Blood, sex and Princess Diana: 10 music conspiracy theories that are actually true
The music industry has always been a great place for myth-making. Although there are plenty of artists who love to strut their stuff onstage, there are always those few people who sit and wonder what really goes on behind closed doors whenever their favourite acts retire for the night. Some of them may have had absolutely lunatic theories about their favourite bands, but sometimes those legends from artists like Keith Richards are true.
As much as they might seem crazy at the time, every one of these outlandish tales of rock and roll debauchery do have a little bit of truth to them. While some of them have been a bit more exaggerated than others, the songs, tours, and insanity that went into these stories all stemmed from a real place.
Then again, none of those stories takes away from the brilliant music they made. All good rock bands can usually get by on the power of their music, but it’s sometimes nice to know that the people behind some of your favourite songs either have a checkered past or have gone through enough live experiences to kill someone half their age.
Some of them may be dark, and not every story is meant to have a happy ending, but given that a few of these rock stars are still around to tell their tales, they don’t even feel like real people anymore. These are the titans of music, and the fact that most of them came out in one piece is quite honestly a miracle.
10 musical conspiracy theories that turned out to be true
10. Queen’s wild night with Princess Diana
To say that Freddie Mercury liked to indulge himself in the 1980s is to put it mildly. As much as Bohemian Rhapsody may have touched on the wild parties that Queen had back in the 1970s, a more accurate account of those times would probably give the film an X rating. Mercury did rub elbows with a few famous friends along the way as well, and one wild night meant having an official member of the Royal Family out on the town.
Between shows in the 1980s, Mercury convinced Diana, Princess of Wales, to go out with him and a bunch of friends one night. Dressing her up as a male model, one of the most famous faces in England, went virtually unnoticed throughout the entire night until they finally settled down back at Mercury’s place later that evening.
Although there has never been any video footage of the event, Queen may have been one of the only bands that could have gotten away with something like this. In the world of rock and roll excess, Queen were just out to have a good time, and if it meant bringing a member of the most important family in England with them, so be it.
9. AC/DC’s amp caught on fire during recording
Every guitarist usually has their dream of an amp catching on fire because of how well they are crushing it onstage. You may be a hotshot guitarist, but this is the moment where even the hardware you’re using can’t handle how much of a badass you are at the moment. AC/DC didn’t need to prove themselves as a kickass rock and roll by the time of Let There Be Rock, but halfway through recording the title song, the amps eventually gave out.
When listening to the song on its own, there’s already something slightly off about Angus Young’s guitar tone, sounding like the guitar is about to explode in his hands. Once they got to the final solo, the amplifier was smoking in the studio, with every channel overheating because of how loud it was.
The show must go on, though, and Young continued to play out the solo until the end, with the entire crashing out at the tune’s end. There’s no telling what happened immediately after the tape stopped rolling, but let’s hope that any safety precautions were taken and Young was given a halfway decent amp afterwards.
8. Kiss put their own blood in a comic book
For many young rock fans, Kiss didn’t even seem real. There had been larger-than-life rock stars before, but these were the kind of guys who felt like they were ripped right off the pages of a comic book, including a bass player who literally spit blood onstage. Though the band was made for the superhero genre, their first turn to the world of comic books had a much more personal touch than anyone imagined.
Right before the first Kiss comic book went to be published, the band took vials of their own blood and poured it into the red ink. Even though the whole thing was meant to be a publicity stunt, there is footage of the band at the factory taking their blood and eventually putting it into the huge vat of ink.
While it’s the kind of thing that would be a major health hazard these days, it all seemed like good, clean fun at the time, especially for kids who thought that they actually had a piece of the band to carry around with them. If you are still the proud owner of one of those comic books in mint condition, please be wary if you pick it up and hear it crunch when you turn the pages.
7. Sting’s tantric sex habits
Rock stars have always liked to talk themselves up as the ultimate sexual beings. Since half of their lives are spent onstage singing songs about scoring some action, you’re going to want to at least give off the impression that you can hold your own behind closed doors. Whereas most people talk up their sexual exploits, Sting has created the equivalent to running a marathon whenever he’s in the bedroom.
After leaving The Police and well into his solo career, Sting began practising different forms of meditation to keep his mind and body at ease. That meant having a clear head when playing, making sure his body was fully at rest, and one other thing…tantric sex.
As far as Sting is concerned, there are no time limits on his sexual drive, claiming that his method involves him being sexually active for more than seven hours at a time without stopping. It’s nice to hear that the frontman has peace of mind due to meditation, but is it necessarily bragging when you can keep everything going in the amount of time it takes to watch Lawrence of Arabia twice?
6. Black Sabbath flirted with the occult to create ‘Black Sabbath’
It would come as a shock to no one if Black Sabbath announced tomorrow that they were secretly in league with Satan. When they first started making their dark take on rock and roll, the media were already jumping on the band as one of the most morally corrupt groups in the world, despite the fact that two of them wore crucifixes whenever they played live. Geezer Butler was always interested in the mystical side of life, though, and the song ‘Black Sabbath’ did come from a horrific experience in the occult.
