Porn Valley- John Bowen aka John T. Bone makes a rare public appearance tonight on KSEX radio, www.ksexradio.com on The Wanker Show.
Bowen who used to do interviews like some metrosexuals do their nails, hasn’t done a public interview in over four years. The last time Bowen was before the cameras at any length was for the BBC. “They did four or five documentaries on me back-to-back,” says Bowen. “Then I stopped. Technically speaking I haven’t done anything in four years. But I got burnt out. The BBC had one guy that was with me for a month every day. He followed me around. He was shooting everything I was doing. Then I had another one who was with me for ten days. After that I took a rest.”
One wonders whether Bowen’s appearance tonight with the equally cantankerous Wankus will prompt fur to fly. Will Bowen have surprises in store? Will one of the girls from Women’s Extreme Wrestling- an organization Bowen used to be involved with- bushwhack Wankus by clunking him on the head with a steel chair if the questions get too rough?
Bowen shoud know because he used to write storylines for that wrestling organization, www.wextremew.com, which deployed female porn stars in various states of undress. But he’s no longer involved with it, and I was curious why.
Bowen calls his involvement with the organization, owned by Steve Carell who had ECW along with Paul E. Dangerously at one time, an uphill struggle. “We had a good product which I thought was doing very well,” says Bowen. “I didn’t know much about wrestling but I enjoyed it. I thought it was very entertaining.”
According to Bowen, they were shooting shows for pay-per-view. “It was taking time- he wasn’t financed enough. He was trying to get enough shows together to tempt investors to come in to finance it properly. He just didn’t have the finances. It was a constant struggle. Instead doing one show a month we ended up doing one show every seven weeks. Then it was one every three months. It was a constant battle to keep the shows going. The shows were not cheap even though the wrestlers got paid nothing. And bless their little hearts.”
Besides porn girls who got involved with the storylines basically to lose their clothes, WEW had a bunch of wrestling girls that were actually very good, Bowen tells me. “I was bringing in the porn girls to add another element to the show,” he explains. “Then they were finding that the porn girls were too expensive and difficult to deal with.”
The shows were bering held in Philadelphia, and, according to Bowen, the main troupe lived nearby.
“These girls would show their tits and get thrown a flaming table for $50,” Bowen continued. “And I was bringing in porn stars that wanted $500 plus airfare plus 3 days in a hotel and it was getting a little too expensive. They were wanting to cut down on the money and the girls, instead, elected to stay in California to shoot porn. The porn girls were constantly complaining and making it really difficult. Then, what happened Steve got a deal from a strip club owner to do shows in Florida, Miami. The guy was going to pick up a lot of the costs. We went down and did a show there. I absolutely fucking hated it because we took it out of a wrestling venue and a wrestling audience and did it in a strip club. And nobody came to the shows. It was just a few guys who showed up to watch girls’ breasts. Nobody cared. Because it wasn’t my money maybe I reacted badly. The other problem was wrestling was dying on the vive. As we were working really hard to try and build this into something, the WWF [subsequently WWE] was going through problems and losing shows. Now I was tied to something that was being done in a strip clun and I quit.”
Bowen says the WEW is still doing shows in Philadelphia. “I think they’re doing shows in bars, now.” It was pointed out that Carmen Elecktra’s doing a woman’s nude wrestling venture. Bowen says that was not the intent of WEW.
“This was a real, honest-to-God out there wrestling operation,” he says. “It was nothing to do with oil wrestling or nude wrestling. They had some pretty damn good wrestlers. Some of those girls were in five years, ten years training. They trained with real wrestlers. Some of the girls went on to join the WWE. The problem was they put the operation together at the height of the wrestling-thing. And that was it. Here we were with this great idea. The girls put on great shows but wrestling was soon dying. It was like disco.”
Memory serves me that Kendra Jade might have been involved with WEW for a time, but Bowen honestly doesn’t remember. He recalls, however, some Japanese porn girl with big tits but can’t place a name to go with them. She was quite popular for awhile, he seems to think. “And then there was the girl who was Chelsea Blue’s roommate. But I don’t remember her name, either.”
I suggested to Bowen, going at the rate he is, that his autobiography’s going to have a lot of blanks in the sentences. Getting back to the fact that Bowen used to write the shows, he says that’s how he ended up writing a column for AVN.
“I was writing all this stuff for the WEW which is all funny,” he states. “Somebody over there read it and said your stuff is really funny, you should write for us. I said only if I could be the sportswriter. So I was the sportswriter for the AVN website. I used to write all these mythical stories about how I was fucking Paul Fishbein and stealing all his money and doing all these wacky things. I don’t know how they ever got up because I just used to really ridicule Paul and the fat girl who was my editor. It was all about me having sex with her, and she was having sex with all the guys in the office. We were telling all these outrageous lies and nobody ever bothered with any of that. All of it was printed. That’s what made it so funny. At one point I even had Paul in the hospital and people were calling up AVN to see if it was true. I enjoyed writing that.”
According to Bowen, the irony was that he got away with those stories but was censored for his reminiscences about Samantha Strong. And that’s why he quit writing the column.