Pop Geeks’ Flashback Interview: Rocky DeMarco
There are some performers who can do a little bit of everything. They can act and do stunt work. They can sing and dance. They can write scripts or songs. My next interview subject, Rocky DeMarco, has managed to do all of that over the course of her diverse career.
The daughter of the late actor Keefe Brasselle and the late Arlene DeMarco of vintage singing group The DeMarco Sisters, Rocky has worked in many diverse areas. B-movie fans will know her from her frequent collaborations with cult classic director Jim Wynorski. Fans of reality television will recognize her from stints on VH1 Celebreality programs like I Know My Kid’s A Star and Tough Love 2. Following in the tradition of her mother and her aunts, she’s a singer and songwriter. On July 28th, I talked to her about all this and more. You may not recognize Rocky DeMarco now, but by the time this interview is over, you’ll know her quite well.
Let’s Flashback again. Say hello to Rocky DeMarco!
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Johnny: What were your pop-cultural likes growing up, like favorite movies and music?
Rocky: My all-time favorite movie was The Sound Of Music. That was absolutely my favorite movie. All the music in it reminded me of fond memories of my mom. As far as music, I think my mother and her sisters were the greatest musical influence ever. I grew up listening to their songs and all that kind of music, that jazz. I knew every standard by the time I was 10. I was a little girl, and instead of singing songs you would sing as a little girl, I would be singing Fran Sinatra songs and songs of the DeMarco sisters and Judy Garland, the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Nelson Riddle. They would have sing-alongs with the orchestra, and I would sing with them. My mom used to do that a lot.
Johnny: What were your high school days like?
Rocky: Horrible…Horrible because girls were very, very mean and jealous, always setting me up and trying to jump me and all that kind of stuff. That’s what gave me the tough skin I would have later in life. I really didn’t have any friends. They were just very two-faced and jealous. I got along with the black girls very well. They were very cool. They were the ones who had my back and always protected me. It’s like a bunch of people would try and jump me, and they would come. I was funny and my personality kind of saved me, but it was just a nightmare. I ended up quitting in the 11th grade.
Johnny: One of your first notable assignments was appearing in the February 1989 issue of Playboy Magazine. How did you land that gig?
Rocky: I was doing modeling at the time for a bunch of stuff. My mother used to take me around, and I landed a gig with this company called 3M, which is a big company that does tape and manufactures all kinds of stuff. I landed a full page ad, and the photographer who shot that entered me in this contest, the Girls Of The 35th Anniversary Playmate Hunt. I came in the top five out of a nationwide search with over 70,000 girls.
Johnny: Your first film credit was as Trina in the 1994 Fred Olen Ray movie Possessed By The Night. Were you nervous about acting, or thinking back on your entertainment industry lineage, did you not worry about it?
Rocky: Never. I studied for almost two years with Lee Strasberg in New York City, and I studied with Weiss-Baron, which is a soap opera school. I worked with casting directors who were actually casting directors of soap operas, and so they hired me out of there. I wasn’t nervous. The only thing that I was nervous about was that I come from a very, very old-fashioned Italian family. If you were in my mom’s house, you couldn’t walk around without a shirt on. I went there once with my daughter’s father. Even though we weren’t married, he was still my daughter’s father, and he couldn’t sleep anywhere near the same part of the house I was in. I made it a point to never do any nudity or be in something that had nudity. When I was hired for Possessed By The Night, I was asked to do nudity, and I said, “Absolutely not. My Italian mother would kill me. No way. I can’t do it”. They said “Well, alright. We like you. We really like your look. Would you be okay doing a scene in a bikini?”. I go, “Yeah, yeah, that’s no problem!”. It’s a funny story because every time, before they called action, they said, “Close set! Close set!”. I said to one of the sound guys, “Why do they keep saying that? What does that mean?”. He pointed and said “Look to your right”. The other girl, Rochelle Swanson, was topless. I was rubbing one shoulder of the actor, I forget his name, and she was rubbing the other shoulder. She goes, “I’m Tina” and I go, “I’m Trina”, but I never was in her eye line, so I had no idea she was topless. That guy pointed it out to me, and all I saw was a big 11X14 of my mother’s face going, “Oh my God!”. I was like, “Shit!”. I didn’t really want to be in it, knowing that, but I figured I could say to my mom, “I didn’t know”. It was my first line. It was a start. Fred Ray was awesome. I loved him. He was very funny. He’s responsible for giving me my first part.
