Jim Morrison and Keith Moon are a few that come to mind… I’ve read many times how Jim would do daring things at school, climbing on top of buildings, railways, anything to get attention… Keith Moon is rumored to have either driven a car or jumped into a pool at a Holiday Inn in Michigan on his 21st birthday, to be banned from EVERY Holiday Inn.
Please include stories, because some might not know details outside of their music, and some stories could be debunked by others… I’ll need to go back and make sure my details are correct before posting more.
It’s 1984, and the Prince of Darkness has tapped the L.A.-based band (Motley Crue) to be his tour’s opening act. One day, as they’re all hanging around the pool in between gigs, Osbourne gives the boys a motivational speech of sorts about the rigors of touring and protecting themselves from the dangers of drugs and unprotected sex. Then he takes out a straw, kneels on the ground, and snorts a crawling line of ants. Then, he urinates on the ground and licks it up, challenging Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx (Douglas Booth) to do the same. Pressured, Sixx urinates on the ground as well—but before he can get to it, Osbourne kneels down and laps it up first.
While staying at Seattle’s Edgewater Inn in July 1969 (having shared a bill at the Seattle Pop Festival), members of Led Zeppelin and Vanilla Fudge, and their respective entourages, are alleged to have pleasured a willing groupie with a fish caught from the local bay.
Thanks for the entire story - I only knew the main details… Kinda funny of Ozzy to be giving out motivational speeches. I’d love to see THAT more than the snorting, lol.
The Happy Mondays are pretty legendary, though (along with many contemporary bands in the UK) self destructed before them made much an impression in the states.
One of the more interesting stories is when their record company unwisely sent them to record an album in the Caribbean to try and keep them away from their drug habit (unwise on many counts most especially as the Caribbean was at the time in the grip of a much worse crack epidemic than the UK). The people who ran the studio (old time punks who’d worked with the Ramones and such so were no stranger to rock and roll excess) said they were the wildest band they’d dealt with. The nadir was when they were caught at the back door of the studio selling all the studio’s furniture to buy crack.
The post-script to this is that later in their life the band strenuously denied this. They claim it was simply logical, that seeing as they were spending all their time in the crack house, which had no furniture, and none at all at the studio which has very comfy expensive furniture they should transfer it from the studio to the crack house.
And here’s Keith Moon blowing up his drum kit once again, this time with a little too much explosives, and ruining his band leader’s hearing in the left ear permanently.
The biography of Motley Crue has some parts that are so disgusting I refuse to quote or link to them. Let’s just say ‘personal hygiene’ wasn’t a top priority with these guys.
Yeah in the plethora of rock and causalities of that era, I feel worst for Jimi Hendrix. Unlike Morrison and some of the other rock stars discussed here, who seem to be narcissistic arseholes playing the “wild man” stereotype to indulge their ego. Hendrix really seems like this nice quiet guy with unimaginable amounts of talent who was completely destroyed by the music industry, the hangers on, and the drugs.
Heard a legend that ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ was written with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in mind, and given that Stevie freely admits to burning a hole in her septum due to cocaine use and was writing dark drug anthems like Gold Dust Woman in 1976(!), I can believe it.
the spaghetti incident was pretty funny. Tommy and Nikki had a competition, who could go the longest without showering before groupies refused to sleep with them due to the odor.
I think Nikki ‘won’ because a groupie vomited spaghetti all over him while giving him oral.
I recall in Nikki sixxs biography some band executive said no band partied as hard as motley and none of them as hard as Nikki. if it weren’t for music he would’ve just been a homeless drug addict, something he said he would have been fine with.
That’s pretty amazing because while I wouldn’t have thought that they were absolutely clean if I had been forced to guess, crack would have been probably literally the last substance I would have guessed they’d have chosen.
Their first choice was heroin. Barbados was in short supply of heroin at the time, which is why they chose to use crack instead. Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.
The film 24 Hour Party People covered the shambolic making of the Yes Please! album in detail; an insanely funny movie that I highly recommend.
