The curious country and western song performed by the German sex symbol turned porn star.
There have been several porn stars who have ventured into the popular music world – most successfully Andrea True who had a worldwide disco hit with More More More, while others like Marilyn Chambers, Traci Lords, Heather Hunter and even Jeff Stryker – to name just a few – have all had musical careers of varying success and seriousness.
Oddest of all, perhaps, was Sibylle Rauch – although technically, she wasn’t actually a porn star when she released her single So Long, Goodbye in 1982. Rauch had first made waves in 1979 when she was a German Playboy playmate, and would go on to appear in the magazine another fifteen times. She had the pouting, blonde sex kitten looks and pneumatic body popular at the time, and her success was no surprise; neither was it unusual when she started to build a career as an actress, albeit one who tended to appear in sex comedies and dramas like Hot Bubblegum, Drei Lederhosen in St Tropez and Bolero. She quickly became something of a celebrity in Germany, even if her film roles were not especially noteworthy, and this led to her 1982 single.
What was odd about the record was the tune – if we can call it that. Rather than the sort of fluffy pop or sultry sexy tune you might have expected, it is a somewhat discordant country and western tune. While country music was oddly popular in Germany, it still seems an odd choice for a sex kitten, and sure enough, despite appearances on TV shows like Musik Laden, it was not a hit.
Oddly, for someone whose career was heading towards the mainstream – albeit as a sexy celebrity – Rauch decided to move into porn in 1987, having been made a lucrative offer for two films – Born for Love 1 and 2 – by Teresa Orlowski in 1987. Clearly, the experience was not an unpleasant one – or perhaps was a career-ending one – because Rauch made another twenty X-rated films until her retirement in 2000. A year later, a two-part biopic was shown on German TV, with Anita Loos playing Rauch. She remains a famous figure in Germany.
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