Johnny: In 1995, you played a band member in Munchie Strikes Back, which would be the first of your many collaborations with Jim Wynorski. When you first auditioned for the movie, did you have any notion that the two of you would become such good friends?
Rocky: Well, I didn’t audition for the movie. What happened was Fred Ray told Jim Wynorski about me. Him and Andrew Stevens called me in for Body Chemistry 3, and they really liked me for it. Again, this was major nudity that the girl would have to do. I said, “Well, you know, I can’t do any nudity, so thank you”. I was really, really flustered. That really bothered me. Jim wound up calling me in for something else that required nudity, and I was like, “I really can’t do it”. He said, “You would be a big success”, and I said, “No, I can’t”. He said, “There’s a movie I’m doing called Munchie. It’s a kids’ movie. There’s the part of a rock-and-roller, and one of these girls skipped out on me. There’s no lines”. Basically, I would be a featured extra. He said, “I’ll pay you more than what you would get at that. You’d get to hang out and have fun. I’d really appreciate the favor”. That day we had a ball. He was just a lot of fun. We were cracking jokes left and right. I’m very good at changing. I can do a lot of different voices. When the ADR section came on, he had me do a bunch of teenagers that were in that movie, and I came in and did that for him. We remained close, and Sorceress was the first part he gave me a while after that. It was just coming out of a room and getting shot, and then there was Body Chemistry 4, where I played a secretary.
Johnny: In 1996, you co-wrote and starred in The Assault. What inspired you to write that script?
Rocky: I don’t know. I just thought about a bunch of people in a house. The director had wanted to do something in the vein of Assault On Precinct 13. I said, “Well, why not make it with a bunch of girls? Add more flavor to it. Have a police officer. Make it be about a mean girl”. I just started throwing characters at him, like one girl who doesn’t really speak. I just wrote an outline and he liked the idea. He said, “Write the script”, and I did. It sold and we shot it. I wanted to play the gun-toting tough girl. That’s me. That’s my favorite kind of role that I like to play.
Johnny: And you do well with them.
Rocky: Thank you.
Johnny: No problem. Speaking of The Assault, I saw that it was rated PG-13. Considering what you’ve written, were you thinking it would get an R rating?
Rocky: No, because I don’t think there was anything that would warrant a rating like that. The thing that was disappointing about that movie, as with a lot of the movies that I do, is they would run short on time and then they would add stuff in afterwards. There was a foreign copy that added half-an-hour of me with the boyfriend and other things because it came up short. There was always something added to the mix that I didn’t know about after the movie was made.
Johnny: On a different tack, according to the Internet Movie Database, you did stunt work in the Robert DeNiro movie 15 Minutes, albeit uncredited, and would go back to New Line in 2003 for more stunt work in A Man Apart, once again uncredited. How did you get involved in stunt work?
Rocky: I was on a movie set and I met my daughter’s father who was a stuntman. We were just talking and he asked me if I would go with him to try out for the live Batman stunt show at Magic Mountain. I forget what year it was, but it was the one that had Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze. (Author’s note: It was 1997, the Batman movie in question being Batman And Robin). There were thousands of stunt people there. I mean, every person in the world, and I wasn’t a stunt person, but I was always, always very athletic. I was always doing flips and cartwheels. It was like anything I could put my mind to, I could do. He asked me to go with him. The stunt guys were like, “Why don’t you try out for it?”. I was like, “Are you kidding me?”. Rob, my daughter’s father, was like, “Pair up with me because I need a partner to do this fight scene with”. I said, “Alright”. Anyway, they ended up narrowing it down. He didn’t make it, and I did. I wound up being cast as Poison Ivy, and when you’re doing a live show, you learn an awful lot about stunts. I mean that’s probably the best way in the world that you can learn stunts. I had Alex Daniels, who was an unbelievable stunt coordinator. He actually doubled Batman in the first movie, I believe. I learned everything. I did flight for life, hand-to-hand combat, tumbling, falling, high falls…Everything on the planet was in that show. I learned a lot, and every single day was running and working out. I also learned in-line skating, because that was used in that show. It was very, very much of a learning experience. So many stunt people who were there said, “Why don’t you get into stunts? You really should”. My daughter’s father just started putting my name inside these stunt coordinators’ mailboxes at this place called Phil’s, which was a stunt service, and I started getting calls. I worked on 15 Minutes. I worked on A Man Apart, which was Vin Diesel’s movie. I was also uncredited for that. I don’t know why that happened. I had the contracts, and you send it in and get credit for it. I also worked on Ocean’s Thirteen. I believe I’m credited for that. I don’t know why for some things I was and some things I wasn’t. I started getting a really great name in the industry with A-list stunt coordinators. I was getting calls for Baywatch. I was getting calls for filming so many things, but at the same time, my acting career was really taking off, and my reality career was starting to take off. A lot of times I wouldn’t be available, so I kind of got out of it for a while, but I was very, very good and I had some really good coordinators that I worked with. It wasn’t just a punch here or a punch there. When I worked on A Man Apart, which had Ken Davidson as coordinator and Troy Robertson, who was Dale Robertson’s son and doubled Vin Diesel, they had me doing flying shoulder rolls over people with pyro. Usually, most of the stuff I got hired for was bikinis or lingerie with no heads, and you’d make a lot more money doing things like that. Maybe because I have ADHD, I have that adrenaline in me where I just love and get a thrill out of doing scenes like that. They’re dangerous and they’re daring and I loved doing stunts as I still to this day do them.
