Hope I get this right, perhaps a Simple Minds fan can set it straight…
I remember reading an interview with Jim Kerr (vocalist/lyricist) and Charlie Burchill (guitarist/composer). Jim Kerr mentioned he lived in a Glasgow tenament and was walking home one day and was plonked in the head with a heavily-played, scratched punk record. He took it home, played it, and became a fan of the punk scene, eventually forming a band with Burchill and others called Johnny and the Self Abusers, which eventually morphed into Simple Minds. When recounting this story, Burchill asked Kerr the name of the record he’d so fortitutiously found on the ground. Turns out the person who tossed the record out of the window was Burchill or a sibling of his, before the two had ever met - and they never knew this before the interview!
Could be an urban legend, but it’s a pretty cool one nonetheless.
In 1977 there was a young Mancunian band called The Nosebleeds. The band didn’t last long but the line-up included founding members of The Smiths (Morrissey) and The Cult (Billy Duffy). Seems like a pretty unlikely pairing!
In their early days, Rick James played in a band with Neil Young (!) called the Mynah Birds.
Johnny Marr’s first choice for songwriting partner was London-based musician Matt Johnson. However, Johnson wanted Marr to move down to London and vice-versa, so it never came to pass. Marr instead went round to Steven Morrissey’s house, knocked on the door, and formed The Smiths. Johnson created an alter-ego with The The, and the two eventually collaborated on two The The albums: Mind Bomb and Dusk.
Last one: one of the early vocalists for Duran Duran was Steven “Tin Tin” Duffy.
The Knack’s blockbuster hit My Sharona was about a real teenage girl, Sharona Alperin, who is now all grown up and working as a hugely successful real estate agent in Los Angeles.
?Teenage girl? I thought she was the wife of a friend of his who he was smitten with.
A lot more people know this now since the movie but June Carter wrote Ring of Fire not Johnny Cash.
Local legend has it-
Kurt Cobain was sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the now defunct Olympia WA record store Positively Fourth Street the day Nevermind was released.
The fossilized Australopithecus Lucy was so named because the Beatles’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was playing on the anthropologists’ boombox when she was discovered.
Giuseppe Verdi was a true gourmet. Wherever he went in the world, his agent arranged for Venetian seafood to be sent to him. When he went to St. Petersburg for a few weeks to write the opera for which he’d been commissioned, he took along several hundred bottles of wine and champagne. He was known for his excellent risotto.
The Alan Parsons Project got its name because Parsons and his collaborator Jeremy Woolfson (IIRC) couldn’t decide on a name, and the record label insisted they had to put something on the paperwork for reserving a studio, paying the session musicians, etc.
The B-side to Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” is “Hasta Manana,” for which songwriters Benny Andersson & Bjorn Ulvaeus (the “B’s” of ABBA) received beaucoup bucks in royalties.
LiveOnAPlane
Since you mentioned Napoleon XIV, his real name is Jerry Samuels. Well no big deal about that … however, he wrote the Sammy Davis Jr hit “The Shelter Of Your Arms”. Hard to believe that was written by the same guy huh?
I don’t have a recent copy of the Guinness Book but this always surprises people.
What song had the longest continuous “run” on Billboard’s Top 100?
People usually think of the big names like Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Madonna, etc. Nope it was …
At the end of the production of London Calling, The Clash attached a track at the very end. The addition was too late, however, and the track didn’t actually show up on the album cover. That track, “Train in Vain (Stand by Me)”, went on to become their biggest hit from the album in the US.
I also know that the catalogue code for Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On is TS310. A clerk at a record store told me that at a different record store in the past, he and his coworkers used to greet each other by saying, “TS310, man.”
In case you don’t get it:
They were saying to each other, “What’s going on, man?”
Johnny Ramone’s guitar strap was actually two guitar straps taped end-to-end so he could wear his guitar lower.
His guitar of choice - a Mosrite - was picked because: a) they could be had for dirt cheap in the 70’s; and b) he didn’t want a guitar that looked like anyone else’s.
His first Mosrite got stolen, so he bought another one. When he bought it - at a pawn shop? - he was told it needed to be refretted. He never had it done - and everytime he got the guitar re-setup they would same thing and he never did…and he loved the fact that he could still play it and prove 'em wrong…
43 weeks, to be exact, throughout 1982. Peaked at #8.
The longest title for a Billboard #1 single was a 1981 medley by Stars on 45. For legal reasons, each song in the medley had to be referred to in the title: Medley: Intro Venus/Sugar Sugar/No Reply/I’ll Be Back/ Drive My Car/Do You Want To Know A Secret/We Can Work It Out/I Should Have Known Better/Nowhere Man/You’re Going To Lose That Girl/Stars on 45. The longest title for a non-medley song ever to make the top 100 is Jeremiah Peabody’s Poly Unsaturated Quick Dissolving Fast Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills by Ray Stevens, which peaked at number 35 in 1961.
Electric Light Orchestra’s debut album, Electric Light Orchestra, was accidentially given a new title in the United States. Someone at the record company had called regarding the title of the album. There was no answer. This was written down, and someone accidentially believed that this was the album’s title…No Answer.
Not only that, it’s a cover of a Beatles song which never did.
The motet *Diliges Dominum * by William Byrd is in eight parts (SSAATTBB). The S1 and S2 parts are mirror images of each other i.e. the S1 and S2 parts progress to the mid-point of the motet, then swap over and reverse the sequence of notes to the end of the motet. Ditto with the alto, tenor and bass parts. There’s probably a technical musical term for this type of writing but I don’t know what it is.
