Roxana Shirazi engaged in some risky sex while hanging with rock's raunchiest hair bands. But the unrepentant groupie is courting bigger danger with her memoir, "The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran , Bred Backstage. Shirazi says several editors and agents passed on her manuscript for fear of a fatwa - the Islamic death sentence that once put "Satanic Verses" author Salman Rushdie in fear of his life.
But her two champions, authors Neil Strauss and Anthony Bozza , finally persuaded HarperCollins to publish it under the new Igniter imprint. It's not hard to see what might incite the mullahs in Tehran , where Shirazi lived until she was Her later rock debauchery is so explicit as to make Pamela Des Barres ' famous "I'm With the Band" read "like a nun's diary," the book warns.
There's also the art: Various inebriated axmen had trouble, um, getting into tune. Tommy Lee was rarin' to go when Shirazi invited him to watch her perform an unusual gynecological feat. But she found him too "bossy" and hated his techno music. He talked about his gardening. She never found Skid Row's Sebastian Bach that hot, but that didn't prevent her from giving him, shall we say, an all-access pass.
But she was mortified when Axl Rose walked in on them. Rose's bandmate Dizzy Reed comes off the worst. Shirazi contends that the keyboardist "was childish and dorky in his seduction" but she eventually found him remarkably sensitive by heavy-metal standards. When she told Reed she was pregnant, she says, he encouraged her to have an abortion and began bombarding her with cruel texts. She says she became so depressed that, one night in a Hollywood motel, she took an overdose of painkillers.
Reed's manager didn't respond to messages. Thankfully, she lived to tell the tale, and quite artfully. The book is out June 1.