Johnny: Cool. Returning to your acting credits, in 2003, you played Shayla in the Master P movie Bad Bizness. Six years later, you would also play a character named Shayla in Vampire In Vegas. Was that a coincidence, or was it supposed to be the same character in two different movies?
Rocky: No. They both have the same name? I wasn’t even aware of that.
Johnny: It’s something I noticed on the Internet Movie Database.
Rocky: No, they’re not the same characters at all. I was asked to do Bad Bizness at the last minute, because I’ve been a trained dancer in jazz, tap and ballet since I was a little girl, and I was a choreographer for many years in New Jersey. He wanted somebody that could do a really good dance across the stage, and it was just a small scene I was asked to do at the last minute. Vampire In Vegas? That wasn’t related at all.
Johnny: Moving on to television, in 2008, you were a contestant on the VH1 Celebreality series I Know My Kid’s A Star, and you followed that up with a stint on another VH1 program, Tough Love. My question is: About how much reality would you say is in reality television?
Rocky: I didn’t understand the question.
Johnny: Well, it’s called reality television, but how much of it would you say is real, and how much would you say was made up in the editing room?
Rocky: Well, I believe, in the editing room, they can make anybody look any way that they want, and that is all up to them. They can take somebody and edit them in a way where things didn’t happen that way, or they can take anything and add in a negative factor, or they can take something that may or may not have happened and put it in a positive factor. Every reality show in scripted in the sense that we’re not told what to say. Everything that came out of my mouth on any reality show that I was in, because I’ve done three to date, I also did Impossible Heists…Any reality show that I did, they were scripted in the sense where, like, let’s take Tough Love. They have to map out what’s going on in the episode, the producers. In other words, they take what people are saying, if they’re laying in bed or if they’re sitting around the pool, things like that, and they have to have a storyline going on. With Tough Love, the producers would say “Let’s have a bikini contest with the girls”, or a talent contest. Now that was scripted and we didn’t know that was happening until it happened. One of the things about that that we didn’t know was that the judges had sunglasses on, so they couldn’t really see what we looked like, just hearing what we were saying. In that aspect, there’s things that are written for the show.
Rocky: Now, with the Kardashians, I believe that every single solitary thing that goes on is written, and they’re just out of ideas and told what to say and what to do in every single episode. My realest reality show, and my favorite reality show, was Impossible Heists, which was the first reality show for Court TV. We were reenacting actual heists that took place, and we went through all the same exact procedures that the real thieves went through to get the jewel or the money or the painting. They were real stories, and they found out how the crooks did it. We really rappelled down 25 story buildings, dealt with laser matrixes and PIRs, detonated explosives, cracked codes, shut off alarms so they wouldn’t go off.
Rocky: That was very, very real, but certain things weren’t real. In that show, our team won three episodes in a row. There were five episodes, and it was a $50,000 prize. We won, technically, but they had to film a few more episodes, so they made it like there was a tiebreaker and we lost, so they had five episodes and, in that sense, that wasn’t real because that wasn’t the way it happened. We shot the episodes out of sequence. I’m a winner. I don’t like to lose, and technically we won, but because they were ordered to shoot five episodes, it made us look as though we lost. Those were things that were not really real.
