Some personal favorites:
-Keith Richards snorting his dad’s ashes (he supposedly admitted to this saying, “nothing stops the old snorter!”)
-Robert Johnson’s deal with the Devil
-Led Zeppelin’s fun with mudsharks
Any others?
This one’s true you know (more or less).
How about the one where Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth supposedly went on a rampage, doing $50 thousand worth of damage to a venue, because their “no brown M&Ms” rule wasn’t observed.
Mick Jagger pleasuring Marianne Faithfull with a candy bar (when he wasn’t boning David Bowie.)
Phil Collins singing “In The Air Tonight” directly to a guy he witnessed not helping someone who was drowning.
Marianne Faithful has denied this.
Rod Stweart being rushed offstage directly to the hospital with a stomach so full of semen it required pumping? (No, it isn’t true)
Keith Richards having all the blood in his drug stream replaced with fresh blood in a Swiss clinic, to beat a heroin addiction.
Also “credited” to Elton John, among others.
Two other well-known ones: Frank Zappa eating ca-ca off the stage, and Alice Cooper biting the head off a live chicken. (Again, both not true… as opposed to Ozzy Osbourne, who actually did bite the head off a bat onstage, although he didn’t know it was a real bat)
“Paul is dead” was my first thought.
I heard it as Cooper eating poo, and Ozzy biting the head off of a bat.
No, it was Ozzy taking a poo onstage, and Zappa biting the head off of Alice Cooper.
I’ve always been suspicious of the Ozzy and the bat story. How does someone who’s done that much drugs and alcohol have such a perfect recollection of the event all these years later? Ozzy tells the story with air of someone who no longer remembers the actual event, but has the story memorized. Why the hell would someone bring a live bat to a rock concert? How could they get it in and carry it around without a single person from staff or security noticing? I’ve seen some crazy stuff at concerts, but come on! “Excuse me sir, you seem to have a large wriggling mammal under your shirt”
Ozzy’s memory is probably Swiss cheese, but it’s not like he’s the only person who saw it happen: there was the concert audience and then the people at the hospital who treated him. The story is pretty well documented. He’s also supposed to have bitten the head off a live dove in 1981, but I don’t know as much about the sourcing for that story.
The dove story is true; the bat story may also be true:
Photos of the dove incident (warning, somewhat graphic, though in black and white):
Charles Manson auditioned for the Monkees.
“KISS” stands for Knights in Satan’s Service
The scream in the middle of “Love Rollercoaster” by The Ohio Players. The UL goes that during the recording session for that song, a girl was murdered in the control booth and her scream was accidentally recorded. The victim is usually claimed to be the girl on the album cover, who was having some sort of altercation with the band’s manager when he stabbed her to death.
This legend is likely to be false, given the fact that she is still alive.
Phil Rizzuto claims he didn’t know what the hell was going on when he recorded the announcer’s parts in Meat Loaf’s “Paradise By The Dashboard Light.” Meat Loaf says he knw exactly what the story was.
I must say I’ve never heard that one. Sounds like a conflation of two more or less true facts (Stephen Stills auditioned for the Monkees, and Charles Manson was associated with the Beach Boys and wrote a song that appeared on one of their LPs).