I decided to quit being serious and have some fun writing about music. After all, the genre is entertainment.
So I researched through the Net, my old notebooks, some magazines, inputs from TV channels and penned down this article. This ain’t really a review since the information is not original, but the thoughts I found interesting obviously deserve some sort of editing and originality. And no, this ain’t cut-copy-paste stuff.I had to sort piles of information and re-write them.
So here’s the roller-coaster ride.
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Nick - Names
Here’s some information you might not have known about.
Stage Names Real Names
Eric Clapton Eric Patrick Clapp
John Denver John Henry Deutschendorf
Bob Dylan Robert Zimmerman
Jimi Hendrix James Marshall Hendricks
Elton John Reginald Kenneth Dwight
Courtney Love Love Michelle Harrison
Marilyn Manson Brian Warner
George Micheal Yorgos Panayiotou
Sting Gordon Matthew Sumner
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Now for some interesting facts I had to dig deep for:
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#Although The Beatles broke up 25 years ago, they continue to sell more records each year than the Rolling Stones.
#Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain were all 27 years old when they died.
#When Crosby, Stills and Nash started out, they were initially known as’The Frozen Noses’, a vague reference to their drug habits.
#Michael Jackson had a great guitarist on his hit, ’Beat It’ - Eddie Van Halen.
#When a record company executive first met the band Pink Floyd he asked them’Which one’s Pink?’
#Jimi Hendrix was thrown out of high school for holding the hand of a white girl in class.
#Uriah Heep, the progressive rock band took their name from a character in Charles Dickens’ novel, ’David Copperfield’.
#Jethro Tull is the name of the band and not the name of the rock singer responsible for such songs as’Aqualung’ and’Thick as a Brick.’ The original Jethro Tull was an English horticulturalist who invented the seed drill. The singer is Ian Anderson.
#David Bowie proposed to his first wife Angie by saying’Can you handle the fact that I don’t love you?’
#John Denver was killed when his light plane crashed.The plane simply ran out of fuel.
#The band’Lynyrd Skynyrd’ took their name from their Physical Education teacher, Leonard Skinner. Skinner had given some of the band members a hard time in school because of their long hair.
#An album called’The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan’ had been released by Stiff Records. The entire disc contained 40 minutes of silence.
#In 1978, Sweden’s most profitable export was the band ABBA. Car maker Volvo was number two.
#Gene Simmons of Kiss has a tongue that is seven inches long. Most men have tongues that are five inches at most.
#The rocker Sid Vicious died in February, 1979 from an overdose of heroin that was bought for him by his mother, who was present when he injected it.
#In 1999, Janis Joplin’s former residence in San Francisco’s Haight district was converted into a drug re-hab center.
#In February 1982, former Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne urinated on the Alamo. He was arrested and charged with defiling a national monument and banned from performing in San Antonio. The ban was eventually lifted.
#In 1963, Frank Zappa started a pornographic movie production company. He was arrested and jailed for sexual perversion a short while later. The sad part was that his studio was located on the opposite side of the California court house.
#Eric Clapton was born to an unwed mother. To shield him from the shame, Eric grew up believing that his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his sister.
#When Pink Floyd played in front of a large lake at the Crystal Palace Bowl in London in 1970, they played so loud that a number of fish were killed.
#Cher ended her marriage to Gregg Allman in 1979 after he had passed out in an Italian restaurant, face first in a bowl of spaghetti.
#The Yardbirds have given rise to three of Britain’s greatest guitarists: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.
#Rolling Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman began a relationship with 13-year old Mandy Smith when he was 47. Six years later, he married her.The marriage lasted seventeen months. Soon after, Bill’s 30-year-old son Stephen married Mandy’s mother, age 46. That made Stephen a stepfather to his former stepmother, Mandy.
#When Pink Floyd’s’Dark Side Of The Moon’ finally fell off of Billboard’s Hot 200 Album list in October 1988, it had set a record of 741 weeks on the chart.
#Ozzy Ozbourne was once unsuccessfully sued by the parents of a 19 year old boy.They claimed that their son committed suicide after listening to Ozzy’s song’Suicide Solution’.
#Metal band Judas Priest were sued by the family of two young men who said that after listening to’Stained Class’, a Judas Priest album, their children beat and choke one of their mothers, walked around town exposing themselves and stole money.
#Another Brick In The Wall II, the famous Pink Floyd number with its chorus of kids chanting’We Don’t Need No Education’ was banned by the South African government since black children, upset about inferior education, adopted the song as their anthem. The government said in a statement that the song was’prejudicial to the safety of the state.’
Update
Some others I could add:-
#Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler once strode all along a passenger plane naked since a band member had bet otherwise. It took some time for the flummoxed stewardesses to bring things back to normalcy.
#In a Guns n Roses video(Patience), Slash is seen playin with a huge snake. In fact, it was his pet snake. He collected snakes for pets.
#Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died of alcohol overdose. It is said that he downed 18 bottles of whisky before he passed away in his sleep.
#Robbie Williams was scared to death one night of a prowler and had to call the police. The prowler was Courtney Love, drunk and banging on the door asking for a sexual favour.
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That’s all, folks.
I hope that made for a fun read.
Let me know what you think.
If it’s crap, I’m sorry for requesting this review.
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