Impossible Heists excerpts on Facebook
Rocky: Everything I said and did, in Tough Love and everything else…In Tough Love, I was constantly accosted by the girl Taylor, who I nicknamed Sasquatch, and Angel, who I nicknamed Screw because she had a screw through her nose. The editor showed them as bullies, which worked in my favor. I wanted to kick the living shit out of Taylor. She threw a drink of water in my face, and I just wanted to lay her out. Before you go on a show, you sign something that says if you hit somebody, you could get charged with assault. You could get thrown off the show. I just said to myself, “Let THEM look bad”, and the producer, Richard Hall, who was Monty Hall’s son, said to me, “Rocky, trust me. You’re going to come out looking like the winner in this. You’re going to butterfly, and they’re going to come out looking bad”. He was right, and he didn’t mislead me in any way. On I Know My Kid’s A Star, I feel that I was excited because I was the big mouth mom from New York, and I was like a pitbull when it came to my kid. I believe that certain things were done to put my child in a bad situation to make me angry, and it was great reality TV. It made me a reality star, but my child should’ve been the star. I only got involved in that show because of how talented she was. She has an amazing voice, she’s gorgeous, and I got involved in that show because I thought she would blow away the competition. What wound up happening instead was that it became about the moms and not the kids. They didn’t really get to see how talented my daughter really was.
Johnny: On another different tack, according to the IMDB, you’ve also spent some time as a pro wrestler. Was it for independent companies, or did you try out for bigger companies like WWE or TNA?
Rocky: It was for a company called WOW, which stood for Women Of Wrestling. It was run by Dave McClaine Enterprises, and they, in the 80s, had a big show with female wrestlers called GLOW, Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling. I had more callbacks to get that than I did for anything in my life. I’m not kidding you. They weeded out at least 800 to 1,000 girls to a pack of 30. Unfortunately, when I was practicing, we would practice three to five times a week at the Great Western Forum. When we were just about to do a live pay-per-view event which was going to be televised, they put me up against this wrestler from the 80s that was, like, 300 pounds, and way outside of my weight class. Why, to this day, I don’t know, but she threw me, she slammed me, and I fell on my knees and came back on my head. I got very, very injured, and had surgery on my left knee. I had disc bulges and herniated discs and neck and stuff like that. I had to get out of it. That kind of sucked because I was injured for a while.
Johnny: Speaking of wrestling, as you’re a writer, if Vince McMahon asked you to write stories for WWE’s Divas division, would you take him up on the offer? Like if you got a call from Vince McMahon, and he’d been doing his research on women’s wrestling, wanted to give the Divas division a boost, and looked at past federations and wrestlers, and asked you to come up with some storylines for him, would you do it?
Rocky: Is this a facetious question?
Johnny: It’s a facetious question.
Rocky: I write anything. I mean, I write screenplays, children’s books, songs. It’s something I know very much about and I’ve trained for a long time. I know a lot about it. I know what goes on behind the scenes. I would absolutely write anything that had to do with that, or anything for that matter.
Johnny: You mention the music. What I’ve heard of your music is very good. You’ve written some good songs, both humorous and serious. What has music provided you that other entertainment ventures haven’t?
Rocky: Well, first of all, I love rock and roll, so put another dime in the jukebox, baby. No, I love rock and roll. I am just, like, such a Joan Jett fan. I just love it, and I’m the type of person that always loves to try new things. I just got myself a guitar and said, “You know what? I’m going to write songs, and I want to write some rocker songs”, and stuff like that, pushing the envelope with that kind of song, because here I was, playing this character Rocky. I always was called Raquel in my teenage years because a lot of people said I resembled her (Raquel Welch), so my teenage friends growing up always called me Raquel. Because I was so tough and had such tough skin, that’s how I got the nickname Rocky. I kept saying to myself, “Let me try writing some friggin’ rock songs”, and I just got this idea. The first song I wrote was called “Don’t Come Knockin’ On My Backdoor”, which is actually on MySpace. I don’t have video of that. It’s a really great song. It’s one of my favorite songs. It’s a rocker song, but not one that really pushed the envelope. I was asked by friends of mine that I knew from a TV show…The girl actually asked me to be a swinger with her and her husband, and I was devastated. I couldn’t believe she actually asked me that because we were friends. I never even knew that she was into that. She started telling me about the lifestyle and swingers and bondage and all this other crap, and I’m sitting there thinking, “You know what? I’m going to check into this stuff”. I just started looking up stuff online and educating myself all about it, and I said, “You know what? I’m going to write a song about this”. At that time, it was very taboo. It was before Rihanna or Britney or Beyonce. Now it seems like everybody on the planet has done some sort of bondage song, but at the time, it seemed like, “I don’t believe she said this” or “I don’t believe this song” or stuff like that.
