Rock & Roll Tidbits

After Nino Tempo and April Stevens hastily recorded a song called "Deep Purple", the master tape was sent to Atlantic Records producer Ahmet Ertegun, who said that the effort was not only embarrassing, but the worst thing Nino and April had ever done. After some pressure from Nino, Ertegun gave in and released the song as a single. It quickly soared to #1 on the Billboard Pop chart and enjoyed a twelve week run. The following year it won a Grammy Award for the Best Rock and Roll Recording of 1963.

Although she is mostly remembered for her hit "Stand By Your Man,” country singer Tammy Wynette has been married five times.

Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote "The Loco-Motion" with the hope that Dee Dee Sharp would record it. For the demo, they asked their infant daughter's baby sitter, Eva Boyd to sing the song. Sharp's producers turned it down, but their publishing firm liked the demo so much, they released it as a single, giving Little Eva a number one record.

The videos for Neil Young’s song “This Note’s For You” lampooned corporate rock sponsorship. The video featured a faux Michael Jackson with his hair on fire, an obvious reference to the accident that occurred while the gloved one was shooting a Pepsi commercial. Stunned MTV immediately banned the video, only to declare it Best Video of the Year at the 1989 Video Music Awards.

In the fall of 1958, Neil Diamond entered New York University on a fencing scholarship.

Brothers Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks took sibling rivalry to new heights. Dining in a Manhattan establishment in 1971, Dave tried to steal one of Ray’s french fries and was promptly stabbed in the chest with a fork by Ray.

Payback came during a Boston performance of the Kinks rock epic, “Preservation,” when Dave was so mad at his brother that he left the stage and played the whole show from behind a curtain.

Bobby Vinton found his biggest hit, "Roses Are Red" in a pile of reject demo records while he was waiting to be told of his release from his recording contract. He talked Epic Records management into letting him record the song and soon after, he and the label had their first million selling, number one smash.

Gale Garnett, who sang the Top 40 song, "We'll Sing In The Sunshine,” appeared in a number of episodes of the TV show Bonanza.

Madonna is a glutton for publicity. In a 1994 appearance on the David Letterman Show, she said the “F-Word” a total of thirteen times. Then she demanded that Letterman sniff her undies, to which a startled Letterman declined to do.

None of The Beatles played instruments on "Eleanor Rigby” though John Lennon and George Harrison did contribute harmony and backing vocals. Instead, Paul McCartney used a string octet of studio musicians, composed of four violins, two cellos, and two violas all working off a score written by producer George Martin.

The Eagles were not satisfied with record producer Glyn Johns. In fact, while they were recording their LP “Desperado” in 1973, drummer Don Henley asked Johns to make him sound like Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham. But John’s could only sigh and say, “You don’t play like John Bonham.”

Shock rock artist G.G.Allin had his share of classic escapades during his brief career (he died in 1993 from a heroin and cocaine overdose). Before a gig in New York, Allin entered a women’s restroom and asked for a volunteer to urinate in his mouth. One gal declined, but did give him the sanitary product that she had just removed. As Allin explained: “I just ate it right in front of her, just swallowed the whole thing.”

Even in death, strange circumstances followed G.G.Allin. He was buried in a leather jacket and a jockstrap upon which was written the epitaph “Eat Me.” At his open-coffin funeral, a microphone was positioned in his hand as well as a bottle of Jim Beam bourbon. His friends all took turns taking swigs from the bottle and put pills into the corpse’s mouth. Others pulled down the jockstrap, posed for pictures and drew on Allin’s corpse with a marker. Some friends.

In 1977, Pink Floyd created a forty-foot inflatable pig for a photo shoot. However, during the session, the renegade pig broke free from its moorings and drifted toward London’s Heathrow Airport. Pilots approaching Heathrow were amused to hear British aviation officials warn, “Pig on the loose!” The Pink Floyd pig eventually crashed into a farmer’s field and no injuries were reported. I guess pigs really do fly, or at least they did for one day.