees but Rourke will send him back down to the plush carpeting with another chair shot across the Hollywood hunk’s back. Rourke will then toss the chair to the side and begin to lay his snakeskin boots into the body of the A-lister. “Somebody stop it!” Daniel Day Lewis will say over the Kodak Theatre’s sound system. Lewis was last year’s best Oscar winner for his arresting turn as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. “Security! Security!” he will plead while still maintaining a certain aloof poise. But the security guards will be paralyzed. They have been expressly told never to lay a hand on the talent, even if the talent is conducting itself in the manner of a rabid wolverine or a Texas rattlesnake. Philip Seymour Hoffman, winner of the best actor award in 2006 for his performance in Capote and best supporting actor nominee this year for Doubt, will be moved to tears by the carnage but will do nothing. Sean Penn will start to cheer Pitt’s dismantling but then, realizing what he is doing, will quickly sit down in the hopes that he wasn’t on camera.

The frantic commentary of WWE Smackdown announcer Jim Ross will unexplainably air over the Oscar broadcast. “Brad Pitt is broken in half! Broken in half! Good God Almighty!! Good God Almighty!! That…That…That…near killed him!!! Mickey Rourke is tougher than a two dollar steak. Mickey Rourke is a freak of nature…and I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way.”

Mickey Rourke has what Roddy Piper calls the sickness now. He’s got the fever. Like his portrayal of Randy “The Ram” Robinson, he needs to get back into that ring. At the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes, he even dressed like every pro wrestler trying to look high class that I’ve ever run across. Like The Rock circa 2000, he is wearing those glittery $500 shirts. Don’t you dare rip that shirt Brad Pitt or Sean Penn, otherwise Rourke is liable to layeth the smacketh down on your roody poo candy asses. A can of whoopass will definitely be opened.

Agents and managers may try to stop him but Rourke is going to do WrestleMania 25 on April 5th. The WWE is unabashedly building up to this. Heel Chris Jericho has called Rourke out on Larry King and has continued to do so every week on Monday Night RAW ever since. Rourke dare not show his face on a weekly wrestling show for fear that the Academy will deem this undignified (as if anything in Hollywood is actually possessing of dignity). Retired wrestlers have been used to stand in for Rourke in his agent imposed absence. This week it was “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. Last week it was “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair. During these segments that usually end with the old pro laying out the upstart with one blow as the fans cheer wildly, the meaning of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is publicly debated. Jericho says that all of the wrestling legends, like the film’s main character, are nothing more than broken down old men willing to dance on strings for the amusement of slovenly fans that don’t really care about them. Flair and Piper have said that the movie hits upon the dignity of the men who get in the ring night after night. In a world where “all of it are shades of grey (sic),” as Vince McMahon himself said on a late 1990s A&E special on the phenomenon of pro wrestling, both interpretations are right.

But Mickey has the fever now. Mickey won’t get the respect that he deserves so he will hit Brad Pitt with that steel chair, making this the best Academy Awards ever.