Ask Blender: Tom Jones Takes Groupie's Virginity and More...

Did Elvira really lose her virginity to Tom Jones?
Don Sparks, Broken Arrow, OK

Weirdly, yes. Before she donned the campy mantle of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the former Cassandra Peterson was one of rock& roll’s first groupies. A cute redhead from Colorado Springs, Colorado, Peterson canoodled with Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Elvis but always refused to go all the way. After high school she moved to Las Vegas and got a job in a nude revue called Viva Les Girls—where, one fateful night in 1969, she met the tight-pantsed Jones.

“I was fresh meat,” Peterson recalled last year. “Tom seemed gentlemanly and nice, so when he was jumping on me a few hours later, I thought, Well, if I’mever gonna do this, it might as well be with Tom Jones.” Butthe well-endowed Welshman wasn’t very gentle with her what’s-new-pussycat. “It was painful and horrible,” Peterson said. Truly horrible—Jones had done some damage to her lady parts. She had to go to the ER alone to get a couple of stitches.

“I thought for sure we were gonna run away together and get married. I went backstage to see him the next night, buthe was with his two background singers … and was all over them. I was devastated.”

I heard Vampire Weekend got their name from a movie, but I can’t find it anywhere on IMDB. What gives?
Rick Schevling, Alpharetta, GA

The summer after his freshman year at Columbia University, future VW frontman Ezra Koenig filmed a super-low-budget horror flick, Vampire Weekend. “It was about a guy, that I played, called Walcott, whose dad gets killed by vampires because vampires take over his country,” Koenig said. 

He set the footage aside and promptly forgot about it. When he found it a couple of years later, he decided the title would make for a good band name. The movie was never finished, but Koenig did edit it into a trailer. Search YouTube for “vampire weekend trailer” to check it out.