Hey there! I’m John Green, and welcome to my salon. Today, we’re diving into some cool and quirky facts about rock bands. Did you know that in the late 1990s, Joey Ramone from the Ramones had a huge crush on Maria Bartiromo, a CNBC talk show host? They became pen pals, and she even gave him investment advice over email. Joey wrote a song for her and invited her to CBGB to hear it. She couldn’t make it, but she sent a camera crew instead. She later called it a “tremendous tribute.”
To promote Radiohead’s debut album, “Pablo Honey,” their U.S. record label, Capitol, decided to team them up with Beavis and Butt-Head. One ad even said, “Radiohead: Better than Butt-Head.” Pretty cringy, right?
Back in the 1960s, the Rolling Stones were known for their long hair, which annoyed British hairdressers. They even complained in newspapers! In response, the Stones took out an ad in a music magazine wishing “Happy Christmas to the starving hairdressers and their families.”
Tom Morello, the guitarist from Rage Against the Machine, is a huge Star Trek fan. He even appeared in “Star Trek: Insurrection” and an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager.” Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, loved “The Lord of the Rings,” which you can tell from their song “Ramble On.” However, there’s no picture of a “Lord of the Rings” character inside Led Zeppelin IV; it’s actually a tarot card figure.
There’s a myth that Jimmy Page played the guitar solo for The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” While it’s a great solo, it wasn’t him. He did help with other Kinks songs, though.
The band Garbage got its name because someone said their music sounded like garbage. But they’re in good company; AC/DC’s first album was once called “hard rock’s all-time low” by Rolling Stone. Years later, AC/DC was on the magazine’s cover!
The Sex Pistols were also criticized, with NME calling their song “Anarchy in the UK” a “third-rate Who imitation.” Speaking of The Who, there’s a legend that they were banned from Holiday Inn hotels after a wild incident in 1967. No one knows for sure, but they were billed $50,000!
The Black Keys have their own hotel story. At the Columbia Hotel in London, when the staff stopped serving them, they wrapped a tablecloth around the beer tap and kept the beer flowing all night.
In 1960, The Beatles had a 56-night residency at the Kaiserkeller Club in Germany. They played multiple sets every night, sharing the stage with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, whose drummer was Ringo Starr. Talk about a busy schedule!
The Beatles recorded “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” at Abbey Road, the same time and place Pink Floyd recorded their debut album. In the ’90s, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video featured a dancing janitor, a nod to Kurt Cobain’s past job as a janitor.
Aerosmith’s hit “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” wasn’t on any of their albums; it was on the “Armageddon” soundtrack. Joe Elliott of Def Leppard admitted he has “not a clue” what “Pour Some Sugar On Me” means.
Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” was a fluke collaboration. Bowie was in the studio for another song, and they ended up writing a new one together. Vanilla Ice later turned it into “Ice Ice Baby.”
U2 once performed as their own opening act, disguising themselves as The Dalton Brothers and singing country songs. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. isn’t a fan of their hit “Shiny Happy People,” calling it “limited appeal.”
Green Day had to scrap an album called “Cigarettes and Valentine” after the recordings were stolen. They started fresh with “American Idiot.” The Talking Heads’ album “Speaking in Tongues” got its name because the lyrics started as gibberish.
Pearl Jam’s name has a few origin stories, one involving Eddie Vedder’s great-grandmother’s jam. KISS doesn’t stand for “Knights in Satan’s Service”; they just liked the name.
The Foo Fighters had a 52-page tour rider in 2011, filled with fun activities like coloring pages. On Mötley Crüe’s final tour, Tommy Lee had a 55-foot drum roller coaster!
Eddie Van Halen originally played drums, and Alex played guitar, but they switched after Alex got better at drums. Paul Simonon of The Clash switched to bass because it was easier with only four strings.
Cherie Currie once called into a radio station to tell Joan Jett she was proud of her. Arnel Pineda became Journey’s lead singer after being discovered on YouTube, where he sang Journey covers.
