10 insane classic rock stories that sound fake but aren’t

John Fogerty sued for plagiarising himself

In a plot that seems too Kafkaesque to be real, John Fogerty was indeed embroiled in legal headaches for allegedly plagiarising himself. Following the release of 1984’s ‘The Old Man Down the Road’, Fantasy Records owner Saul Zaentz claimed the single sounded far too much like ‘Run Through the Jungle from Fogerty’s former band, Creedence Clearwater Revival.

In this litigious absurdity, Fogerty had to demonstrate on the guitar the two songs’ distinctly separate compositions while also illustrating that any artist will have flair and style that anchors their body of work. While owning the rights to the CCR song, Zaentz’s claim ultimately came to nothing, and Fogerty was awarded attorney fees of over $1,000,000.

James Brown’s cop car chase

A full-blown, legit car chase with the police had been triggered by ‘Godfather of Soul’ James Brown in May 1988. A dubious criminality had dogged Mr Dynamite ever since he first found fame in the R&B and later funk worlds, with a litany of drug charges and assault allegations that never seemed to derail his career.

Still, the long arm of the law came down hard when Brown decided to give the cops a high-speed chase on Interstate 20 near the Georgia–South Carolina state border. Convicted of carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting an officer, Brown would be handed six years in prison, released on parole in February 1991 after serving just two.

Richard Nixon’s bizarre meeting with Elvis Presley

The countercultural shifts had hit Elvis Presley hard. In no time at all, ‘The King’ stood as rock and roll’s leading force and an emblem of 1950s rebellion, before plummeting to a dead end of stodgy Hollywood irrelevance and a lapse into conservative paranoia. Amid his wariness of perceived communist subversion invading the country, a written request to meet with President Richard Nixon was made in December 1970, arriving at the Oval Office that very afternoon.

Arriving in a flared jumpsuit, Presley gifted Nixon his very own .45 Colt pistol before offering a cautionary warning on The Beatles’ “force for anti-American spirit” and requesting a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Nixon obliged, forging one of the strangest meetings of mutually paranoid political and pop-cultural minds during the administration’s notorious heyday.

Rick Allen’s winning one-armed drumming career

The full complement of both arms would appear to stand as an essential drumming for one of the world’s biggest hard rock acts. Yet, a car crash just as Sheffield’s Def Leppard was soaring to global fame didn’t deter Rick Allen from soldiering on as the band’s dependable percussionist, despite losing his left arm.

With the support of friends and family, and a specially designed drum kit featuring electronic foot pedals to supplant the lost arm, Allen remained in the band through their Hysteria UK and US chart topper, and still sits on Def Leppard’s drum stool to this day. “What I’ve experienced through losing my arm, I wouldn’t change,” Allen revealed. “The human spirit is so strong.”

Gram Parsons’ corpse kidnapped

For a moment, Gram Parsons seemed destined to be a much-loved and cult singer-songwriter. Yet, countercultural hedonism and a taste for heroin would ultimately claim the Flying Burrito Brothers frontman’s life at the tender age of 26. Having spent the day consuming alcohol and barbiturates in local bars near The Joshua Tree, a spike of smack triggered a fatal overdose on September 19th, 1973.

It turned out that Parsons had confessed to road manager Phil Kaufman to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the national park should he ever die. Posing as mortuary staff, Kaufman and assistant Michael Martin managed to claim Parsons’ body from Los Angeles International Airport in transit to Louisiana for burial. The two illegally drove Parsons’ body to Joshua Tree for cremation, only managing a partial burn. Kaufman and Martin were forced to pay for the charred remains’ legitimate burial in Metairie’s Garden of Memories Cemetery.

Chuck Berry’s surveillance deviancy

While standing as a veritable rock and roll icon, a catalogue of grim sexual misconduct and downright abuse never seemed to tarnish Chuck Berry’s lauded stature in the music community. Even as late as 1989, it was discovered that secret video cameras had been installed in the women’s toilet in his Missouri restaurant, The Southern Air.

