Odd This Day: casting Jimi
25 February 1968
It’s the 58th anniversary today of Cynthia Allbritton and her friends Dianne and Marilyn ‘meeting’ Jimi Hendrix after they went to his show at the Chicago Opera House, followed his limo to the Conrad Hilton, and suggested taking a plaster cast of him. Well, part of him...
Cynthia had been studying at the University of Illinois Chicago, where an art teacher asked the class to cast “something solid that could retain its shape”. Hitting on the idea, as one does, of male genitalia, she “tried it on a few civilians first”.
Once the technique was perfected, she was ready to ask a famous person to shove his old chap into some dental alginate in the name of art and/or rock history, and Hendrix duly became “No. 00004 in the Plaster Casters’ diary”.
The method – should you wish to reproduce it – is to approach your chosen star with a vase full of hydrated alginic acid and invite them to insert their old chap. Part of the process will, of course, involve achieving an erection, and how this happens is up to the participants.
At some later stage, equally naturally, the fun and thrill will subside, making it a fairly simple procedure to withdraw the member from the polymer. This is not quite what happened with Hendrix, as the Plaster Casters later recorded in their diary.
To begin with, Hendrix possessed “just about the biggest rig I’ve ever seen!”, which made the women worry they hadn’t brought enough plaster. It turned out they had. Just. Extrication was complicated by the fact that some of Jimi’s hair got stuck in the drying plaster, but he didn’t panic.
However, he “kept hard for the entire minute”, which got him more stuck than the hair business: “I believe the reason we couldn’t get his rig out was that it wouldn’t Get Soft!” And as if all that wasn’t stressful enough (for all concerned), Cynthia
got anxious to get the finished product out before it was finished, and so it all crumbled. But it ... was only broken in 3 divisions — head, rig, and ball. A little Elmer’s glue and we had our plaster cast — a little on the Venus DeMilo side, but it’s a real beauty.
They later became friends with Frank Zappa, who told Rolling Stone (where many of these quotes come from) that taking plaster casts of rock cocks was “the most fantastic thing I ever heard”, adding: that “pop stars ... should be able to laugh at themselves. The Plaster Casters help you do that.”
(He also said “The girls don’t think this is the least bit creepy, and neither do I”, but even if the Plaster Casters weren’t strictly speaking groupies, they were groupie-adjacent which raises complicated, inconvenient facts about imbalances of power, and what consent really means.)
However, Zappa was genuinely supportive of these (genuinely) creative acts. He invited Cynthia to LA, where she completed many more casts, later branching out into filmmakers, other artists, female artists (casts of breasts) – and legal action (to retrieve the casts from Zappa’s manager). Just before she died in April 2022, she donated ‘Jimi’ to the Icelandic Phallological Museum.