Eggs, Schmeggs

In Can Rock Music Cook Eggs? Cecil concludes with:

I saw Iron Butterfly in concert in 1969. They did a half-hour version of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” of which the drum solo alone was about 17 minutes, following which the drummer collapsed on stage and had to be revived.

Cook them eggs, baby. And point me to whatever the sales number is for Alison Goyette’s widget factory. I ain’t buying: I’m merely hoping their customer service is really, really bad.

An entertaining edition of the Straight Dope indeed.
I just popped in to point out that the guy making the egg claim, Bob Larson, has published a number of books about topics including exorcism, aliens, the pervasiveness of Satanism among youth, and of course the evils of rock music.

I’ve read some of his stuff and it’s pretty hilarious.

I like In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, but I’m not sure I’d like listening to it on hold. Nor do I want to hear the usual “Lite” music.

I suggest excerpts of audiobooks. If you pick a good story, people won’t want to hang up.

If you own Dell Computers, I suggest that only the Oxford English Dictionary will be long enough not to repeat before someone picks up.

140 dB? Pffft. The roadies for Hotblack Desiato and Disaster Area make that much noise when they prep the stage.

[ol]
[li]I worry a lot more about the pervasiveness of Satanism among fundamentalists.[/li][li]As to the outside test cited, it is important to note that bels and decibels are a logarithmic scale. “14db louder” means approximately 25 times as much sound energy.[/li][li]Brains addle (fatally) at much lower temperatures than eggs hard-boil. But most rock fans seem to survive the experience.[/li][/ol]

I would be more inclined to believe that it was the heat from any stage footlights that cooked the eggs…not the sound from the band :slight_smile:

Not being old enough to have attended rock concerts in the 1970s, I have to ask: did security actually let fans get close enough to the stage to do this back then?

That said, I suspect Bob Larson of simply Making Shit Up™. I was made to read one or two of his books as a teenager, and I’m convinced that he simply found himself a way to make a good living writing books that played to the fears of susceptible Christian parents. Many of the accusations I read in one of his anti-rock books I have since discovered (thanks to the Internet) to be urban legends. And as a teenager (way pre-Internet), even if I couldn’t prove or disprove any of his claims, I still stopped taking him seriously when, in his listing of all the horrors allegedly committed by various rock artists he included Emerson, Lake & Palmer, but couldn’t come up with anything better than wringing his hands over the fact that Carl Palmer’s drum kit cost $30,000. I mean, I wasn’t even an ELP fan, but I thought that was really stretching it (not the price, the outrage).

Rock music may not cook eggs; however, loud music will cause mice to explode. The Rock documentary “Rock and Roll Highschool” proved that loud music is dangerous to mice,

As we have learned in previous columns, those proteins in egg are in other cells as well - like, for instance, human eggs and sperm.

If Pete Townsend, Sting, and the others who have suffered long-term hearing loss have not cooked their scrota hard-boiled, I think we can assume loud music has never cooked an egg.

Hmmm. Their kids are pretty funny-looking, come to think of it…

Might not the heat of spotlights and other stage lighting cooked the eggs?

More likely, there were no eggs and therefore nothing cooked them.

Really, even if this were even remotely possible, who would have been doing this? “Hey, Bob, we’re all going to the Moby Grape show tomorrow night. make sure you bring some raw eggs so we can have a snack after.” :confused:

I vote that this Larson guy is just a nutjob.

I would have tried it in my youth.

I wonder if you could cook an egg on a rock concert (or other) stage by placing it close to a floor-mounted light. Those puppies can get pretty hot. If I agree to try the experiment, will The Straight Dope cover my medical bills if the bouncers get to me and fail to appreciate the importance of the research?

Actually, Manowar reached 139dB during a sound check two years ago ((source). The loudest band in the universe has competition. The loudest actual concert was KISS’s performance at Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest last year (which I attended), which reached 136dB, as measured by bylaw enforcement (according to the Ottawa Citizen, though their website refuses to show me the article).

I was extremely disappointed when the show ended without even a single spaceship being crashed into the sun.

Una’s experiment for Cecil is good nuff for me to not believe. I really don’t care about eggs but when my chest starts moving and hurting, I get away… YMMV

“Other bands play, Manowar kills!” :smiley:

Note: Two “Eggs” threads merged together into one.

Hell yeah!

I was right under the lip of the stage at a Led Zeppelin concert in '71. I could practically see up Robert Plant’s flares, and certainly I have reached up and touched the speakers. If I had thought to bring eggs, I could have put them there.

This was not an unusual situation in those days either. There were other concerts where I was right next to the stage, and if it wasn’t me it was other people.

Now that I think about it, I remember coming across video clips on YouTube of Rush and Kiss concerts where the band has stopped the show and Geddy Lee and Paul Stanley, respectively, were exhorting the audience to move back because they were in danger of causing the stage to collapse.

Geddy Lee: “Do you understand English? Mooooooove baaaaaaaack!”