"JOHNNY LEGEND" CONTINUED FROM PAGE 13

VIVA: What was she wearing?!

Johnny: I don't know. I was really drunk.

DUDE: What about sexy songs?

Johnny: "I Love How You Love Me," by the Paris Sisters. That was really sexy.

VIVA: What about Ike and Tina?

Johnny: That was pure sexual energy. I saw them in their prime, with Bo Diddley. A lot of what I do now onstage comes from seeing Bo Diddley a bunch of times between '65 and '67 or '68. And it wasn't just Bo....

DUDE: It was LADY Bo...and who was the other gal on guitar?

VIVA: Lady Bo?!

DUDE: Oh Yeah! I'll show you stuff that will put your hair in curlers!! They were BAD CHICKS. The way they moved....oh...

Johnny: Bo Diddley was like this big boxcar-shaped guy, and he was doing this fundamental--almost religious--sexual show, with these trashy looking women playing maracas and stuff. It was really mind blowing. You know the thing I do now where I go "Throw away the Bible, we're gonna get tribal!" and the girls slowly molt? That comes directly from the Bo Diddley shows. That's what got me going.

VIVA: Alright, what was your sexiest stage experience of all time?

Johnny: Well, last night was pretty good.

DUDE: With Becki? That girl's got it ALL. It's her attitude that's so exemplary. Four star.

[Becki appears at Mary's Club and the Magic Garden under the name Lucy. --ed.]

CHIC: I must say I can't believe you sing whole songs from the cleavage of a woman!!

Johnny: It is tricky, because sometimes my head has literally disappeared into an orifice, and I still have to figure out a way to sing!

The 3000+ words of classified insanity involving Dennis Wilson, Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Christine McVeigh, the neighborhood tramp with the speech impediment, Andre Williams, Elvis and the Memphis Mafia, Ed Wood, Thor Johnson, Mick Fleetwood, George Thoroughgood, and the geek patrol had to be edited out due to space constraints. Maybe if we're lucky and live through these ominous end times, I'll publish a continuance....

at my Cramps interview, then again at the Demolition Doll Rods show. "DUDE" used to write for the Village Voice before, presumably, going insane and retiring to the country where he freelances. His last project: eight and a half years with Mr. Neil Young, soon to be documented in his forthcoming biography. Here we go...

VIVA: So what's been your favorite incarnation, Johnny? The music? The porn? Is it all equally satisfying?

Johnny: Yeah. I like doing everything! As my great friend Johnny Whiteside once said, I'm a full-time rock'n'roll beast and a part-time everything else.

VIVA: YEAH! Have you ever had a normal, nine-to-five job?

Johnny: Even though I've gone through decades of barely surviving, I've never had a normal job. And the few times I would almost get lured into doing something like that, it would turn out to be crazier than anything I was already doing.

DUDE: Talk about Teenage Cruisers!

Johnny: That's the first and only rockabilly porno ever made. It came out in '77. We'd had this rockabilly band, the Rollin' Rock Rebels, for about five years, and I decided we needed to make a movie about it because we needed a breakthrough. We only had enough money to do one day of hardcore stuff, but John Holmes helped us out. Nobody had thought to do such a thing before. In fact, Teenage Cruisers was only the 12th porno title ever to come out on video. It came out the year video was born.

VIVA: So you're originally from San Fernando, California.

Johnny: Yep! And I'm still there, in the family house. It's where they filmed Plan Nine From Outer Space.

DUDE: Now his sister--and he'll get mad at me for this--was Andy Kaufmann's gal pal. And in this new Milos Foreman movie that's coming out [Man in the Moon], Courtney Love plays Johnny's sister.

Johnny: Yeah, my sister and her spent a lot of time together. They grilled her unmercifully, because she and Andy Kaufmann were inseparable until he died. She was the last love of his life. They met on camera in My Breakfast with Blassie. Andy was interviewing Blassie, and my sister was in the background eating as an extra at the restaurant.

VIVA: Wow! So, who is Classy Freddie Blassie?

