Wendy Carlos, perhaps the single most important pioneer of the synthesizer with Switched on Bach and at least a few Stanley Kubric soundtracks, oh and Tron too, was born Walter Carlos.
Oh, and as a bonus, she did a now OOP and very hard to find but really cool version of Peter and the Wolf with Wierd Al.
Dr. John was also a guitar player originally, but switched to the piano after a shooting-related finger injury. Although the one time I saw him in concert, he did end up playing a little guitar.
“Life is a Highway” singer Tom Cochrane was first famous for singing “Lunatic Fringe” when he was in Red Rider.
Guns n’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum (now in Velvet Revolver) used to be the drummer for The Cult.
Bette Nesmith Graham invented “Liquid Paper” correction fluid, otherwise known as white-out. Her son Michael Nesmith was the front-man for the Monkees.
Eddie VanHalen started out as a drummer while Alex VanHalen started out as a guitarist. They switched and flourished. Nuno Bettancourt also started out as a drummer.
How many #1 hit songs did Aerosmith have?
Just one. “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” from the Armagedon soundtrack. It’s accurate since I last cheked it.
Dolly Parton wrote the song I Will Always Love You specifically for Elvis and at his request. (He was a fan of her music and asked her to write him something.) He loved the song, she said that hearing him sing it was better than sex and moonshine and drugs, but Colonel Tom Parker (who had Elvis’s complete Power of Atty- Elvis himself could not override him) refused to wave the 50% of the publishing rights that all he demanded of all songwriters who wrote for Elvis.
To most songwriters it was worth it. If you’ve written a song like Rock a Hula Baby or Yoga Is as Yoga Does or even some of his bigger hits like it’s sound business- you can either let The King record them and get half of a lot of money or let Cousin Billy and the Monkey Grass Boys record it and get all of nothing from the writer’s fees, but Dolly had already had hits by then, knew how valuable the publishing rights were, and balked. She tried offering him lesser amounts (15% was I think as high as she went) but Col. Tom wouldn’t budge. If Mark James (Suspicious Minds) and Scott Davis (In the Ghetto) and others agreed to this arrangement and Elvis was the reason these songs sold in the gazillions, who was this half-literate hillbilly flash in the pan to be making conditions with Elvis? So it broke her heart but she went away and by her own admission cried for years whenever she thought about it.
The Beatles song Come Together was written as a gubernatorial campaign song for Timothy Leary. When Leary was imprisoned they recorded it with slightly changed lyrics. When Leary said something about it to Lennon years later he told him “I’m a craftsman just like a tailor. You didn’t come back for the suit so I sold it. Get on with your life.”
I’m sure there are other tracks where all the guitar is played by Paul. *Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?[i/] seems to be one of them.
I can’t verify this right now, but I believe Rick also played on Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’. Rick was a very in-demand session player before achieving fame with ‘Yes’ and in his own right.
Oh, and when Rick joined his first band, they wanted to call themselves ‘Sour Milk’ because ‘Cream’ were very big at the time.
A photograph of a very young Courtney Love - yes, that one - is on the back cover of the Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa album, amidst a group of stoned hippies {bottom right}: her father was a Grateful Dead hanger-on.
As did Feat’s original bass player, Roy Estrada.
God, how I love that woman. This is my favorite bit of trivia so far.
Terry Jacks didn’t think Seasons in the Sun was much of a song at first, but his paperboy happened to hear him singing it and started bringing other people around to hear it, which encouraged him.
Someone should hunt down that paperboy and make him pay! 
Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders was in a band with at least one member of DEVO back in Ohio - Mark Mothersbaugh? - called SatSunMat, which was short for “Saturday Sunday Matinee” which is what they did to kill time as kids…
Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick is considered the Godfather of Vintage Guitar Collecting - with one of the biggest, most respected collections. He was buying vintage Les Pauls out of pawn shops for $50 that now go for $300,000…
I wasn’t clear in my first post. Sedaka had two #1 hits with two different versions of the same song. The 196? upbeat version and the 197? ballad version.
Cool! I saw Dr John a few weeks ago at JazzFest. He was great.
Southpaw, the 1976 version of “Breaking Up” peaked at #8 on the pop charts, not #1.
Some guy was in two bands at once. The bands didn’t know each other. One day, a member from each band showed up at his apartment. The two guys hit it off immediately. Their names were Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons.
