Rock & Roll Tidbits

An obvious inebriated Steve Tyler once confessed to a luck reporter: “I’ll tell you what’s fun,” the rock said. “Finding the right stewardess and turning her upside-down in the back of the plane. Ever done it? You come so fast, it’s the greatest.”

Frank Zappa made an experimental film in 1965. He tied a camera to a string and just started swinging it around his head. The name of the film? “Motion.” “Pretty stupid, eh?” lamented Zappa.

Vince Neil of Motley Crue saw a woman mud-wrestling one night and quickly fell in love. He offered the dirty grappler $3,000 a week if she would stop mud-wrestling with anyone but him, and she agreed. The two were married- but divorced a short time later.

Ray Davies of the Kinks once tried to be like Keith Moon (the Who) and destroy his hotel room. “I threw a Guinness bottle against the wall,” he explained. “It bounced back and hit me in the head and knocked me out.” That plan failed.

While we are on the subject….At a Monkees’ concert in 1968, Keith Moon jumped up in the crowd just before the show started and started chanting “We Want the Who!”

Alice Cooper is famous for his stage antics. In 1988, while he was rehearsing for his onstage hanging routine, the safety rope broke and Cooper would have hung himself if not for the quick thinking of a roadie; who cut the dangling rock star down.

Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue fame once claimed he shot whiskey into his arm when he ran out of heroin.

In a related story, Sixx shot up too much heroin in 1987, in addition to consuming Valium, Cocaine, whiskey, and beer. Sixx stated, “I kinda remember waking up and a paramedic telling me that I had died, and had to be revived.” He got that part right, as paramedics did indeed have to administer two shots of adrenaline to restart his heart. Upon his release from the hospital, he hitchhiked back home, shot up more heroin, later writing the song, “Kickstart My Heart.” How appropriate.

In the early days of Queen, rocker Freddie Mercury would hit himself so hard with the tambourine that he suffered a severely bruised leg.

Frank Zappa booked the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to play a concert of his music at the Royal Albert hall. But the show was canceled due to “lyrical obscenity.” Zappa sued, but lost the case when he couldn’t convince the British judge that the song “Shove It Right In” was not obscene.

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys spent 1971-1975 in bed.

Mamas and the Papas founder John Phillips was kind of careless with his drugs. His dog, Trelawny (a.k.a Mr. T) once gobbled up a whole bag of mescaline capsules. The poor pooch ran in circles for three days. Then he stared at himself in the mirror for over twelve hours. “He was more human than anything else after swallowing all that mescaline,” mused Phillips.

In the 60’s, the Who made instrument smashing a part of every show that they did. Trouble was, the band was destroying 700 pounds of equipment per night and only earning about 500 pounds per show. Bass player John Entwistle screamed: “We’d come out ahead just by not showing up!”