MTL ROCKER JONAS EMBRACES HIS GAY FANS

Montreal rock star Jonas IS the massive attraction!

(May 27)  My mind is completely in the gutter when I ask handsome Montreal rock star Jonas how on earth he and his band came up with their name, Jonas & The Massive Attraction. "We were fucking around with names, doing that old high school thing where everybody goes home and thinks up a name for the band," Jonas says. "We were trying to be subtle but there’s nothing subtle about us! Why try some poor emo name? This is everything we are – rock’n'roll and shameless."

Well, if there’s one thing I know, it’s shameless. So I tell Jonas with his package he could’ve posed for the cover of the classic Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers. "That’s a Jonas cover!" I tell him.

"I’m totally down with that!" Jonas laughs over the phone from his hotel room in Berlin on his band’s recent mini-tour of Europe. "[After] we played the Embassy Club London in Soho [we went] out with a couple of friends – I met a girl who used to be the stylist for The Who. She was also a stylist for the Stones when she was 18 and had all sorts of stories. Then she made a couple comments that way, comparing me with Jagger. You got to take that stuff with a grain of salt, but it was still flattering!"

Montrealers knew Jonas was going places when they first saw him back in 1999 when his band Rubberman (yes, Rubberman!) won the CHOM L’Esprit rock band contest. The young and wiry Jonas had a tight midriff and a "package" you couldn’t miss at 500 paces.

When his first album was released in 2004, the then-24-year-old Jonas told me, laughing, "You work with what you have and sometimes other people can work what you have for you. And that feels really nice. Especially after a bottle of wine."

That was also the year his band opened up for Van Halen’s North American tour. "Their people didn’t want Eddie and Sammy socializing and partying with us. They thought we were going to be a bad influence! But they [Van Halen] were in full party mode. Michael Anthony and I had shots [at the bar] under the stage – that’s like a sign saying ‘Welcome aboard.’ We had a blast the whole tour."

Jonas smooches Bugs at 2006 Juno Awards!

  If Jonas has a knack for band names, he also has a Diamond Dave-style knack for meaty quotes. For instance, at the 2006 Juno Awards in Halifax, attending a CTV VIP party with folks like Pam Anderson, Jonas – as we both proclaimed our love for a fabulous rack – cracked, "It doesn’t matter what you got going on in the fireplace as long as you got a mantelpiece!"

It was also at that party that Jonas first told me about the first time he met Anderson – in an L.A. hotel elevator. "It was Oscar night and I was at this party and Hilary Swank walked in with her Oscar. I walk over to the bar and Tracy Morgan comes over many sheets to the wind and I become his new best friend and we end up in a hotel penthouse afterparty. I’d been drinking red wine and made some pharmaceutically bad decisions and wasn’t feeling very well, so I left. I got in the elevator and two floors down who walks in but Pam Anderson! So in my state, I [actually] said, ‘Hey Pam, what up?’ Then she gets off the elevator and I watch her walk down the hall until the elevator doors began ringing. She turned to look at me and I froze in my tracks! And that was that."

Always the gentleman: Jonas poses on red

carpet with my mom Liliane at Old

Montreal Europa fashion show

This weekend an older and wiser Jonas – he’s now 32 – and The Massive Attraction (featuring long-time guitarist/band leader Corey Diabo, J.S. Baciu on bass, Francis Fillion on drums and Henri "H" Fortier on keys) open for Kid Rock, at Montreal's Bell Centre on May 30.

Kid Rock better watch out too, because Jonas and the boys could easily steal that show, especially on the heels of their hugely successful latest album, Big Slice ("We’re definitely experimenting with our poppier side"). The title track is ZZ Top-style fun and the mid-tempo closing ballad The Deep End also deserves to top the charts. And this time they did it all themselves on their own Big Slice Records label.

"I came out of two years of record label hassles [with Deja Music]," Jonas tells me. "It was great at the beginning but then it was time to get out of Dodge. They sold our contract to DEP and we bought it out from them."

It’s a brand-new start for the Juno-nominated Jonas, who broke nationally in 2005 with his terrific cover of Stevie Nicks’ Edge of Seventeen and still looks hot after all these years on the road.

Straight guys like him because Jonas really is a nice guy. Girls love him because, well, he has a nice package. And gay audiences love him too, as evidenced by the long and loud reception he got headlining the outdoor Divers/Cité stage a couple summers ago. Let's face it: Jonas is hot.

"I love my gay fans because they know out of adversity comes love," says Jonas. "When you’re isolated for being different – I can relate to that on a huge level. I was always different too."

Jonas and I have another thing in common even though he’s straight and I’m not: We are unabashed boobiesexuals. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I admit it. I love a fabulous rack. Tits, bazoombas, bodacious tatas, my world, welcome to it.

"But," Jonas adds, slipping back into rock star mode, "I’m also a bootiesexual!"

Jonas & The Massive Attraction open for Kid Rock, May 30 at Montreal's Bell Centre

Jonas & The Massive Attraction website

Jonas & The Massive Attraction on Facebook