In the late 1960s, Jackson Browne, Glenn Frey, and J.D. Souther all lived in the same apartment building in southern California – Frey and Souther were roommates, as well as bandmates, while Browne apparently lived in a nearby apartment. Frey has related that he learned a lot about songwriting from listening to Browne work on songs in the apartment below theirs.
“Life in the Fast Lane” was inspired by a conversation with Glenn Frey’s drug dealer at 90 miles an hour. The Eagles’ success made them, by their own admission, well versed in most forms of debauchery: illicit pharmaceuticals, hotel destruction and elaborate forms of sex play. Some of these late nights yielded memorable lyrics. One of the album’s standout tracks was inspired by Glenn Frey’s particularly harrowing car ride with his bagman.
“I was riding shotgun in a Corvette with a drug dealer on the way to a poker game,” he recalled in 2013 documentary The History of the Eagles. “The next thing I know we’re doing 90. Holding! Big Time! I say, ‘Hey, man!’ He grins and goes, ‘Life in the fast lane!’ I thought, ‘Now there’s a song title.’”
He held onto the phrase for months, until a hard-hitting riff spilled out of Joe Walsh’s guitar during a band rehearsal. The lick stopped Frey in his tracks. He asked Walsh to repeat it, and soon realized that he was hearing the sound of life in the fast lane. From there, the song began to take root.
The final track brought Frey uncomfortably close to the drug-fueled reality that surrounded the band. “I could hardly listen to [‘Life in the Fast Lane’] when we were recording it because I was getting high a lot at the time and the song made me ill,” he told Rolling Stone in 1979. “We were trying to paint a picture that cocaine wasn’t that great. It turns on you. It messed up my back muscles, it messed up my nerves, it messed up my stomach, and made me paranoid.”
When the series began, Game of Thrones character Walder Frey was getting ready to celebrate his 90th birthday by preparing to marry his 8th wife. During the 3rd season, Lord Frey was responsible for the deaths of two of the main characters, Robb Stark and his mother Catelyn. However, he himself was killed in the 6th season by Robb’s sister Arya.
David Bradley, who plays Walder Frey, has been married to just one woman, Rosanna, for the last forty-one years.
The 1982 song Roseanna was of Toto’s biggest hits, and won a Grammy Award for Record of the Year.
The song was written by Toto keyboardist David Paich, who has said that he based the lyrics on several women that he had known. However, at the time that the song was recorded, bandmate Steve Porcaro was dating actress Rosanna Arquette, leading to an assumption among fans that the song had been written about her – an assumption that the band, and Arquette herself, played along with.
The music video of Toto’s “Rosanna” features dancers Cynthia Rhodes (as the lead) and Patrick Swayze; both of them came to prominence in 1987’s sleeper hit Dirty Dancing.
Gilda Radner was the first performer cast for Saturday Night Live prior to its first season in 1975. Radner was noted for her recurring characters on the show, including Emily Litella, a hearing-impaired woman who gave angry and misinformed editorial replies on “Weekend Update”, Baba Wawa, a parody of newswoman Barbara Walters, and, of course, personal advice expert Roseanne Roseannadanna.
Gilda Radner’s screen debut was in the 1973 Jack Nicholson movie The Last Detail, in which she played a young hippy at a party. She had a single line.
1973 saw the launch of the first American Space station known as Skylab on a Saturn rocket.
On January 1, 1973, CBS sold the New York Yankees for 10 million dollars to a 12-person syndicate headed by George Steinbrenner.
When Steinbrenner died in 2009, the Yankees franchise was valued at 1.6 billion dollars.
On Seinfeld, Larry David voiced the character of George Steinbrenner, whose face was never seen. The back of Steinbrenner was actually the back of Lee Bear.
Yogi Bear, one of Hanna-Barbera’s most well-known cartoon characters, first premiered in 1958 on The Huckleberry Hound Show.
Yogi’s personality and speech patterns were patterned after Ed Norton, the character portrayed by Art Carney on The Honeymooners. The character’s name was almost undoubtedly a play on the name of New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra, though Hanna-Barbera claimed the name was purely a coincidence.
Game show host Art Fleming was the son of William and Marie Fazzin of Austria, a popular dance team in Europe, who had brought their show to America.
The home of William Howard Taft, Republican of Ohio, late President of the United States and Chief Justice of the United States, is now a National Park Service site in Cincinnati, and is open for tours.
Television director Hugh Wilson created the series WKRP in Cincinnati based on his own experiences, when he worked in advertising sales at a top-40 radio station in Atlanta early in his career.
Several of the characters in the series were based on real people in the radio industry – program director Andy Travis was based on Mikel Herrington (a program director who also inspired a character in the film FM), while Dr. Johnny Fever was based on disc jockey “Skinny” Bobby Harper.
A full-length version of the WKRP in Cincinatti theme song was released as a single in America in 1981, charting at #65. This version explores more of the DJ’s journey as he leaves his girl behind to make it in Cincinnati. “The price for finding me was losing you,” he sings.
This version was produced by the team of Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia, who had a big hit in 1982 with “Pac-Man Fever.”
When singer Carlisle recorded the full-length version of this song, he and his producers also made a whole bunch of customized versions for different radio stations around the country, replacing the ending line, “I’m at WKRP In Cincinnati,” with the call letters and city of these stations. For instance, “I’m at WGAR in Cleveland.”
Jerry Garcia (1942-1995) was one of the founders of the Grateful Dead and performed with the group during its entire 30 years of existence. Garcia was the lead guitarist and vocalist with the band.
During his career, Garcia authored or co-authored over 65 songs, including such Dead classics as ‘Truckin’, ‘Friend of the Devil’, ‘Brown-Eyed Woman’, and ‘Casey Jones’.
Notwithstanding the Grateful Dead song, railway engineer Casey Jones was not, in fact, “high on cocaine” when he died in an accident near Vaughan, Miss. in April 1900.
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In play: Despite an intense war against its production, financed in part by $400 million from the United States, there was more cocaine produced in Colombia in 2017 than any other year. 1400 metric tons of coke were produced in Colombia in that year.
The 1800s saw many products containing cocaine, including toothache drops, cough lozenges and a large number of coca wines. The ethanol in the wine acted as a solvent and extracted the cocaine from the coca leaves. Vin Mariani (c. 1865) was the leading coca wine of its time. Pope Leo XIII purportedly carried a hipflask of Vin Mariani with him, and awarded a Vatican gold medal to its creator, Angelo Mariani.