Seven Sins from The Good Old Days: Shameful rock ‘n’ roll ‘antics’ that would now get you cancelled
“The rock star is dying,” Nick Cave proclaimed, “and it’s a small tragedy.” Indeed, it is true, music is a sanitised realm now, where loose ends are quickly combed back into place. Is it less exciting as a result? Perhaps. But given the dark side that often gets glossed over, raucous rock ‘n’ roll antics are hardly amiss either, because all too often the joke was far from a laughing matter.
Along with the waning status of the rocker, the days of opulent excesses have gone into hiding, and that is actually a small victory. The swaggering enigma of mystic stars who seem bigger than themselves is a loss, and maybe the feuds and frolics that illuminate discourses within society are too, but some of the wasteful, dangerous and troubling stunts that they engaged in are gladly gone with the wind and would be rightly condemned in this more discerning and equitable age.
And therein lies the point of cancel culture. On paper, ‘cancelling’ is a bad thing in itself. It seems merciless and mercy is a pillar that keeps any functioning and tolerant society upright. It is an acknowledgement of our universal fallibility. It is far from absolution or the other extreme of cancellation. It sits in the middle ground of accountability and forgiveness, which provides the necessary open space for a society to grow, converse, and be empathetic. The bipartisan extreme of cancel culture narrowed this breathing space and condemned many who found themselves outside of the linear realm of stringent acceptance to the ash heap of history without any chance of redemption.
This outlook of moral certainty has beset the world of culture more than most. Celebrity, after all, is an alternate reality and the online world these stars exist in is devoid of the same personable discussion that allows us to empathetically hash out our differences in genuine society. If pubs and public spaces were comment sections, you would never leave the house. As playwriter, Danny Robins recently told me: “Once you get two people in a room together, it’s very hard to hate each other. Just as it’s very hard to change people’s minds in 140 characters, but when you do get together and talk about stuff, you do feel that people’s positions are less hardened than even they themselves thought.”
And that same token finds the middle-ground of culture where spades should rightfully be called spades. Because while ‘cancel culture’ may have pushed things too far on occasion, that should not derail the drive for a more egalitarian society. Both sides in the bipartisan debate have appropriated the phrase and twisted it, when, in truth, in the middle of the histrionics is the noble strive to hold others accountable for their actions and expose the exploitation of privileges.
So, while there are myriad elements of alternative music’s past that have rightfully been reconciled in the publication consciousness and condemned – bar a few folks who still cling to the notion that it was a different time – the idea of laughable antics is still passed. And calling out these antics when they aren’t really that laughable or victimless is often met with, ‘Oh, you must be fun at parties’. But who were these antics really fun for? The examples below show times in rock’s past when things were pushed the damaging extremes that, thankfully, would no longer fly.
Shameful rock ‘n’ roll ‘antics’ that would now get you cancelled:
The tax-dodging ways of The Rolling Stones
We might now look at hell-raising exile of The Rolling Stones in France as a mere comic symptom of their wild ways. After all, they were even proudly open about it themselves, titling the resultant record Exile on Main St. But if a new band had blown their fortune on drugs and shot off after a brief British tour to avoid an incoming bill from the government to lay low and make a fortune in a tax haven then I highly doubt that many people would be crediting it as a bit of old school rebellion.
In fairness, it’s hardly retrospective criticism to condemn them for this. Their latest tour in the UK and Europe earned them £36million, off the back of this, they are reported to have paid a mere £300,000 in tax. As the guitarist Keith Richards wrote while sitting on his £295million nest egg in his memoir: “We’re sitting around half the time talking about tax lawyers! The intricacies of Dutch tax law vis-à-vis the English tax law and the French tax law. All of these tax thieves were snapping at our heels.”
John Lennon throwing a glass at a waitress
While Lennon is another rocker with plenty more sins to his name than the less obvious ones that we’re covering in this list, there was one public flashpoint that certainly would’ve hit the headlines these days. When he attended a Smothers Brothers performance at the Troubadour, he relentlessly yelled during their show.
As Jaoba Atlas reported in Rock’s Backpages in 1974: “Finally, the Smothers Brothers’ manager, Ken Fritz, came over and asked Lennon to leave. The ex-Beatle took a swing at Fritz but missed. Fritz swung back. Then Lennon took a glass and threw it at the manager: he missed Fritz but hit a waitress.” On his way out of the premises, the drunken former Beatle was asked for a picture by a 51-year-old woman, she reported that rather than merely say no, he hit her. Now, that is hardly a harmless inebriated lark.
Led Zeppelin’s mudshark incident
This crazy tale of Led Zeppelin, a mudshark, and a groupie begins with the Seattle Pop Festival, July 27th 1969. After a manic show, the band retired to Edgewater Inn. This particular inn was famed for how close to the waterfront it proved to be. It was so close, in fact, that Led Zep figured they could fish from their hotel windows. And that is how a fresh catch of mudshark enters our decrepit story.
