The Delta Cats* featured a teenaged Ike Turner, a friend from his Clarksdale, MS boyhood of Jackie Brenston. Turner claimed to have been married 15 times, though he also claimed he and the former Anna Mae Bullock were never legally married; he died of a cocaine overdose at the age of 76.
*Playing off Stray Cats above
Don Everly’s middle name is Donald.
His first name is Isaac; he’s named for his father, Ike Everly, a respected guitar player in the thumbpicking style.
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story Gimpel the Fool was translated from Yiddish into English by Saul Bellow for publication in the May 1953 edition of Partisan Review. Twenty-three years later, Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Singer received that award in 1978.
[del]The Everly Brothers are first cousins of actor James Best, ‘best’ known as Roscoe P. Coltrane on Dukes of Hazzard but a veteran character actor with many credits before that show and a sometimes acting teacher whose students included Quentin Tarantino.[/del]
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s best known work may be Yentl the Yeshiva Boy due to its dramatization as a musical by Barbra Streisand. Singer was highly critical of the movie, stating that the role had been played to perfection on stage by Tovah Feldshuh in the non-musical play but Streisand never “grasped” the character and that the music ruined rather than enhanced the story.
Noted science fiction and science writer Isaac Asimov liked dirty jokes, and once wrote alternate lyrics for “Home on the Range” about cloning and then having sex with himself: The Clone Song
Honda denies having named its humanoid robot “ASIMO” after the good doctor, saying it officially stands for “Advanced Step in Innovative MObility”.
The title of the Bonzo Dog Band’s album “The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse” is a reference to an outhouse. Songs on the album include “I’m the Urban Spaceman” (which gave the US version its title, and produced by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym of “Apollo C. Vermouth”), “My Pink Half of the Drainpipe,” “Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?”, and “Humanoid Boogie.”
SNL alum Chris Parnell (perhaps best known for the Lazy Sunday video with Andy Samberg) has a recurring role on NBC’s 30 ROCK as Dr. Leo Spaceman (pronounced spah-CHE-man), an incompetent physician who works for NBC and prescribes pills and remedies to cast members of TGS, the show within a show on the series.
On “The Simpsons”, incompetent physician Dr. Nick Riviera (“Hi, Dr. Nick!”) uses his degree from Hollywood Upstairs Medical College to prescribe anything he wants. The degrees in his office read “Mayo Clinic Correspondence School”, “Club Med School”, “Female Body Inspector” and “I went to medical school for four years and all I got was this lousy diploma”. His phone number is 1-600-DOCTORB - “The B is for Bargain!”.
Trivia-loving Star Trek fans had to wait until the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock to learn that the father of Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, Chief Medical Officer of the USS Enterprise, was named David.
The phrase “the real McCoy,” meaning a genuine or true thing is a corruption of the Scottish term “the real MacKay,” a 19th Century advertising slogan for the MacKay Distillery. In a letter, Robert Louis Stevenson used the phrase “He’s the real Mackay.”
Paul “Red” Fay, JFK’s old Navy buddy and an inveterate White House jokester, once asked the visiting Soviet bigshot Anastas Mikoyan, “Are you the real Mikoyan?”
Jokester and comedian Red Buttons is best known for winning an Oscar for Sayonara – a straight dramatic role.
The Oscar which Shelly Winters won for her role in The Diary of Anne Frank is now displayed at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, Holland.
Shelly Winters’ other Oscar was for A Patch of Blue in which she played Roseanne, an evil woman and former hooker whose plot to prostitute her blind teen-aged daughter is foiled by the girl’s friendship with (a character played by) Sidney Poitier.
Shelly Winters returned to stardom after letting herself go, in 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure, one of the greatest of Irwin Allen’s disaster flicks. Winters won a Golden Globe for her role as Belle Rosen, an aging housewife, and wife of Jack Albertson’s character, who calls upon her youthful background as a swimming champion, giving her life to save the other survivors of the capsizing. Red Buttons (for a double play) survives the sinking and looks after Carol Lynley’s character. Leslie Nielsen’s performance as the captain was jarringly straightlaced.
Shelly Winters played Rose-Anne in a Patch of Blue and Nana Mary on Roseanne. She first appeared in the Mother’s Day episode, where Roseanne’s waittressing co-worker, played by Bonnie of Bonnie & Delaney fames, joins into an impromptu sing along of “You Really Got a Hold on Me.”
The cover of the album “Delaney and Bonnie and Friends on Tour with Eric Clapton” features a photo of a car with a pair of boots sticking out the window. The person wearing the boots is Bob Dylan, who had no other connection with the tour. The art director liked the photo (one of a series of unpublished Dylan photos) and used it.
Eric Clapton wrote the song “Tears in Heaven” as a memorial to his son, who died after falling out of a window at their NYC (IIRC) apartment.
The Beatles song “All Together Now” begins with a countdown of 1-2-3-4.
The total number of husbands had by the widows of the two late Beatles are 1 (Olivia Trinidad Arias Harrison), 2 (Patricia Ann Boyd Harrison Clapton), 3 (Yoko Ono Ichiyanagi Cox Lennon) 4 (Cynthia Powell Lennon Bassanini Twist Charles).