“Who’s The Bitch Now?” on Facebook
Rocky: I thought it was a pretty damn cool song. The line that got everybody was, “I’ll put a strap-on on and you’ll take it like a man”. That line made 50 Shades Of Gray look like Breakfast At Tiffany’s. It was a great line, to say the least. Like I said, this was before 50 Shades Of Gray. I thought it was a great, rocking song, but because of what it represented, there was only a certain audience that it would appeal to. I said, “Alright, now let me play with some of my ideas and write some other songs”. I wrote “I Wanna Be A Bad Girl For One Night”, which is a really cool song. It’s I just want to party and do everything on the freakin’ planet. Cheat, ride a Harley, punch a cop in the face. That wasn’t as taboo as “Who’s The Bitch Now?”, but it was in that genre. I was a rebellious rock-and-roll person that pushed the envelope.
Johnny: Definitely.
Rocky: My favorite song that I wrote was, when you’re mentioning humorous, I know you’re mentioning “So Bam”. Now that song is funny. It was a rap song. I got a rap producer to do it and I got a rap artist to do it with me. I’m very happy with the way it came out. The whole reason behind the song was the most important. I was being stalked by one of the moms, who shall be nameless, from I Know My Kid’s A Star. She stalked not only me, but my child, who was nine years old at the time. Our fans, because we have many, many fans from I Know My Kid’s A Star, opened up several YouTube accounts and pretended it was like us…Just crazy, crazy things. They took over all the VH1 boards. Everywhere I went, she took over everything and it was very, very upsetting to be cyber-stalked like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, there were blogs up, things that she wrote, personal information that she wrote about my mother, really horrible things, especially to do that to a child that was my little girl. She’d say horrible things about her when she was still in elementary school. It just wouldn’t stop. I’d report her. She’d open another account and she would always give clues in the things she would say, lingo she would use to let us know it was her, and all our fans knew it was her. I even got a cease-and-desist letter from an attorney and it didn’t stop. It really consumed me. I said to myself, “I can either let this destroy me, or I can just humor her and write a song”. My tagline from I Know My Kid’s A Star was “So Bam”. I was yelling at one of the moms, who I said looked like a Mary Kay representative. I said, “Unless I want Mary Kay make-up, I’m not talking to you, so bam!”. That was the tagline that VH1 used over and over. I wrote a song called “So Bam”, and the entire song ended up as one about haters that hated people in general, because they hate themselves. All the words are for all that she put me through, and it was my way of getting back at her. That was the song that I enjoyed writing. The rapper was great, the words were great, and it’s one of my favorite songs.
Johnny: Definitely. It was a good song. I heard it on your YouTube channel. It was definitely an excellent track. Speaking of your music, you’ve written songs about several people, from the serious “Caylee’s Song”, which was your tribute to the Caylee Anthony, to the more humorous “Winning”, which was about Charlie Sheen. Are there any personalities out there today who would inspire you to write a song?
Rocky: “Caylee’s Song”..My daughter actually sang the track on that, and I have to say my child was only nine years old when she sang that, and the depth and emotion that came about in that kid’s voice, I mean, she was Caylee’s voice from the grave. To have that kind of passion and emotion and talent at that age is phenomenal. I’m so proud of her. Two things that bother me the most in life are child abuse and animal abuse, and what happened to that poor child really, really hurt me and a lot of people. That’s why I wrote that song. It was about to get a lot of airplay on the radio and everything. I knew radio stations that wanted to play it, but when she (Casey Anthony) was found innocent, they couldn’t play it anymore. It was saying something that she was acquitted of, so I’m going to change the name of that and just call it “I Remember You”. I do write songs that mean something.
Rocky: When I wrote “Winning”, I just took all the facts about Charlie Sheen. He was out of his mind at the time, but he was a great character…All the things that he said, his quotes, I just took them all and put it together. I was literally reading it off the key that I had just wrote down. That was a lot of fun to write. That and “Caylee’s Song” were really written about current events.
