This week, porn producer Vivid is shipping the Jimi Hendrix sex tape, which is likely about as real as the Marilyn Monroe sex tape, which is to say not real at all.

Yes, reports the New York Times, there's a Hendrix-like guy and a couple of girls with pubic grooming schemes that invoke the spirit of '69. Vivid says they've vetted the video—they and broker Howie Klein tell a rich tale of someone finding the reel labeled "black man" in a box of stuff sold at a memorabilia auction and recognizing the face of the man in the film as Hendrix. But attempts to authenticate it focus less on Hendrix's face and more on little Jimi. Or, not so little Jimi, according to legend. Cynthia Plaster Caster, a reformed groupie who now makes her bones hawking plaster casts of rockstar junk, says it's Hendrix's yutz, but she was paid to comment in the DVD. Same deal with Pamela Des Barres, another famous groupie who backs up the Vivid claim.

And why wouldn't Vivid cherry-pick facts to vet this thing? It's a potential goldmine. Who would want bad enough to see Jimi Hendrix in a sex tape that they'd actually buy a copy of it and not just download it on a file-sharing site? Old people with money to burn. The same people who have a soft spot for Hendrix, buy his box sets, and get nostalgic at the site of the copious amounts of pubic hair in these scenes.

But rumors of the tape have been around for years. The Times talks to plenty of people who report having seen and discounted it years ago. They found Hendrix's old girlfriend who said no way. Someone threw it up on eBay in 2007. And late last year, the rumor mill started churning again when Vivid started buying up domain names related to a what was apparently a Hendrix sex flick. All but paid-for evidence seems to point to this being bogus—more likely the product of willful ignorance than a hoax. Vivid's chief Steven Hirsch does a non-denial denial when asked whether his company would knowingly sell a fake porn flick starring a dead guy who couldn't refute it. "There are only about five real icons," he says. "If I had Frank Sinatra, that would do awesome. J. F. K. would do great. I don't know if, other than that, there are a lot of dead people that it would make sense to put out."

At the end of the day, though, people will pay to see this thing, even though it's a 45-minute DVD stretched from an 11-minute reel ... without any actual Jimi Hendrix music in it (but surely plenty of generic guitar shredding and wah-wah effect). And if they want to believe it's Jimi, then it may as well be. And if Vivid has proven anything in this little cash grab, it's that the actual flesh-on-flesh scenes are only half the equation. In an age where even Miley Cyrus has topless pics, a big part of the appeal is the idea that Jimi Hendrix might have been blown by two chicks on film.