Page 18 - AVN August 2016

WHO’S WHO
MILESTONES| |By Mark Kernes
regarding the posting on YouTube
When AVN received a press release
of the catchy song “Goodbye Hello,”
attributed to composer/musician David
Perry, we gave it a listen—and found that the man we
were staring at, who was playing so many parts so
eloquently, was none other than the person we knew
better as adult actor/director Rodney Moore.
And we figured, anyone who was that musically
talented probably had an interesting story to tell, so
we called him up and asked him about it.
“I started playing guitar when I was a teenager, 13,
just before the Beatles came out, actually,” Moore told
us. “I was totally hooked on the Beatles back then, and
then I started writing songs. The first songs I wrote
were pretty horrible, but I started playing keyboards,
and had a tape recorder that would do something
called ‘add a track,’ where you could record one part
and then overdub another part. Later on, I built a little
home studio.”
After mastering the keyboard, Moore turned his
attention to other instruments he could use to flesh
out his tunes, so he added guitar, which he now
considers to be his main instrument, then piano, as
well as a smattering of bass and drums
“On the guitar, I was pretty rusty for a while,”
Moore admitted. “I got so involved in porn that there
might have been times that I didn’t pick up a guitar for
like six months, but I’ve been playing a lot more lately
and practicing to get back to where I once was.”
Music Man
Rodney Moore says ‘Goodbye Hello’ to his first love: music
Indeed, for the longest time, Moore’s first love was music—by most measures, it still is—and his first jobs
were all music-related.
“In the mid-’70s, I started playing in local bands around the New Haven, Connecticut area,” Moore said,
“and at one point, I went to work with a recording studio as an engineer and producer, and in 1978, the owner
of the studio decided he wanted to move himself and his family out to Seattle, so I followed him out there.
In the 1970s disco era, a client came to the studio asking for help fixing up a track. Moore said it would be
more efficient to start from scratch—and ended up offering to produce the new track himself.
That was a turning point in Moore’s young life. His new arrangement of the song got up to number 60 on
the Billboard Disco Charts, and landed the artists a record deal with a label in Seattle called First American
Records. Moore was starting to think he had it made in the music biz.
“I think it was 1984, when ‘We Are the World’ came out, I wrote a song called ‘Give Just A Little,’ which was
a similar type of ‘feed the world’ song, and we did a local version of ‘We Are The World,’ where we had local
celebrities come in and sing on it for charity,” Moore recalled. “Also, between ’78 and 1990, when I moved to
L.A., I probably did well over a hundred jingles for radio and TV advertising, some that I wrote myself and sang
on; others that I co-produced with other people at advertising agencies. I played in a local Top 40 band up in
Seattle from ’84 to ’88, and I did a whole lot of work in the studio of Meredith Brooks, who eventually had that
one hit, ‘I’m a Bitch,’ which came out in the mid-’90s, and altogether, I must have recorded 40 or 50 songs.”
And that’s about when things started to go sideways for Moore in the music business. Even a move to L.A.
in 1990 didn’t help. “I had a couple of close calls with success that, through bad luck, didn’t happen. I was
pretty depressed about my music career ... I was just never in the right place at the right time.”
Then something a little weird happened. He wrote a jingle for an L.A. video store, and in partial payment for
it, he received an old VHS camcorder—and in short order, “Rodney Moore” was born.
“I was always a big fan of porn because my father had quite a collection in his closet when I was growing up
as a teenager,” Moore recalled. “Around this time, amateur porn was first starting to come out and be popular,
and I had this camcorder and I thought it might be fun to shoot my own amateur porn video, so I put an ad in
the LA Express and got answered by this couple who had come in from Chicago; the guy had his own little mail-
order business and he basically had come to L.A. to shoot some stuff for his catalog, and they figured they’d
make a little extra money banging out a scene. The two provided Moore with lots of information and help.
“That was kind of a lucky break for me,” Moore recalled.
Another bit of good fortune came in the form of adult director Randy Detroit, who also answered Moore’s
ad and wound up letting him use his studio space and lighting equipment, and put him in touch with adult
performers.
“That was another lucky break,” he reflected. “They say, ‘Do what you love and the money will come.’ The
money never really came in the music business. ... I found there was something else that I loved doing, which
was making porn, and I started doing that and the money came.”
Among Moore’s first sales were to Bob Genova of LBO Entertainment and Bob Tremont at Odyssey Group.
But it was when Moore hooked up with producer Dean Goldfarb, whose forté was softcore Playboy-style videos,
that Moore was first able to marry his interests in music and porn.
“I started shooting stuff for him, and that gave me a reason to try to get back into doing a little music,”
Moore said. “So I bought a keyboard work station and started cranking out instrumentals, because you kind
of have to add music underneath the softcore stuff. I never really liked music in hardcore; I always found it
distracting.”
But once Moore moved into the “big time,” with the success of both Rodney Moore Productions, whose
videos filled several niche markets including hairy girls and BBW ones, and his trans line, as “Sammy Mancini,”
for Mancini Productions, his music got away from him, until ...
“About two years ago, I really started trying to get back into doing music,” Moore said, “and seven or eight
months ago, I started doing music videos for YouTube, and this [“Goodbye Hello”] was the first original that
I did, although I did do a bunch of covers in-between. So I’m trying to devote equal time now to working on
music and working on porn, and I chose to use my real name with the music, just for people who have known
me from the earlier days and would recognize my name if anything ever happened.
“I sent that “Goodbye Hello” song out to a couple of places that seem to scout material for established artists
that are looking for good material to record, and producers working with new artists,” he added. “At this stage
of the game, I’m looking at it more as fun than as a career. I mean, if something comes of it financially, if I gain
any notoriety, that’s all fine and good, but I’m just enjoying the few people that have seen the video and the
response has been great.”
Rodney Moore’s adult movies are by distributed by Exquisite. For DVD sales, licensing and broadcast,
contact David Peskin: davep@expxxx.com or (866) 629-4273.
18 | AVN.com | 8.16