Rocky: “So Bam” was basically, “I’ll have the last laugh”. It was for all the kids who have been bullied and all the people who have haters. Let this inspire you because there’s a reason that they’re hating on you. My best song that I wrote that has not come out yet is a song that I wrote for my mother called “What About Me?”. My mother died a very tragic death in 2013. I left California when I heard she was ill, and I gave up my career when I had just come off Tough Love. All these things were being offered. I just got on a plane and left my house. I took my mother back to her house and became her nurse, and medically educated myself and took care of her myself. It was horrible, what happened to her. The medical system is just so wrong and so unfair, and the next thing I would like to do is write a memoir about what happened to my mother, and how it didn’t have to happen to my mother. Here was this animated, unbelievably talented singer who didn’t have cancer, didn’t have anything wrong with her. She had a mini-operation and they put her in a rehab facility, which they call a sub-acute. I thought she’ll be in there a couple of weeks so they can get her going again. Get her legs back in shape, get her to eat, get her back up to speed and she’ll come back home. She wound up getting a bedsore that was the size of…Like someone took a shotgun and put a shot through her back. I could not believe it. I never knew anything about elderly care or nursing homes. I mean, my mother looked twenty years younger than she was. She had the most beautiful skin. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. What happened to her was just a mortal sin, and I could not believe it when I saw that. I sat there, and it was just me against the doctors. I went up against the board of directors at hospitals, and got all my facts, and just kept fighting and fighting for her. The problem was they just kept releasing her. She had sepsis, and they kept releasing her when she still had such a bad infection, was gravely ill and needed to be on intravenous and antibiotics. She needed to be under hospital care, and I kept fighting the Medicare people. It’s the worst thing going on in society today, and people need to be aware of that. I wrote a song called “What About Me?” because I was the only one that visited her when she was in the regular hospital. When I took her home, a couple of times her heart rate would go up. She needed to go back in, and a few days later they would discharge her. She need to go back in. She still had a fever and they’d discharge her. I remember that I had gotten sick myself, and I had a fever for about three or four days.
Johnny: If this is difficult for you to discuss, I can…
Rocky: No. It’s okay. I went to go see her in the hospital, and she was in a chair. They had her facing towards the window. She was just looking out the window, put in this position, with nobody to talk to all by herself. I wrote this really gripping song from her point of view called “What About Me?”. That’s something that I’m going to be recording in the next couple of months. That was the reason for me writing it. It was how she must have felt. “How did this happen to me? What about me? Where is everybody? Here I am alone”, and how she was feeling at the moment. At the same time, little aspects of that can relate to so many different things, besides the elderly or my mother, that I plan to show in the video. It was very heart-wrenching to watch her deteriorate and go from this animated personality to having to give her a feeding tube and shots and all these things that are necessary to do, and then lose the battle. I was in grief for, I would say, about three years. I would kind of fold into myself, and I wasn’t heard from again. The first thing I did was make an appearance at Chiller Theatre to get back into it. It was how I started to get back, because I knew that’s what my Mom would want me to do. She is my inspiration. She was one of the five DeMarco Sisters who started at the age of five on the Fred Allen Show. They were on every single week. They were on Ed Sullivan numerous times. They were on the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis show. They opened for, and sang with, Frank Sinatra. They were huge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnQIgs6Pgvg
(Above is footage of the DeMarco Sisters. Arlene DeMarco is doing the solo).
Rocky: It’s always been in me to be a singer, and at first I took the rock-and-roll route because I came of age in the 80s with Joan Jett and everything. When my mother died, I really, really felt I wanted to carry the torch. This was something I’d grown up with all my life. I always was around jazz. My mother was a jazz singer, and I wanted to pay homage to her. I wanted to make her proud because she was always proud of me as an actress and anything I did, but she always wanted me to be a singer and do an album of standards. That’s why I recently released, which just became live on iTunes yesterday, a cover of “Fools Rush In” as my first jazz single.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMdmFAXtmJw
Johnny: I’ve heard that, and I must say you did an excellent job with it.
Rocky: Aw, thank you. Thank you so much.
Johnny: If I may say so, I think you definitely did your mother proud with that cover.