Berry claimed he was trying to catch a suspected worker stealing from the establishment, but the copious amounts of tapes discovered in his residence, including minors, resulted in the ‘Johnny B Goode’ singer being slapped with a suspended sentence and a class action from 59 women implicated in Berry’s secretive recordings in 1990.

Peter Criss faces off with an imposter

In 1991, a man claimed to be the founding Kiss drummer, Peter Criss and even managed an interview with Star and an appearance on The Phil Donahue Show. The imposter told Star that he had fallen on hard times, become homeless and was living on the streets of Los Angeles.

In the time Criss had stepped away from the limelight after leaving Kiss, alcoholic drifter Christopher Dickinson realised a passing resemblance to the hard rock drummer could bring publicity and sympathy. Criss was in the audience for the later Donahue feature, resulting in the surreal spectacle of Criss calling out the imposter from the audience. Star issued a semi-apology, and Dickinson spoke frankly about the dead end he’d stumbled upon during his deception: “90% of the time, I was out of it. Loaded. Drinking.”

Bill Wyman’s relationship with a 13-year-old

It’s a grubby case of flagrant paedophilia that would rightly ruin any public figure’s career today, but somehow, original Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman admitted to falling in love with a 13-year-old with little more than a frenzy of tabloid salaciousness.

Having met the child Mandy Smith at the 1984 BPI Awards when he was 47 years old, he’d later reveal in his 1990 autobiography, “She took my breath away… she was a woman at 13.” A ‘relationship’ had already been underway for over two years when the coupling became public after Smith had turned 16, with the understanding that the two had already slept with each other, which is considered rape in the eyes of UK law due to her age.

Still, Wyman got away with it. Marrying in 1989 when she was 18 and he was 52, the marriage barely lasted a few weeks, Wyman allegedly frustrated with her health issues wrought from the birth control pills she needed, and officially divorced after 23 months.

The Beach Boys’ crossing with The Manson Family

While The Beatles’ songbook provided unwitting fuel to his apocalyptic visions, it was sunny California’s The Beach Boys that actually crossed direct paths with Charles Manson and his murderous Family cult.

In a bizarre turn of events, two Family members, Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey, had been picked up by Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson in 1968, the two hitchhikers taking up generous residence in his Pacific Palisades house on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard. It was just the manoeuvring Manson was after. Fancying himself as an outsider folk artist, the cult leader made his way to Wilson’s home with the Family entourage, meeting the likes of Neil Young and Mama Cass Elliot at parties and even jamming with Wilson, helping to record the killer’s ‘Cease to Exist.’

However, after several months, the Family had virtually ransacked the log cabin home and left as much as $100,000 in property damage. Only a year later, Manson would command his Family to commit murder in Benedict Canyon, infamously carrying out the Tate–LaBianca killings and spelling a bloody close to the 1960s hippy idyll.

Ozzy Osbourne’s taste for doves and bats

Sometimes, we can become so inured to a story or anecdote’s presence in popular culture that we fail to actually grapple with just how shocking it may be. It’s completely understandable that the late Ozzy Osbourne and family became sick to the back teeth of his biting the heads of two doves and a bat, but it’s an act of impulsive ferality that never fails to trigger pangs of shock and disgust.

The bat was supposedly an accident. Believing the dead bat thrown on stage was a prop during a 1982 show in Iowa, Osbourne wasted no time in sinking his teeth into its neck, tasting a “warm and gloopy” sensation in his mouth and reportedly seeing that bat’s head twitching, forcing the Prince of Darkness to endure painful rabies injections in the aftermath.

It’s the doves that illustrated his mania during those early years, however. Riding high off the success of his solo debut, Blizzard of Ozz, a 1981 meeting with CBS execs to arrange US promotion was sharply put to an end when an intoxicated Osbourne took two of the three doves intended to be released as a stunt and chomped their heads off to the horror of the team. According to the former Black Sabbath frontman, the birds’ neck tasted like tomato sauce.