The Most Infamous Rock and Roll Urban Legends
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Legend has it that Charles Manson wrote a song with or for The Beach Boys. Before you scoff at the impossibility of this, know that it's completely true.
Before he was a psychopathic murderer, Manson was just another struggling songwriter in LA. In 1968, Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson had a chance meeting with two female members of the nascent Manson Family, picking them up while they were hitchhiking, leading to Manson and Wilson forming a strange friendship. Manson wrote a song for Wilson to give to The Beach Boys, titled “Cease to Exist.” Wilson liked the song, re-wrote the lyrics and titled it “Never Learn Not to Love.”
Manson was reportedly enraged by Wilson changing his lyrics and taking credit. Though accounts differ as to what happened when Manson confronted Wilson, the strange songwriter was soon out of Wilson’s life, and went on to bigger things, namely carving a swath of destruction through Topanga Canyon.
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The “Crying” singer's normal attire of black clothes and his stationary concerts gave him the aura of a sad, dark man. And the huge dark glasses he wore both on and off stage led to something else: a persistent rumor that the singer was either born blind or blinded from an accident at some point in his life.
The truth is that Orbison was never blind, though he did wear thick glasses to correct his vision. As the story goes, he once accidentally left them on a plane, and the only other pair he had were prescription sunglasses, so he wore those on stage. The next day he left for Europe to open for the Beatles, and didn’t have time to find his old glasses or get new ones made, so he just kept the sunglasses on. That tour received massive press coverage, and by the time he returned home, he was “the singer in the dark glasses.” So he made them part of his persona.
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This one is actually true. Mamas and the Papas singer Mama Cass and The Who drummer Keith Moon did actually die in the same London flat, four years apart. The apartment belonged to American singer Harry Nilsson, who was so spooked by the two deaths that he never went back. Instead, the apartment was bought by The Who lead singer Pete Townshend, to keep it from being exploited as a tourist trap.
- Photo: Warner Bros. Records / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain
Why would someone record three dozen intentionally bad gibberish songs? In 1967, Irish troubadour Van Morrison was stuck in a brutally unfair record deal, and tangled in a dispute with his manager’s widow. Finally, he managed to get his contract bought out by Warner Brothers, but was still bound to the terms of his old deal, which required him to write and record 36 more songs.
But Morrison got the last laugh. Knocking out over 30 songs in one day, Morrison fulfilled his end of the deal, recording short, out-of-tune, nonsensical tracks about ringworms, Danishes, and overdue royalty checks. These so-called “revenge songs” were useless to his old record company, but they did the trick, freeing Morrison up to start a run of albums that are hardly surpassed in rock greatness.
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A half-eaten ham sandwich was found by the body of singer Mama Cass Elliot in a London flat, leading the media to put two and two together and declare she choked to death on it. It’s not true, and never had any truth to it. In fact, Elliot’s death from heart failure was probably due to the stress she put on herself through an extreme form of fasting, attempting to quickly lose a large amount of weight.
Like so many other urban legends, the ham sandwich rumor has become accepted as fact, despite it not being true in the least. Unlike Phil Collins’s drowning victim, or the woman murdered by the Ohio Players, this urban legend has a real victim behind it: a great singer who died before her time, whose legacy is burdened with an ugly, fat-shaming smear, and should be debunked at every opportunity.
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Various stories have swirled about Aerosmith almost buying the plane that later crashed and nearly killed everyone in Lynyrd Skynyrd. What actually happened is a lot less mystical, and is based on good observation and strong human resources.
Right before the Skynyrd crash, Aerosmith’s assistant chief of flight operations checked out the Convair CV-300 that Skynyrd later chartered and deemed it unworthy of the Boston band, either because he saw the crew drinking or the engine caught on fire in his presence. Unfortunately for Skynyrd, they had no such luck, and spent years trying to pick up the pieces from the incident.
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Guns N' Roses Included Explicit Sounds On 'Rocket Queen' (True)
While recording their smash hit Appetite for Destruction, Guns singer Axl Rose brought drummer Steven Adler’s girlfriend, Adriana Smith, to the studio, and the duo engaged in activity that could euphemistically be described as “not drumming.” It was captured on tape during an incredibly awkward recording session and included on the track “Rocket Queen.” Numerous people saw it, and nobody involved with the incident ever did anything but confirm it. Smith later came to regret the incident before coming to grips with her weird claim to fame.
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Waylon Jennings Cursed Buddy Holly (Sort Of True)
While history remembers the trio of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper being killed in a plane crash on “The Day the Music Died,” most people don’t know that future outlaw country superstar Waylon Jennings played bass in Holly’s band.
Holly had chartered a plane to take him and the band to the next show, and being a nice guy, Jennings gave up his seat to the Big Bopper, getting on the bus instead. While the band members figured out their travel arrangements, Holly chided Jennings, “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up!” to which Jennings replied, equally, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!” Which it did.
Thinking he’d cursed Holly, Jennings blamed himself for the crash and carried the guilt with him the rest of his life. But words and curses don’t make planes crash, and in this case, it was pilot error and bad weather, not the ill-advised joke of Waylon Jennings that sent Holly to his death.
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Lou Reed’s album Berlin is widely hailed as one of the bleakest records of all time. Capping off the horrific tale of a marriage gone wrong is the song “The Kids” which actually features album producer Bob Ezrin’s kids crying and wailing. Legend has it Ezrin and Reed got this effect by telling them their mother was dead and recording the horrifying aftermath.
In reality though, Ezrin got his kids to cry on tape in a more old-fashioned way – recording them refusing to go to bed.
