As one of the so-called groupies integral to the '60s and '70s rock scene, Cynthia Albritton gained fame by casting phalluses of her musical heroes.
The new album is a complex treatise on her newfound love and fame, told through a head-spinning mesh of flamenco, hyperpop, hip-hop and Caribbean sounds.Albritton held the first exhibition of her casts in New York in 2000, and was the focus of “Plaster Caster: The Rock & Roll Adventures of a Super-Groupie,” a 2001 documentary about her work. The artist inspired songs by the likes of KISS , Jim Croce and dance punk band Le Tigre .
Albritton’s first run of casts occurred during three whirlwind years starting in early 1968, after she practiced on two college friends in preparation for her first attempt at a rock star. A week later she successfully cast Jimi Hendrix in a hotel after a concert in Chicago. “He was a casting dream,” she told Salon in 2000. When some of Hendrix’s pubic hairs “got stuck in the mold,” she continued, “he didn’t freak out at all. Just ... waited for me to pull out one pube at a time.
“As it progressed,” Albritton said, “I got this collector’s impulse to collect more and more. And then people told me it was art, and itAlbritton, a longtime resident of Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, resumed her casting in the 1980s. Her prerequisite for a mold subject was basic: “In my mind, they have to be superheroic and talented. Not just musical. I have a soft spot for artists in general.”On Facebook, Ronnie Barnett, bassist and co-founder of L.A.
Des Barres testified on her behalf. “What Cynthia did is as much a part of rock lore as what any record producer or engineer or manager did,” she told The Times in advance of her testimony. “A hundred years from now when people look back on the ’60s, Cynthia will be remembered as an important pop artist.”
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