Myths that form about songs and bands / band members

Cafe Society
1

So since this came up in the Songs about planes and flying thread:

…I thought it might be fun to do a thread about myths and ‘urban legend’ style stories that have sprung up about songs, bands and musicians. I didn’t see in ‘similar’, and don’t remember any recent threads like this, so hopefully I’m not duping a recent one.

In addition to the ‘Fire and Rain’ example I linked to, there’s a story about Phil Collin’s song ‘In the Air Tonight’ that I first heard when an on-air DJ told the story as if it were the Gospel truth (it’s not).

As the story goes, Phil saw somebody drowning, and couldn’t save the victim himself, but saw somebody on shore very nearby who could easily have saved them, but ignored them. He was so angry that he sent the guy front-row tickets to his concert, and when he showed up, Phil had arranged to get a spotlight on the guy and sang the song directly to him, which Phil had specifically written in order to shame the guy. And it worked so well that the guy killed himself shortly afterward.

For band legends, there’s the infamous Led Zeppelin ‘red snapper’ story that appeared in their ‘Hammer of the Gods’ band biography, which is not entirely unproven, but ‘fishy’, to say the least. I won’t recount the story here since it’s a nasty one, so if you haven’t heard it, google it at your own risk.

As for band member legends, I remember reading the Rolling Stones’ band biography ‘Up and Down With the Rolling Stones’ as a youngster, and being amazed that supposedly Keith Richards used to get a blood transfusion, completely replacing his own blood, before a tour. This supposedly cured his heroin addiction, at least until he started shooting up again when the tour would be over. I remember at the time thinking, one, what a waste of blood for medical use, and two, is that even possible? I didn’t know too much about how drug addiction works, but I didn’t think a blood transfusion would be a miracle cure. And of course, it is Not True.

2

Paul’s been slain in a bloody car crash!

3

Frank Zappa, The Infamous Shit-Eating-On-Stage Contest

4

That’s the one I was going to post.

5

Which reminds me of The Infamous Ozzy bites the head off a live bat incident.

It did happen, but as a youngster I always heard that he staged it himself with his own bat. The truth is, someone threw a bat onstage, and Ozzy bit into it thinking it was a rubber toy, dicovering to his horror it was real. And had to endure rabies shots afterward.

6

They way I heard it, it wasn’t to cure his addiction, but to hide it. The idea was when crossing borders, they’d test his blood for drugs, but since it was all new and pristine, the tests would come back negative.

7

Ah, that does make more sense.

8

Which is exactly what you don’t want from a good Rock&Roll Rumor!

9

The famous Van Halen “brown M&M’s clause” (one of their rider clauses was their dressing room must have a bowl of M&M’s with all the brown ones removed) was real and it wasn’t about the candy, it was simply a clever way to check that someone had actually read the contract. Their stage setup was massive and complex, and had complicated technical and safety requirements. Someone could get seriously hurt or killed if something in the contract got missed.

10

In more generic terms, back in the 80s countless bands and artists were accused of being “devil worshipers.” :roll_eyes: My mother fully bought into the hype. When I was is middle school, one weekend I bought an Iron Maiden Number of the Beast poster, and put it up on my bedroom wall. I came home from school the following Monday, and the poster was gone. That began a long battle… she never forbade me from listening to the music, but posters and t-shirts of anyone on her list of “satanists” were not allowed.

To her credit, she did eventually come to her senses, and she feels rather silly about the whole thing now.

11

Good example of a myth that actually turns out to be true.

I was dating a girl in the Summer of '82 who was a huge Van Halen fan, and I went with her to a VH concert where she had scored 8th row seats. Somehow the ‘Van Halen M&M myth’ that we knew at the time was not that they didn’t like brown M&Ms, they preferred green M&Ms, because the green dye was supposed to be an aphrodisiac or something. So she had collected a bunch of green M&Ms before the show and put them into an M&Ms box- a cardboard king-size box like you’d get at the movies. She wanted me to throw the box of green M&Ms onto the stage, and I refused- I didn’t want to put DLR’s (or worse yet, EVH’s) eye out with the corner of the box or anything.

12

I can remember two about Marilyn Manson: 1. he had one of his ribs surgically removed so he could perform oral sex on himself, and 2. he was actually the actor Josh Saviano from The Wonder Years.

13

I’m assuming this is the story behind Zappa’s “Mud Shark” song. Purportedly happened at Seattle’s Edgewater Inn, and in Zappa’s telling the band involved was Vanilla Fudge.

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Legend has it that Keith Moon drove a car into Holiday Inn pool during a birthday celebration. According to biographer Tony Fletcher numerous objects did end up in the pool, but a car wasn’t one of them. What is true about the incident is The Who were presented a bill for damages and permanently banned from Holiday Inns.

As I understand it the story behind Van Halen’s colored M&Ms is the band put that on their rider to make sure the venue was honoring the terms of the contract to the letter.

15

I like that one because it’s a myth that turned out to be true, but not for the reasons everyone thinks.

Yes, Van Halen’s contract did stipulate that there was to be a bowl of M&Ms in the dressing room, with the brown ones removed. So everyone assumes that means Van Halen were a bunch of prima donnas who could make silly demands about M&Ms because they were so famous, or the green dye was an aphrodisiac or something.

Here’s the real reason: Most of their contract was boring technical stuff like the stage must have an electrical connection capable of this many amps. The stage must be able to support this much weight. Stuff that was necessary to put on their show safely, and not necessarily a given in some of the markets they played in. And then buried in the contract was the M&M thing. That was the canary in the coal mine. If they got to the dressing room and saw the wrong kind of M&Ms (or no M&Ms), that was a sign that the people running the venue hadn’t read the contract. And that meant they had to double check everything else, because chances were if they saw the wrong M&Ms, they find something else wrong, something that would jeopardize the safety of everyone at the show.

16

Y’know what? I heard that the whole M&Ms thing was really a contract adherence thing, not fussy rockers. Who knew!?

17

My first thought was Motley Crew’s the spaghetti incident.

18

A lot of people back in the day thought that Billy Idol’s 1980 song White Wedding was written because he didn’t like his sister’s fiance and didn’t approve of their marriage.

The truth is that while Idol did have a sister who got married at about that time, the song wasn’t about her specifically and he had no issue with the marriage. The song, to the extent that it is about anything at all, is about marriage and life in general.

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Mama Cass and the ham sandwich.
Marianne Faithfull and the Snickers bar.

(for the foodies).

20

This was so pervasive that Denis Leary used it in his stand up - I think he thought it was true.

What ever happened to that guy anyway?