Speaking of America, the late Phil Hartman was a graphic designer before he took off as a comedian. He created several album covers, including three for America.
Also, I’m pretty sure I remember Penn and Teller, in one of their numerous Letterman appearances, talking, or at least Penn talked, about having been an opening act for America on tour. And (at the time) speculating about becoming songwriters if the comedy/magic act became unsustainable, because surely they could do better than “There were plants and birds and rocks and things”!
The Mister Jimmy in the lyrics to the Rolling Stones song You Can’t Always Get What You Want is claimed by Jimmy Hutmaker of Excelsior, MN to be about him. He said he met Mick Jagger in a drug store in Excelsior and told him, “You can’t always get what you want.” Others though say it’s a reference to Jimmy Miller who was the Stones’ producer from 1968 to 1973.
I had always fancifully imagined it was Mr. Jimi after Hendrix or Mr. Jimmy after Jimmy Page.
The group Radiohead is named after Stephen Tobolowsky. Yes Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day.
Stephen Tobolowsky was writing the Talking Heads movie True Stories with David Byrne. Tobolowsky genuinely believes he is psychic. Byrne wrote the song Radio Head when he heard Tobolowsky’s story. The group Radiohead took their name from that song.
Electric Light Orchestra’s “Don’t Bring Me Down” uses, as its drum beat, a slowed-down tape loop of a different ELO song, “On the Run,” from the same album (Discovery). The “cha-clunk” sound at the very end of the song is the sound of a metal fire door closing, at Musicland Studios in Munich, where the album was recorded.
“Torn”–most famously recorded by Aussie singer Natalie Imbruglia–was written for (and co-written by) the American singer Anne Preven; but first recorded by Danish singer Lis Sørensen as “Brændt” (Danish for “burnt”) with Danish lyrics written by another Danish singer named Elisabeth Gjerluff Nielsen.
Pulp’s (and Bill Shatner’s) “Common People” is rumored–apparently no one can prove this to be true–to have been inspired by a young Danae Stratou, who (unless you’re really into installation art) is now considerably less notorious than her husband, former Greek Minister of Finance and roving pundit Yanis Varoufakis.
In the music video for Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark, Bruce is on stage and he invites a young woman to come up and dance. The young woman was a then little-known soap opera actress named Courtney Cox.
The lead singer for Cheap Trick once said, “We played a bunch of different gigs under a bunch of different names, and ‘Cheap Trick’ was the one where we didn’t get fired.”
From the eighteenth-century agrarian who invented the seed drill, I believe.
Similarly, Alice Cooper was supposedly a seventeenth-century witch who, as a Ouija board revealed, was reincarnated as Vincent Fournier, the lead singer in a 1970s band. Originally the name of the band, Fournier in subsequent years would change his name to Alice Cooper.
And to round this all off: Three Dog Night is a term by Australian aborigines who bring their dogs with them to bed for warmth. The colder it is, the more dogs they bed down with. A three-dog night, needless to say, is pretty damn cold.
Quarterflash named themselves after an Australian saying they claimed they heard, although I’ve never come across it myself.
The name came from an Australian slang description of new immigrants as “a quarter flash, three quarters foolish”, which the Rosses found in a book at producer John Boylan’s house