A young man tried to become a blues musician as a guitarist. He never got very good at it. When he met Eric Clapton, he realized that he’d never be that good. So he sold his guitar at a pawn shop. He traded it in for some weird instrument he’d never seen before, he didn’t even know what it was called. But he swore he’d become the best blues whatever-it-was player in the world, since he’d be the only one. Months later, Ian Anderson actually got a sound out of that flute.
I believe you are correct on this, but they were mainly Lennon-McCartney songs. Taxman is was written by Harrison so you would have thought he would have played lead guitar on it.
I also believe The Ballad of John and Yoko was just John and Paul playing.
The lead guitar on Free’s Alright Now was not played by Paul Kossof it was played by … Paul Rogers.
Cool stories, but I hear them being told by Paul Harvey.
Sure there are. There are plenty of examples of non-obvious instrument matchings at Beatles recordings. You should check out the book Revolution in the head by Ian McDonald, he has listed the story and and musicians and tons of trivia on each Beatles song, in chronological order:
On his first appearance on Ed Sullivan, Elvis was shown only from the waist up. Contrary to myth, this had nothing to do with fears that his dancing was too sexy for TV (he’d already been shown fully on other shows). During rehearsals, Elvis kept putting a beer bottle in his crotch as a joke. The director got tired of it and, afraid he’d do it live on the air, gave orders only to show Elvis from the waist up. And once Elvis showed he was behaving during the first segment of songs, he was shown fully on the second segment of his appearance.
The glass harmonica – tuned water glasses – was a popular instrument during the 18th century and Ben Franklin even invented an improved version. The instrument fell into disuse in the 19th century because it was believed that its vibrations caused mental illness and drove its musicians insane.
Herman’s Hermits two biggest hits were both accidental. Once they needed a flip side and another time they needed filler for an album (I forget which was which), but for one Peter “Herman” Noone remembered an old drinking song his grandpa used to sing about a widow who married 8 men named Henry, so he called him up and asked how it went pretty much as a lark and recorded it, and of course it was a huge hit. The other time he needed a short song to fill some vinyl he reverted to a silly ditty he and his band used to sing whenever they played a teenaged girl’s birthday or batmitzvah or graduation party or whatever, “Mrs. [hostess’s surname] You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter”. (On an interview program he talked about how hard it was when the girl was named something really long like Shostakovich or whatever, but they did it.) He went with “Brown” because it was generic and he had friends named Brown and never expected anybody to like the song anyway but it way outsold the expected hits.
Regarding Dolly- when I said she wrote the song for Elvis, I meant she wrote it for him to record. The actual inspiration for the song was Porter Waggoner, her boss for years who held her to an exclusive contract after she wanted to leave him. It cost her pretty much all she was worth at the time to pay him off and she was really really pissed at him.
They had something of a “Star is Born” relationship- she was a total unknown and he a known star when she got a job on his syndicated TV show and very soon after people were tuning in to watch her and forgetting about him, and at their live appearances it was worse. He was booed off-stage sometimes by fans wanting her to come back out and his only major hits after she joined his bandwagon were duets with her. While he had major ego problems with this, he had good enough business sense to know that he needed her if he wanted to rake in the megabucks and so he refused when she asked out of the contract she signed when she started which forbade her to do any type of solo work without his permission.
She has never formally said he sexually harassed her, but she has made so many jokes about it in her act over the years that I wouldn’t be the least surprised. Also, in the old clips from the show he never missed a chance to touch her. Most people assumed they were a couple, many that she was his wife, few knew that both were married to other people.
Dolly credited and still credits Porter with starting her career and freely admits she wouldn’t have gone as far as fast without him, and they were bitterly estranged after she left (a judge ruled she could buy her way out of her contract and she did). “I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU” was her way of saying to him “I love you, I appreciate all you did for me, but BYE BYE!” (pretty much her exact words in one interview [and she also went into it in some detail in her PLAYBOY interview when it was a lot fresher]). I’ve seen them on the same shows together so they’ve apparently reconciled but I don’t believe they’ve performed together since.
And speaking of being booed off stage, Jimi Hendrix was when he opened for THE MONKEES, particularly by girls screaming for Davy.
The first was told on a VH1 special called Behind the Makeup.
The second was told by Anderson himself.