In the mid 1980s, the US Senate (provoked by a high-powered busybody wives club called the PMRC) held a series of hearings on so-called “porn rock”—music containing lyrics about violence, sex, drugs, and the occult. The hearings were pointless but hilarious, providing a public venue for several old, rich, uptight assholes to make fools of themselves reciting lyrics from songs by prominent 80s rock bands. And though the hearings are probably best remembered for testimonies by “degenerates” like Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver, the most absurdly awesome testimony was delivered by the Reverend Jeff Ling who read aloud lyrics from a song called “Golden Shower” by a band called The Mentors.

Formed in the late 1970s, The Mentors are—even by today’s standards—one of the most offensive rock bands you’ve ever heard. Led by the notorious Eldon “El Duce” Hoke (who gained national notoriety in the mid-90s when he claimed that Courtney Love had offered him $50,000 to kill Kurt Cobain), the band built a name for themselves as the originators of “rape rock”, a style of music dedicated exclusively to sex, drugs and the subjugation of women. If that sounds awful to you, don’t worry—it’s supposed to. Much like 70s porno-rap icon Blowfly, The Mentors have spent the last thirty years testing the boundaries of propriety though parody, gross-out humor and over-the-top sexual fantasy. Controversy is their stock-in-trade, and in a lot of ways, the band helped set the stage for groups like 2 Live Crew whose equally bawdy material literally redefined the word "obscene" during the early 1990s and subsequently erased all notions of propriety in popular music (for better or worse).

Though El Duce was hit and killed by a train nearly a decade ago, the two surviving original members of The Mentors, bassist Dr. Heathen Scum and guitarist Sickie Wifebeater, continue to tour and make records with a revised lineup (their latest record was even produced by Seattle grunge king Jack Endino, a longtime fan of the band). Tonight, Alamo Music Mondays presents El Duce Vita, a DVD re-release of the band's 1990 video The Wretched World of The Mentors, a collection of early interviews and music videos featuring excessive amounts of nudity, drug use and bodily fluids. Heathen and Sickie will be in attendance to introduce the video, and The Mentors will be playing a gig at Emo's following the screening.

We recently spoke to Mentors guitarist Dr. Heathen Scum about the new DVD, the state of punk rock, and sex with audience members.

Is there any reason you waited until now to release this DVD? I ask because it’s almost ten years to the day since El Duce died.

Well, we were just approached by the company who’d done the previous VHS tapes to do it – it wasn’t really our idea. It’s an interesting coincidence, but there was no plan behind it from that aspect at all.

You’ve been a band for more than thirty years now – in all that time, how has the climate changed for a band like The Mentors?

Well, it’s funny – we were just talking about that on the way up. When we first started it was at the very beginning of that “punk” stuff. And I don’t know if it’s well understood but El Duce played with the lead singer of The Screamers in a band in Seattle. The Screamers were kind of an influential LA punk band, and that was part of the reason that we moved to Los Angeles. We’d planned to gravy train with them, meaning that we figured they’d let us open for them on some big shows. Well, it turned out that we were pretty much shunned by kind of “in crowd” punk groups at the time. X wouldn’t let us gig with them, The Screamers wouldn’t let us gig with them—we had a hard time getting gigs. The first year or two we were in LA, we weren’t getting gigs at all. So if you ask how it’s changed—we’re now to the point where we’re sort of established, so we can actually gig when we want to, which is nice.

It seems to me like it’s almost easier to offend people now—like there are certain issues that people are hypersensitive to. And I’d just assumed that it would be harder for you to do what you do now.

Well, I don’t think so… because if you look at some of what goes on in rap now—just total use of obscenity in rap and in rap videos—it’s desensitized the culture to those things. And that’s part of the reason those punk bands wouldn’t let us gig with them at the time. With X, for instance, we offended their feminist sensibilities. They were like, “it’s not cool what those guys are doing putting down women and all that stuff”. But now, you have Brittney Spears and Lindsay Lohan showing their crotches to everyone.

There have always been two components to what we do: the music and the x-rated humor. We’d also like to think there’s some kind of musical content to it beyond just saying “fuck” and trying to get a reaction out of it.

Does it matter to you whether people get that it’s supposed to be funny? Whether they understand that it’s a joke or take it seriously?

Yeah, we’d hope that people would understand it on some sort of level. I think we try to strike a chord with a certain type of person who’ll understand it right away. And we’ve always had this syndrome where other bands fall in love with our band. That's the thing—we’re this kind of prototypical, high-school male bonding band. We're one of the few bands that’s stuck together through thick and thin. Or at least me and [the guitar player] Sickie. And our drummer’s been with us for fifteen years also. So it has that aspect of being a real band, and the humor and stuff sort of goes with it. But I don’t know that that’s completely unique to The Mentors. A lot of bands have that; we’re just an extreme example of it.

Has all the danger gone out of rock n’ roll? I mean, in the early days of punk, it was actually dangerous to tour as a rock band. And now…

Yeah—I think the danger is completely gone. Rock n’ roll is really a dying artform. Punk rock is still there, but it's on a commercial level. We played a big punk club last night in San Antonio, and there were all of these kids there dressed up in their punk rock fashion—even some chicks who looked like they were thirteen had all kinds of tattoos on ‘em. And I was wondering, how many of these kids know who Sid Vicious is and think that it’s cool to be a completely fucked-up junkie guy? Because the early punk and metal bands that we hung out with or were affiliated with were all super fucked-up, drug addict, suicidal type of guys. And that element seems to have died out quite a bit. Now you have this Good Charlotte, Blink 182 kind of stuff that’s more oriented towards materialism and that kind of thing rather than getting completely fucked up and being a Sid Vicious-type icon. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily cool to be that way, but for me Sid Vicious was way more entertaining than any Green Day kind of shit.

It certainly doesn’t seem as if punk bands or rock bands or even metal bands are pushing many boundaries these days.

Yeah. As a musician and as a music collector, I find very little going on right now that interests me at all. But I grew up in the 70s, and the kind of stuff that really gets me going is Johnny Winter and shit like that.

Do The Mentors have any contemporaries right now? You’re definitely the only band tagged “rape rock” on Amazon.

There are certainly a number of bands that are inspired by us, and there are a number of Mentor tribute bands around as well. But yes, I think that we’re the only band that claims we’re rape rock.

Back in the 80s or in the early 90s, you at least had some similar—I mean, you had someone like GG Allin, who wasn’t the same style of music, but had a similar sort of audience and the same sort of appeal, I think.

Yeah, I think there were some similarities with GG in that El Duce was a bald kind of guy who was completely out of control on booze. So there is sort of a crossover element in that respect. But GG was more like another Sid Vicious—obviously suicidal, complexly wacky, nobody would consider him a good musician. Whereas we always tried to appeal to the sort of musician crowd; people who were interested in the guitar playing and the songs and all of that. His thing was more about shitting on the crowd and all that.

What should people coming to the movie or to the show on Monday expect from The Mentors?

Well, they should expect a bunch of elderly, drunk guys trying to tune their instruments and trying to play some shit. And who knows – we do have a dancer with us, who hopefully will interject some kind of excitement.

[Heathen To dancer]: Can we raffle you off to have sex with a guy from the crowd?

[Dancer]: Um… I don’t know about that. You can raffle Sickie off to a girl from the crowd.

Music Mondays Presents El Duce Vita w/ The Mentors Live in Person
Monday, April 2nd
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown
9:45pm, $4 / $5 Student, AFS
[Tickets]