Rock & Roll Tidbits

Neil Young loved the perks of being a rock star. While touring with CSN&Y, there were hookers on the payroll and a twenty-four hour party suite complete with champagne, iced shrimp and capsules of cocaine.

In her early days, Madonna would get the attention of the record company executives by dropping popcorn into her cleavage during business meetings and then sassily retrieving the lost kernels.

Rapper Ice-T had a firm belief that without the male sex-drive that the economy would come crashing down. “All we would do is lie around and eat and fart and get fat.”

Mama Cass Elliot was once on trial in London in 1967 for failure to pay a hotel bill. As the group (she was with fellow Mamas & Papas) left the courtroom, TV cameras caught Denny Doherty and John Phillips taking hash brownies out of Mama Cass’s purse and gobbling them down.

Back in 1978, Ozzy Osbourne publically declared that he was an alcoholic. He proceeded to quit his band and retired from music. So the odd rocker decided to open a bar, but Ozzy quickly drank up the inventory; squandered his money and soon was back together with his band.

Iggy Pop got very depressed when the Stooges broke up for the second time. So he gobbled up a bunch Quaaludes, Valium and Seconals and then went out for dinner. He flipped out and cops picked him up and gave him the choice of going to jail or a mental hospital. He chose the mental hospital. But the next day he broke out, consumed the rest of his stash and then committed himself to the hospital again.

Aerosmith was in Memphis for a gig in 1975 and local cops were intent on busting lead singer Steven Tyler if he said the ‘f-word’ onstage. But Aerosmith’s road manager convinced the locals to hold off on the bust until after the concert. However, one of the roadies tipped Tyler off. So he had the lighting man black out all the lights as soon as the show ended. After the show’s final number, Tyler jumped offstage and stumbled through the now pitch black auditorium in an effort to get away. But the vigilant cops just nailed the rock star in the lobby.

I guess Michael Jackson yearned for friendship because there was a time that he kept six mannequins in his room. He would dress them in evening gowns (no word whether these were male or female stiffs), he had a name for each one and actually had conversations with them. “I like to imagine talking to them,” the strange gloved-one stated. Perfectly normal Mike, perfectly normal- we all do that.

K. D LANG insists that people write her name using only lower case letters. Ooops.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were known to push the media’s buttons every now and then. After their infamous ‘bed-in,’ the pair concocted ‘bagism.’ John and Yoko actually had themselves sewn inside of white bed clothes and crouched silently on a low table at a hotel in Vienna. Stunned reporters refused to believe that the odd couple were actually in the bag until Yoko began to wail a Japanese folk song- and left no doubt.

In 1987, while on a break from Metallica, James Hetfield played a series of surprise gigs at San Francisco nightclubs with a band named Spastic Children. When the band wanted to end one show with a nude encore, they were strongly discouraged from doing so by the club’s owner. So for the encore the group played in their underwear.

When James Brown was arrested at age fifteen for stealing clothes from parked cars and sent to jail, he said, “They sent me to prison for being dumb.”