While Butler became interested in the practice because of its association with astral planes, he was gifted a book on the occult that he kept by his bed. After having it in his possession for one too many nights, Butler awoke to find a mysterious cloaked figure next to his bed pointing directly at him. Whereas most people would find a way to burn that book at the nearest opportunity, Butler did the next best thing…he wrote a song about it.
The experience was lifted nearly verbatim by Ozzy Osbourne for the band’s namesake track, including being given the spooky treatment thanks to Tony Iommi’s tritone riff. Although Butler said he had gotten rid of the book later, the scenario that he experienced feels like something that was left out of Ari Aster’s Hereditary.
5. Van Halen’s insistence on no brown M+M’s
Every artist is prone to have diva moments at least once in their career. No matter how many times they have talked about being just a regular Joe, there will always be some accommodations that come to them a little faster than everyone else. While Van Halen definitely had the party band image that made anyone love them, their insistence on not having a specific snack food on their rider was entirely practical.
Since hardly anything goes into the backstage area, the band always had their rider full of instructions on how the light show was supposed to work and snacks to have, which included a bowl of M+M’s. There was just one rule they had: “ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES.” If they came anywhere close to the green room and saw brown M+M’s, they would trash the room.
Although this might seem like a case of rock star partying gone too far, it’s exactly what they needed to check everything. According to David Lee Roth, the reason behind the snack debacle was to make sure the venue had read every word of their contract to make sure nothing was wrong once it came time to play a show. Some divas can be a handful, but Van Halen was more worried about their crew when it came to their outrageous demands.
4. The Beach Boys did work with Charles Manson
At the start of The Summer of Love, California seemed like a magical place where nothing could go wrong. Everyone was living the psychedelic lifestyle, so it wasn’t out of the question for someone to mistake the Haight-Ashbury scene as a glorified utopia half the time. A bit further down the California coast was The Beach Boys, but they had a sinister figure lurking in the background.
When working out various songs for B-sides, Dennis Wilson had recommended working with a new kid in town he had just heard of named Charles Manson. Although the band would drastically change what the infamous madman wrote, the song ‘Never Learn Not To Love’ is roughly based on the sketches that Manson had begun working on.
Apparently, the omissions ended up souring Manson and Wilson’s relationship so much that he would get surprise visits from ‘The Family’, who would later threaten to kill members of his family when Wilson was on the road. Even though Wilson said that he would eventually recount his experiences with Manson in a tell-all book, he never got the chance to elaborate, passing away in the late 1980s in a drowning accident.
3. Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Rocket Queen’ features real-life sex
There was no greater band that epitomised the term ‘sleaze’ quite like Guns N’ Roses. As much as the hair metal scene was beginning to look passe in the late 1980s, Slash and Axl Rose brought a rough-and-tumble attitude back into the genre that felt like the late 1970s all over again. The order of the day was sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but Rose ended up taking that first step a bit too seriously.
When working on their debut Appetite for Destruction, Rose had the idea of having some sound effects put on the song ‘Rocket Queen’ when drummer Steven Adler’s girlfriend walked into the studio, still fuming after an argument with him. As a way of payback, Rose suggested that they have sex in the middle of the studio, which was then recorded for the song and can now be heard over the guitar solo during the instrumental break.
While there’s a good chance that no one who agreed to this was sober during it, the track does get a lot more dangerous-sounding once you know what’s really going on in the background. The band may have gotten what they needed for the record, but the moral decisions behind every piece of this incident are incredibly questionable.
2. Led Zeppelin’s Mudshark Incident
Since we’re on morally questionable decisions, who here knows of a little band called Led Zeppelin? As much as the group changed rock and roll in their short time together, not everything they did would put them in glowing terms had they started today rather than 1968. Trashing hotel rooms and being obnoxious on the road is one thing, but The Mudshark Incident is one of the most singularly gross things that anyone has gotten into on the road.
During a stop-gap between shows, the band were staying at a hotel right next to the water, where John Bonham would be fishing right outside his balcony. No 1970s rock and roll story is short on groupies, but someone had a truly heinous idea of using one of the mud sharks they caught to…shall we say…do the job for them with one of their female friends.
While Robert Plant has said numerous times that he has no memory of the incident, many members of the Zeppelin camp have talked about being there when it happened, even claiming that a member of the touring band Vanilla Fudge had a video of it all. Many fans like to chalk incidents like this up to more ignorant times, but even by the standards of the 1970s, there’s a good chance that someone would have been in jail if the footage had been made public.
1. Keith Richards snorting his father’s ashes
It’s a miracle of modern science that Keith Richards can count himself among the living. The amount of times where he had the opportunity to die throughout every facet of The Rolling Stones’ career is too many to count, and yet he still has that strange cockroach DNA that makes him impervious to death. If cocaine, heroin, and a blood transfusion couldn’t kill him, then a handful of ashes didn’t stand a chance.
When talking about the wildest things that he had ever smoked, Richards remembered having a hit of some of his father’s remains. Looking for some kind of kick, Richards talked about whipping out a straw and ingesting the last of his father, which would most likely give someone a headache rather than any high.
Even though Richards has changed his story numerous times saying that it was all meant in good fun, he said that his dad wouldn’t have cared had he known what he had done. Still, when all of the signs point to Richards being dead a long time ago, the fact that he’s able to snort his father’s ashes and walk away clean feels like him having a go at the powers that be.
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