A few months ago, a friend of mine gave me a list of podcasts that she thought were pushing the boundaries of the format. One of them was called The Rialto Report. With a name that sounds like a libertarian newsletter, it was the last I checked but turned out to be by far the best of the bundle.
The Rialto Report focuses on the history of the (mostly American) pornography industry, from seedy Times Square sex joints (when Times Square was seedy and still had sex joints) to Q&As with aging porn stars from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Ironically for a genre that was widely seen as disposable, The Rialto Report is exhaustively researched and have hit upon a certain exhaustive, confessional narrative tone in their podcasts that surpasses simple titillation. This shit is just fucking fascinating.
Because of the subject matter and the reticence of podcast archives to deal with anything remotely related to porn (or at least that’s what I imagine), Rialto doesn’t get promoted like NPR or news or nerd podcasts. Most people seem to have stumbled across their site to find it and subscribed via iTunes that way.
And so we go to the latest episode: the search for a porno disco queen. “The Search for Andrea True” is more than an hour of Rialto’s writers piecing together the life of perhaps the only pop star to launch herself out of the skin flick business (apologies to Traci Lords, whose dance tracks pretty much sucked). True is known in music for “More More More”: a disco smash (#4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US) that despite the risqué subject matter has graduated to the ubiquity of supermarket jingles and ads for snow tires.
But Andrea’s fame was different. You see, most people hadn’t heard of Andrea because she’d appeared in sex films. They’d heard of her because for a short time she was a successful singer – with one of the biggest hits of the disco era, ‘More, More, More.’
“Hokey enough to make it”
Among the people interviewed about Andrea True is the legendary Tom Moulton, who souped up the original recording of “More More More” into the version that you’re most likely familiar with today. Moulton is in rare form, as someone that’s been on the other end of the phone with him can tell you. Clips from the interview with Tom begin at around 26:30 and continue through the rest of the episode.
Tom Moulton agreed to mix “More More More” despite knowing nothing of the story behind it (he claims he thought it was about the feeling music gave Andrea until she stopped him short by telling him, “I fuck and suck on camera.”) “It was hokey enough to make it,” he says, despite judging the quality and musicianship on the original recording as a shambles. Though not a music podcast, Rialto does a pretty bang-up job in showcasing the magic of Tom Moulton by comparing various segments of “More More More,” the thin and tinny original vs. the dreamy, lush Moulton Mix side by side. In what might be a motto to describe much of his life’s work, Moulton describes his job with a poorly recorded track like this as, “Fix what you can, and if you can’t fix it – distract.”
There’s some vintage Moulton in here too. “The song was so much bigger than she was,” he says, and it feels like he’s hit you in the face with a bat when he says it.
The episode ends on something of a cliffhanger, with a part two forthcoming and dedicated to when the search for the porno disco queen turned up its quarry (Andrea True died in 2011). Like many Rialto podcasts (I’ve binged on the thing by now), what’s most interesting isn’t the bizarre and unique but the common threads of life among actors and artists and musicians on the fringe. A friend describes Andrea True as yearning for stardom but having no idea how to achieve it – working hard but largely spinning her wheels until opportunities struck by chance – some good, some bad, and most of it now belonging to the storytellers.