Then, as the band’s road manager Richard Cole recalled according to Stephen Davis’ book Hammer of the Gods, “A pretty young groupie with red hair was disrobed and tied to the bed.” With a fresh catch at hand, something truly despicable happened thereafter. “Led Zeppelin then proceeded to stuff pieces of shark into her vagina and rectum,” Davis claims.
The authenticity of the story is heavily disputed, and it would seem there aren’t many corroborated ties to the members themselves aside from allegations that John Bonham was involved. The only things that are certain are: you could fish from the hotel windows, Led Zeppelin were staying there, and they had a coterie of young women following them during the period. The rest is a condemnable tale we can only hope isn’t true.
When Slash used a maid as a shield against Predator
At the height of their fame, Guns N’ Roses began taking heroin and cocaine in copious quantities. This resulted in some troubling incidents that sadly embroiled the public in their downward spiral. Things got so bad that after one intense cocktail of heroin and cocaine, guitarist Slash started tripping at a golf course in Arizona. It was so overwhelming that he thought he was being pursued by “predators… with rubbery-looking dreadlocks” who carried machine guns and harpoons.
Fearing that his death was imminent as surreal assassins targeted him, Slash punched through a glass door at the Golf courses hotel suite. Strangely, he was also fully naked by this point and grabbed an innocent maid standing by as an impromptu “human shield”. He later told the police what was happening: “I was still high enough that I told the story without a shred of self-consciousness.”
Naturally, this was a very harrowing incident for the maid whose ordeal was anything but intoxicated, and perhaps all the more terrifying as a result. Rather than assault, this was viewed more as comic tale of excess with the maid’s ordeal a mere footnote.
Jim Morrison’s secret swinging code
If you think of Jim Morrison, you’ll almost immediately paint him in leather trousers or his striped pantaloons. The man behind these guises was his best friend and fashion designer, January Jansen. Not only were the pair buddies, but they were also often mistaken for twins. This allowed for a bit of questionable tour antics, to say the least.
While on the road, the duo would often rent hotel rooms next door to each other. If they were lucky enough to convince a lady’s back their rooms – which was presumably quite often seeing as though Morrison has 20 paternity suits posthumously pending against him – they would swap women throughout the evening.
Morrison would leave his hotel room, slam his door twice, which was the signal for Jansen to also leave. They would then mull about somewhere for a handful of minutes before swapping rooms and simply hoping that their sexual partners for the evening wouldn’t notice.
Grace Slick’s armed stand-off with the police
Grace Slick’s adventures with acid may well have resulted in masterpieces like ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody to Love’ but the brilliance sadly waned towards a darker end to Jefferson Airplane. This unfurled in myriad condemnable ways even though she once said, “Personally, I never freaked out on acid. I didn’t think it could affect you unless you had psychological problems to begin with, and I didn’t.”
While she might opine that, appearing on the cover of Teenset in blackface along with the caption, “Grace Slick and Jimi Hendrix on being black,” would imply otherwise. Furthermore, when police were once called to her house when an “apparently intoxicated man” phoned them to report that “a drunken woman was firing a shotgun in the house,” they encountered a stand-off upon arrival as Slick brandished a shotgun at them and screamed at the cops ordering them to get off her property.
Ultimately, as per the police report, “officer Bob Rossi was able to wrestle the gun away from her when her attention was diverted,” but the incident hints at an unstable encounter that could’ve been far worse.
Queen’s very anti-Live Aid £200,000+ party
For the launch party of Jazz, Freddie Mercury descended into decadent oblivion with an event that belongs in the realm of fiction, not fact. The night was one of the wildest that the world has ever seen. To give you a flavour, at one point in the evening the line ‘Oh Freddie Mercury is sniffing cocaine off of a hermaphrodite dwarf’s head again’ was auspiciously uttered.
With a coterie of socialites, celebrities and journalists in attendance, guests were greeted at New Orleans Fairmont Hotel not with a handshake or a friendly nod of the head but with a blowjob or cunnilingus sex from the gender of their choosing (which I suppose you could argue is actually the friendliest head nod of them all). “Most hotels offer guests room service,” Freddie Mercury famously quipped to UNCUT journalist Jon Wilde, “This one offers them lip service.”
As far as entertainment goes, the famed publicist Bob Gibson used his £200,000+ budget to hire a man who specialised, for want of a better word, in biting the heads off of live chickens. Alongside that fowl defacer there were Zulu tribesmen, fire-eaters, drag queens, and naked models writhing in baths of uncooked liver, which no doubt absolutely stunk. There were also magicians in attendance to hold up the rather more wholesome side of things. All while a handful of 300lb+ Samoan women lounged on banquet tables, in the nude, smoking cigarettes… out of various orifices. Aside from the decadence and mocking of minorities, perhaps what would draw most criticism these days is perhaps the hypocrisy of the so-called charity that followed this wasteful act.