Rocky: Thank you so much. That makes me feel so good. I wish she would’ve been alive to hear it, but I truly believe that she knows and she’s guiding me through every single thing that’s going on in my life. I truly, truly believe that. It was just like a fluke that I was in California. I just happened to take a trip there and I was at my favorite hotel, the Loew’s Hotel, sitting at the bar. I’m just talking to this guy who happened to be a composer. I said, “My mom always wanted me to record an album of standards. I know one song I wanted to come out with as a singer”. He said, “What’s the name of it?”. I said, “Fools Rush In”. He said, “Why don’t you come by my studio and we’ll record it?”. I know that had to do with my mother. It’s a company, and it was amazing. I think it came out great. I want to do a video for it. It inspired me to do an entire album of standards, which is what I plan on doing within the next couple of months. Thank you very, very much for saying that, because that means a lot to me, and I feel I did make her proud. That’s my main reason for it, because I want to carry the torch. I want to show where I came from. It’s one thing to be a crazy reality TV star and be funny and off-the-charts. The acting aspect takes after my father, Keefe Brasselle, but I wanted to show where I came from in regards to my mother. That’s why, on “Fools Rush In”, I use the name Melissa DeMarco. Even though I was always called Raquel, that’s what she named me. That’s why I use Melissa DeMarco.
Johnny: Very cool. If you could go back to your youth with the knowledge you have now, would you do anything differently?
Rocky: You know, I can’t say I would’ve because I’m proud of all the things I’ve done. I’ve done everything from wrestling to writing children’s books, jumping off buildings, being a stunt woman. I’ve really never held back from anything I ever wanted to do. If somebody said it couldn’t be done, I did it. I really have no regrets. I only wish that the unbelievable, amazing bond that I’m thankful to God for that I had a year-and-a-half with my Mom, I would’ve had sooner. Of all the things I’ve done besides being a mother, which I’m the most proud of, that’s the most gratifying thing I have ever done to date in my life, was to be there for my mother in her time of need. Therefore, I can’t say I regret anything.
Johnny: So you say your favorite movie to work on was Demolition High?
Rocky: Yes. That was my favorite all-time movie because it was non-stop action. I thought Corey Haim was a very talented and gifted actor, and the role of Anya, the gun-toting terrorist, I connected so much to that character. I really enjoyed that character more than any character I’ve ever played, and the movie came out really, really well.
The other thing I wanted to mention was, currently running on the Encore channels is Camel Spiders, which I’m really proud of, because I got to work with C. Thomas Howell and Brian Krause from Charmed, but I also got to work with my daughter, who didn’t play my daughter, but I thought she was pretty amazing in the film. I was very proud of her acting. Again, that was another very big action movie using guns, and I really, really enjoyed that. … I just wanted to mention my daughter and that we were in something together besides I Know My Kid’s A Star. We worked on Camel Spiders, and she also worked on another movie for Roger Corman Jr. called Lost In The Woods. Michael Madsen from Reservoir Dogs played her father. She got that right after I Know My Kid’s A Star, and I’m proud of that. I just wanted to mention the close relationship we have. She’s a very talented child and a very wonderful actress. It was really great to talk to you.
Johnny: Well, I must say that it has been an honor to speak to you. You’ve done a lot of amazing work in a lot of different fields, and it’s been an honor to speak to you about it.
Rocky: Thank you. You’ve been a pleasure to talk to. You’re a little sweetheart.
Johnny: Thank you very much, and you’re an excellent performer. I look forward to seeing more from you, no matter what field it’s in.
Rocky: Oh, thank you. I’m coming back with a vengeance. Like I said, I took my mom’s death very, very hard, but one thing about me: I can get knocked over by a crane and I’ll still get back up. I always find the strength to crawl right back from under and get back on the horse. I have standards in the works with some producers. I have a new reality show. There’s a lot that’s going to be going on, acting and all that jazz.
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Indeed, it was great to talk to Ms. DeMarco. For more on her upcoming projects, visit her official Facebook fan page. If you’re looking for the professionally recorded version of Ms. DeMarco’s cover of “Fools Rush In”, that is available on iTunes.
UPDATE: (02/01/2016) Rocky DeMarco is currently running a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for her new album, and more importantly, to help her and her daughter Hayley into a better living situation. I’ve already donated. I encourage you to do so as well. Here’s the link to Rocky’s GoFundMe page.
Thanks as always for reading. Who will I flashback with next? Stay tuned.