Five of the craziest coincidences in rock and roll history
On March 12, 1951, the British comic strip character Dennis the Menace debuted in an issue of the Beano. On the same day, across the pond, an American comic strip character called Dennis the Menace made his first appearance in American newspapers. The two characters are both mischievous little boys, one dark-haired and one blonde-haired, and both went on to massive popularity for decades to come.
These characters were not created by the same person, however, nor were they owned by the same publishers. Somehow, despite investigations into plagiarism and some trademark disputes, the two Dennises were found to have been created entirely independently of one another, at essentially the exact same point in time, as if something in the glorious post-war ether of the early ‘50s had simultaneously manifested them into existence as cross-Atlantic cousins. This, for my money, is the greatest coincidence of recent human history.
The word coincidence, much like the word ironic, is deployed in far too many situations these days to describe events that don’t remotely meet the dictionary standard definition of the phenomenon. Not everything needs to rise to the level of the ‘two Dennises’, of course, but we still need to have a clear understanding of what separates a freaky happenstance from a fairly predictable coming together of things.
In a rock ‘n’ roll history context, for example, it’s not actually a coincidence that some of the people in attendance at the first Sex Pistols gig in Manchester in 1976 went on to form Joy Division, The Smiths, and The Fall. That’s just an amusing but logical causal connection: similarly-minded, ambitious young punk rock fans in the same city go to the same concert, get inspired for the same reasons, and eventually make their own music. They didn’t wind up at the concert randomly, and the outcome wasn’t serendipity.
The same goes for the events from ‘The Day the Music Died’, a tragedy that hinged on fateful decisions and included plenty of darkly prophetic moments, but not really anything straight-up coincidental. Waylon Jennings did infamously joke to Buddy Holly, “I hope your ole plane crashes”, but that was a direct response to Holly joking that he hoped Waylon’s bus froze up. They were making light of actual legitimate concerns they had about their respective modes of transport in the middle of a winter storm. If, however, Buddy Holly had recorded a song a year earlier titled ‘Last Moments in Iowa’, that would qualify as both premonitory irony and a coincidence.
Fortunately, I don’t need to spend the rest of this piece annoyingly nitpicking all the misclassified coincidences in music history, because there are plenty of perfectly bizarre and amusing moments that do fit the Merriam-Webster definition of “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection”. So, without further ado, let’s explore.
Five legitimately crazy coincidences in rock and roll history:
The Eleanor Rigby gravestone
“I was sitting at the piano when I thought of it,” Paul McCartney said not long after the release of one of The Beatles’ most beloved songs, the lonesome, string-inflected character study ‘Eleanor Rigby’. “The first few bars just came to me, and I got this name in my head… ‘Daisy Hawkins picks up the rice in the church’. I don’t know why.”
Yes, for a hot minute there, Eleanor Rigby was nearly Daisy Hawkins, but Paul correctly recognised the beats didn’t quite work, and he soon recast his leading lady, knocking it out of the park with his new name idea. At the time, and for decades after, McCartney insisted that “Rigby” had been inspired by a shop sign he’d seen in Bristol, and that “Eleanor” probably came to him “from Eleanor Bron, the actress we worked with in the film Help!”
At some point in the 1980s, though, some observant Liverpudlian happened to be walking through a cemetery by Saint Peter’s Church in Woolton, a place Paul McCartney and John Lennon used to hang out as teenagers, and noticed a gravestone from 1939 that everyone else had somehow marched right past, without clocking, marking the final resting place of a real-life Eleanor Rigby, who had died at 44, shortly before Paul and John were born. Had Paul subconsciously stowed away a childhood memory of this stone as future songwriting fuel? He didn’t think so. It was, instead, to the best of his knowledge, a very odd coincidence.
Keith Moon and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s doomed album covers
For the cover art of The Who’s 1978 album Who Are You?, photographer Terry O’Neill had the band pose among a mess of equipment outside Shepperton Studios, with drummer Keith Moon placed behind a chair so as to conceal his alcoholism-induced weight gain, but there was a small detail that proved unintentionally prescient.
As O’Neill recalled to Shutterbug in 2015, “Coincidentally, the chair was marked with the label ‘Not To Be Taken Away’, an accidental irony given [Keith’s] life was about to be snuffed out”. Moon died of a drug overdose just three weeks after the album’s release, and Who fans immediately noticed the creepy connection.
To many, it was eerily reminiscent of a similarly morbid coincidence with the cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors album a year earlier, which depicted the band engulfed in flames. Days after its release, a fiery plane crash killed several members of the group, including frontman Ronnie Van Zant.
Mark Bolan’s weird lyric takes on a new meaning
Sticking with the theme of eerie death coincidences, Marc Bolan always had a habit of weaving strange, poetic imagery into his lyrics, but the lines “Life is the same and it always will be / Hey, hey, hey / Easy as picking foxes from a tree” from T Rex’s 1972 single ‘Solid Gold Easy Action’ have taken on a weird, much mythologised afterlife.
Five years after recording the song, Bolan would die in a car crash in southwest London when a car driven by his partner, singer Gloria Jones, crashed into a tree (Jones survived). The accident report noted that the car’s registration plate number was FOX 661L, suddenly creating a meaning behind the previously nonsensical image of a fox being removed from a tree.
In the same song, Bolan had also mentioned, “A woman from the east with her headlights shining / Hey, hey, hey / Eased my pain and stopped my crying”.
Syd Barrett pops ‘round to Abbey Road
In 1975, while Pink Floyd were working on a mixing session of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, their sprawling tribute to former bandmate Syd Barrett, a coincidence of Dennis the Menace proportions took place, when Barrett walked into Abbey Road Studios, unannounced and barely recognisable, after years of no communication.
He had shaved his head and eyebrows, gained a significant amount of weight, and was behaving in a detached, almost ghostlike manner. When David Gilmour finally realised who the visitor was and told the rest of the band, Roger Waters immediately broke down, overwhelmed. There they were, crafting a musical elegy to Barrett, and suddenly he was standing right there in the room, as if mystically summoned. He reportedly listened for a short while, made some odd remarks, and then quietly left.
There’s no logical explanation tying the timing together, making it one of those uncanny, inexplicable sorts of moments that make a good rock anecdote worth telling.
Bryan and Ryan Adams: birthday bros
This final entry isn’t quite on the level of the other four in terms of intrigue and retellability, but the best coincidences do have a poetry to them, and sometimes a silly sense of humour.
Indie rock singer/songwriter Ryan Adams has long had a notorious reputation for being a bit of a bad hang, prone to surliness onstage and occasionally yelling at reporters. His ex-partner, Mandy Moore, had far worse accusations than that, but we’ll keep it simple for the purposes of this story. The main thing to know is that one of Ryan Adams’s greatest pet peeves, for years, was being compared to, or confused with, the very similarly named vanilla pop star Bryan Adams, singer of mighty torch songs like the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves anthem ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’.
Back in the 2000s, if someone dared to call Ryan ‘Bryan’, even by mistake, fisticuffs might ensue, as Ryan considered any such association a direct insult, which makes it delightfully satisfying to learn that both Adams actually share the same birthday: Bonfire Night, November 5th (1959 for Bryan, 1974 for Ryan). Maybe it was this odd coincidence that helped soften Ryan to Bryan over time, as he eventually gave up the beef and even covered ‘Summer of ’69’ at some gigs in 2015.