JOHNNY: He's like the Jerry Lee Lewis of wrestling. He came out of nowhere back in the sixties when we were all kids. He's just this weird human juggernaut. This bleached blonde torpedo roaming around with legs. He has a totally unique charisma. So one day I had this dream of making a record with him. One of my friends infiltrated the wrestling industry, and eventually we made the record "Pencil Necked Geek." He had no sense of music, no idea of a verse or a chorus or meter or anything. He was a wrestler, you know. He finished the whole thing in thirty seconds like a locker room interview. So we spent days and days on the thing, and to make it worse, at the end he started trying to do it phonetically correct....I said "Fred! No! It sounds like My Fair Lady!" So, it took over a year to get it done. There are lots of people out there still who will tell you that "Pencil Necked Geek" was like the most important thing in their life.

VIVA: Well, before the tape runs out altogether, I should start asking my retinue of questions that I ask everyone. First off, what's the sexiest song of all time?

Johnny: [Silenced for the first time in two hours!] Believe it or not, whenever someone asks me what's the best this or that, I blank out! ......

VIVA: The Kinks? Otis Redding? Prince? Marvin Gaye? The Stooges? You know, Iggy?

Johnny: I only saw the The Three Stooges live, and that's another story.

VIVA: I love the Stooges. I don't know how sexy they are, though.

Johnny: Yeah, but have you ever met anyone who's seen them live?

VIVA: No.

Johnny: Well, this is he! It was the same club where Petula Clark put her arm around me years later! That's what gave me the spark, I think, when Petula put her arm around me.

DUDE: Were you impressed by the Stooges? My bet would be no.

Johnny: Yes, I was. The Three Stooges.

DUDE: Oh! The Three Stooges.

Johnny: That's what I'm talking about!

VIVA: What about Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders?

Johnny: I'll tell you what, I met her. I think she's pretty sexy.

DUDE: Yeah, but now she appears on Friends! That's so unsexy!

Johnny: Blondie is sexy. I always wanted to do a rockabilly version of "One Way or Another." I spent an entire evening talking to Blondie once. She was sitting in her limo.

But Terah has had more than herself and other's opinions to overcome. She had Graves disease--a condition which attacks the thyroid gland. Her thyroid was surgically removed, so she's on a thyroxine supplement for life to regulate her metabolism. So, I wanted to know if she took any other supplements, like steroids.

"Why don't you ask me if I take heroin," she chided, "because it's just as illegal to possess steroids." Then she explained, "I'm at the novice level; there's no reason for me to get that carried away." She does admit to taking Creatine--a supplement which puts fluid in the muscle. "The muscle loves it and grows," she said. "It's hard on the kidneys, so, I cycle on and off it."

Working for herself as an escort gives Terah time and money to devote to her bodybuilding and her daughter, whose passion is figure skating. The skating lessons are pricey, as is Terah's personal trainer, Noel.

So, I checked my form with Terah on my crunches and got the bodybuilder seal of approval. I declined her invitation to arm wrestle; we still had photos to shoot and I wanted to make sure I had the use of both of my arms. Terah wants to pursue obstacle course competition. But not now. Maybe later. After the Oregon State Bodybuilding Championships in April, she wants to take a break and reevaluate. Terah has a dream vacation planned to Southern Utah for the end of May--driving a dirt road she discovered between Bryce Canyon and Kodachrome State Park. There, you're not likely to encounter another person for days. But it has to be done at just the right time: after the road has dried up a bit, but before it gets too hot. She'll probably do it. Then, who knows: more bodybuilding or on to the next challenge of obstacle course competition training. Whatever she decides, she won't let anyone or anything stand in her way, especially not herself. Which may sound hardened. But she's definitely not.

Terah, who's a spiritually minded person, said. "When I got into this work [escort/modeling] I said, 'OK, God, I really don't understand you but please guide me here," she softened as she was walking out the door. "I have grown more doing this job [escort/modeling] . . . " and she trailed off. Then she summed it up for me: "Before I got into this, I used to hate men. Now, I just love men." And she was out the door, hoping to get in a workout before she picked up her daughter at the sitter's.