- Photo: Mercury Records / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain
A Pizza Guy Wrote 'Takin' Care of Business' (False)
Was one of the most iconic songs of the '70s, Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business,” written in part by a pizza delivery guy who happened to be at the studio? Various versions of this rumor have gone around for years, putting the band in a scenario where they’re working on the song but something is missing – and that something is a piano part. Some versions have the pizza guy actually playing the iconic barrelhouse piano part on the song, others have him just sketching out the chords on a pizza box for someone else to play. Then he vanished, leaving the band to find him and give him a check.
Neither version is true, though both are espoused by various members of the band. In reality, the piano player on the song was a professional musician who was in the same studio as BTO, recording commercial jingles. The band’s engineer asked him to play piano on the song, and the musician, Norman Durkee, did so – banging out one take of a boogie-woogie that became the best known part of the song. Durkee claims pizza had nothing to do with it. Durkee, who died in 2014, claimed he was paid $90 for the take.
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The 27 Club (False)
Rock’s most exclusive club isn’t on the Sunset Strip, it’s made up of musicians who died at age 27. Foremost are Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix, who all succumbed to drugs and/or alcohol, around the same time and all at the same age. This coincidence lead to the media dreaming up a mythical “27 Club” where rock stars of that age go when their time is up. Later, Kurt Cobain would take his own life at the same age, and this, combined with his mother's grief at him “joining that stupid club,” revived the mythos of the 27 Club.
While it’s true that many rock legends, including Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and members of the Stooges and Badfinger all died at the same age, it denotes the occupational hazard of being a musician, not a curse. These rockers didn’t die because they were 27, they died because of drugs and alcohol. Some died in car crashes, showing the risk of spending months at a time on the road. A few were murdered. Regardless, their age had nothing to do with their death, other than that’s the age they were at when they died. Moreover, while there is a large number of musicians who died at 27, there’s a much larger number who didn’t.
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Contrary to popular rumor, the Rolling Stones guitarist never had his entire blood supply swapped out in Switzerland. While he did have a procedure to clean toxins out of his blood in an effort to kick heroin, the blood replacement story was a joke he told because he got sick of talking about his attempts to clean up. There’s no actual way to “change” a person’s blood, anyway.
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Michael Jackson And Prince Disliked Each Other (False)
Back in the mid-'80s (shortly after Phil Collins didn’t witness someone drowning), Michael Jackson and Prince were at the top of their game and engaged in a fierce but mostly friendly rivalry. And while rumors swirled of the two disliking each other, they were actually friends. In fact, Jackson originally penned the 1987 smash hit “Bad” as a duet to perform with Prince. It never happened, though, and various reasons came out as to why. Some speculate Prince thought the song would be a hit on its own, which it was. Others that Prince had qualms about the lyrics, specifically refusing to have “Your butt is mine” sung at him. Whatever the case, the version on the album is just Jackson singing. However, we can’t entirely rule out that they might have recorded a demo given the vast amounts of unreleased material both artists have in their vaults.
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Contrary to popular belief, the Beatles did not calm their nerves with a joint before meeting Queen Elizabeth and accepting their Member of the British Empire accolades. The story was a goof from John Lennon, and wasn't corrected until years later by Paul McCartney. Macca admitted that the band did pop out for a smoke before meeting the Queen, but they were regular old cigarettes.
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Virtually every popular band of the '60s and '70s was accused by fundamentalist Christians of including backward Satanic or drug messages in their music. But few bands got as raw of a deal as metal gods Judas Priest. In 1990, the band was sued by the parents of two boys who took their own lives after listening to their music. They claimed that subliminal messages in the song “Better by You, Better than Me” urged listeners to “do it” with “it” referring to self-harm.
The trial dragged on for a month before the judge ultimately dismissed the case, and subsequent research has shown that backmasking is ineffective at delivering subliminal messages. However, the judge bizarrely ruled that Priest HAD included backmasked messages in their music – you just had to know exactly what they were for them to work.
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Maybe the best known of all rock urban legends is a persistent story that has Phil Collins writing his hit song “In the Air Tonight” after he was on a night drive and witnessed a man drowning, while another man stood on the beach watching the victim go under. The story goes even further, with Collins premiering the song live in concert, having sent tickets to the man who witnessed the drowning. He then ordered a spotlight onto the man, telling the audience that this new song was dedicated to him. The witness, publicly shamed by a rock star, goes home and takes his life.
The problem is that absolutely none of this happened, nor is it even plausible. How would Collins be able to see any of this without being so close that he couldn’t just save the drowning man? How did he know who the witness was? Why would a man be randomly invited to a Phil Collins concert by Phil Collins and think that’s normal?
Furthermore, the legend itself has a number of different versions, with some saying Collins actually witnessed an assault, or tried to prevent the drowning and couldn’t, or couldn’t find the man and sings the song to a spot-lit empty chair. It’s all nonsense, as Collins himself has confirmed many times.
- Photo: Private Stock Records / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain
Was the Blondie lead singer a potential victim of serial killer Ted Bundy in New York City? According to Harry, yes. She said he kidnapped her in the early '70s while she was trying to hail a cab, and she was held hostage in a car, only narrowly escaping with her life.
In reality, while Harry might have had a scary encounter with a creep in a battered car, there’s no way it could have been Ted Bundy. The serial killer never spent any time in New York during his murder spree, and so couldn’t have almost killed Debbie Harry, or anyone else living there at the time. What's more likely is a simple case of confirmation bias.
