Fun Facts: Rock & Roll

Life is mostly about the pursuit of knowledge and, therefore, the collection of fun facts. All my fun facts were harvested personally … They started as a physical book purchase from Amazon, then moved to a Kindle download where I bookmarked them by hand; at the conclusion of a book they were transcribed into a Snoopy Moleskine, and finally, they appear here for your personal wonderment.

• In 1970, Neal Schon was fifteen years old and had two job offers, one was to join Santana and the second was to go to England and play with Derek & the Dominoes.
• When Woodstock started, Yogi Bhajan asked the audience to “meditate for one minute for brotherhood” to which a voice in the crowd screamed out: “Fuck you. Let’s boogie.”
• Here’s the translation of the lyric in The Doors song “Five To One” that says “Five to one, one to five”: the first part is the preferred ratio for cutting heroin and the second part are the odds when playing Russian roulette.

• Buddy Holly’s song “That’ll Be the Day” comes from the line John Wayne utters multiple times in the movie The Searchers.
• Elvis Presley’s drug of choice was Dilaudid, a synthetic morphine prescribed for cancer patients and amputees; he’d also routinely pack his nostrils with cocaine-soaked cotton balls.
• Jerry Garcia played 2,314 gigs over three decades.
• Jerry Garcia liked to smoked ninety-five percent Persian black tar heroin, while Janis Joplin preferred to shoot China White heroin. To each his own.
• Johnny Cash sold 6.5 million records in 1969.
• In 1974, the Cadillac High School Vikings in Minnesota started the season 0-2, then their coach started playing Kiss music during warm-ups and they won seven straight games … Kiss came and played at halftime of their homecoming game.
• When Sammy Hagar first met Alex Van Halen, he was drinking a case of tall malt liquors a day. They’d wake Alex about twenty minutes before show time, he’d shotgun three or four beers, carry two more on stage and finish the case of Schlitz Malt Liquor during the two-hour show. He’d stand up between songs and piss into a trash can.
• Here’s the lineup for the 1988 Monsters of Rock concert (in order): Kingdom Come, Metallica, Dokken, The Scorpions and Van Halen.
• In 1971 Glenn Frey and Don Henley played in Linda Ronstadt’s the Stone Poneys. Their last gig together was at Disneyland’s Grad Night. The contract with Disneyland stipulated that Ronstadt “must wear a bra.”
• Al Kooper played organ on Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” founded Blood Sweat and Tears and produced Lynyrd Skynyrd’s first three albums.
• Tammy Terrell first recorded as Tammy Montgomery, she died of a brain tumor days after collapsing into Marvin Gaye’s arms on stage.
• Delta blues legend Peetie Wheatstraw (William Bauch) was known as the “devil’s son in law” and as the “high sheriff from hell”.
• “Classical Gas” by Mason Williams is the most played instrumental in the history of American radio.
• Three Dog Night had 21 consecutive top 40 hits, I bet you can’t even name “One.” Harry Nilsson wrote “One.”
• Only seven bands have sold more records in America than Metallica: The Beatles, the Stones, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Eagles, Aerosmith and Van Halen.
• From “Close to You” in 1970 until “I Need to Be In Love” in 1976 every Carpenters single reached #1 or #2.
• Springsteen was fifteen when he heard Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” while in a car with his mother. He described it as, “Somebody kicking open the door to your mind.”
• When Steven Georgiou (Cat Stevens) was twenty-two, between the spring of 1970 and summer of 1971, in just fourteen months, he wrote, recorded and released: “Where Do the Children Play,” “Wildworld,” “Father and Son,” “Tuesday’s Dead,” “Morning Has Broken,” “Moonshadow” and “Peace Train.”
• In the early 1970s Murry Wilson (Brian’s dad) sold Brian Wilson’s song catalog – “Good Vibrations,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “God Only Knows,” etc. to A&M records for less the one million dollars.
• Seventy-five percent of the 537 songs Motown released in the 1960s made the charts and 79 were top ten hits.