It was certainly a common rumor at the time, so much so that I heard it in my rural Indiana high school.
Didn’t some of the parodied song/singers perform on Weird Al’s records?
Mark Knopfler played the guitar on “Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies”.
Yes I heard he insisted, in order for Al to have permission to perform the parody!
From wikipedia
"Clayton is best known for her 1969 duet with Mick Jagger on the Rolling Stones song “Gimme Shelter” (on some releases her name is misspelled as “Mary”).[4] According to Jagger, the collaboration happened partially by chance: Jagger stated that the band thought, “it’d be great to have a woman come do the… chorus.” They called Clayton “randomly” in the middle of the night in Los Angeles, and she showed up to the studio “in curlers” and contributed her parts in a few takes, which Jagger remarked was “pretty amazing.”
The Temptations sang backup on Rick James’ Superfreak. He gives them an in-song shoutout.
As well as some songs on So Red the Rose, the album by Arcadia. I only thought Sting’s vocals were vaguely familiar at first although once you find it out, it does sound a lot like his backing singing in Money for Nothing. But the album also features backing vocals by Grace Jones, which I did recognize and correctly guessed it was her, and some guitar work by David Gilmour which I recognized as being like Gilmour but did not guess that it actually was him.
So Red the Rose is probably one of the biggest guest musician albums of all time considering that the core group of Arcadia consisted of most of the members of Duran Duran so it feels like a bunch of people getting together for a big side project.
On Robbie Robertson’s self titled first solo album he had many guests. Bono can be clearly heard on “Testimony” and “Sweet Fire of Love.” Peter Gabriel is singing back up on “Fallen Angel.” The Bodeans are singing back up on “Sonewhere Down a Crazy River.” Still one of my favorite albums of all time.
Oh, that reminded me that on U2’s album “Rattle And Hum”, Bono sang “Love Rescue Me” as a duet with Bob Dylan. Talk about a honorable backing voice! Dylan had done the same already for his buddy Doug Sahm in 1972 when he sung backup on his own unreleased composition “Wallflower”, his voice prominently mixed to the foreground, on the album “Doug Sahm And Friends”.
And 4 month pregnant Clayton miscarried the following day.
I’ve heard that several times, but isn’t it an urban legend? I don’t want to attack you, I might even have spread that story myself in the past, but I seem to remember that this isn’t true. Yes, she was pregnant at the time, but she later birthed a healthy baby.
John Sebastian was not only THE premier electric autoharpist (despite a lot of competition), but he guested with a lot of other bands. The CSNY connection reminded me that he played harmonica on Deja Vu.
Crosby, Stills and Nash all sang backup vocals on “John B. Sebastian”, his still-fresh-sounding solo album. They did the same for Jackson Browne, on many albums.
(A friend asked me how I know all sorts of personnel trivia, and I realized that it was because, before the internet, all we had to do while a new album played was sit and read the liner notes!)
I dunno. A quick glance at Wikipedia states she miscarried “soon afterwards” as opposed to the next day.
I have a book by the great rock writer Barney Hoskyns called Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys In The L.A. Canyons. In the late 1960s, when labels stopped being jerks about allowing their people to appear on other labels, everybody in L.A. started hanging out with everybody else in L.A. For the next decade it felt like nobody ever made an album on their own with only faceless backups. CSN - seldom Young - were almost as ubiquitous as Michael McDonald. And so were Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne and bunches of other people who would become famous.
Sebastian wasn’t one of the crowd, which is why I called him a surprise, but plenty of people came in from other places and had fun sitting in. A great time until drugs killed it, just like they had in San Francisco.
Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsburg stopped by Phil Spector’s house when Leonard Cohen was recording Death of a Ladies Man, and Specter ordered them to sing backup on Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On. (You didn’t say no to Spector.)
On his debut album, the person harmonizing with him on “Hasten Down the Wind” is Phil Everly, and the harmonizer on “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” is Lindsey Buckingham, and on “Mohammed’s Radio” you get both Buckingham and Nicks, Glenn Frey on “Carmelita”, and two Beach Boys on “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.”
Jackson Browne was early in his production career on this, I’m guessing he’s the one who loaded it up.
Your mention of “Wallflower” reminds me that Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz sings backup on “Sixth Avenue Heartache” by The Wallflowers (and the lead singer of that band is Jakob Dylan, Bob’s son).
Damn, I never made the connection that Jakob Dylan named his band after one of his father’s songs 
. It is one of Patti Smith’s favorite songs, she could relate. I also like it very much, because I’ve been kind of a wallflower for most of my life.
This popped up in my YouTube feed yesterday:
Skip ahead to about 2:50.