Two Metallica members voiced dragons in a Disney series, and Jim Morrison was pardoned for a 1969 incident decades later. Guns N’ Roses spent $1.5 million on the “November Rain” video, with an $88,000 custom coffin!
Jerry Garcia’s estate earned $400,000 a year from Ben and Jerry’s for “Cherry Garcia.” The Beach Boys used unique instruments like Coke cans and bicycle horns in “Pet Sounds.”
Finally, my favorite rock fact: Michael Bolton might have auditioned for Black Sabbath after Ozzy Osbourne left. Bolton denies it, but Tony Iommi insists it’s true!
Thanks for joining me on this rock and roll journey. Let me know your first concert in the comments. Mine was The Cure. And remember, don’t forget to be awesome!
Research a rock band of your choice and create a fact sheet with at least five interesting facts about them. Include quirky stories, myths, or collaborations similar to those in the article. Present your findings to the class and explain why you chose this band.
Choose a rock band mentioned in the article and create a timeline of their major events and milestones. Use images, dates, and brief descriptions to illustrate their journey. Share your timeline with the class and discuss how these events shaped the band’s history.
Pick one of the myths or misunderstandings mentioned in the article, such as the Jimmy Page guitar solo myth. Investigate the truth behind it and present your findings to the class. Discuss why such myths might arise and how they affect the band’s legacy.
In groups, choose a rock band and role-play a famous or fictional scenario from their history. You could reenact a quirky collaboration or a hotel incident. Use props and costumes to make it engaging. Afterward, discuss what you learned about the band’s dynamics and challenges.
Imagine you are designing an album cover for one of the bands mentioned in the article. Use elements from their history, such as their interests or unique stories, to inspire your design. Present your album cover to the class and explain the symbolism behind your artwork.
Sure! Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript, removing any inappropriate language and ensuring clarity:
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Hi, I’m John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is a Mental Floss video, and you know that in the late 1990s, Joey Ramone of the Ramones was infatuated with then-CNBC talk show host Maria Bartiromo. They eventually became pen pals, and she would give him investment advice over email. He even wrote her a song and asked her to come to CBGB to hear it. She couldn’t make it, but she did send a camera crew. She later very generously called it a tremendous tribute.
That’s the first of many facts about rock bands I’m going to share with you today. This video is brought to you by our friends at Geo to promote Radiohead’s debut album, “Pablo Honey.” Their U.S. record label, Capitol, made the unusual choice to align them with Beavis and Butt-Head. One print ad read, “Radiohead: Better than Butt-Head.” That’s just terrible; it’s so cringy.
Before they were astonishingly old and somehow still alive, the Rolling Stones were cool for their long hair, which frustrated British hairdressers in the 1960s. Hairdressers even wrote to newspapers to complain about the new popular style. In December 1964, the band took out an ad in the music magazine NME that said, “Happy Christmas to the starving hairdressers and their families.”
The guitarist of Rage Against the Machine, Tom Morello, loves Star Trek. He even appeared in “Star Trek: Insurrection” and an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager.” Other nerdy rockers, Led Zeppelin, loved “The Lord of the Rings,” as you might know from the Mordor and Gollum references in “Ramble On.” However, it’s a myth that there’s a picture of a “Lord of the Rings” character inside Led Zeppelin IV; that’s actually a figure borrowed from tarot cards.
Another rock myth is that Jimmy Page played the guitar solo for The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” It’s a myth that makes sense in a way because the Kinks couldn’t play their instruments very well, and that is a proper good rock solo, but no, it was not Jimmy Page, although he did help out with a couple of other Kinks songs.
The band Garbage got its name because an early listener told them that their music sounded like garbage. But getting negative reviews puts Garbage in good company; in 1976, Rolling Stone reviewed AC/DC’s first album, stating, “Hard Rock has unquestionably hit its all-time low.” Thirty-two years later, still rocking hard, AC/DC appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. By the way, hard rock actually hit its all-time low with the band All Time Low. I’m just kidding, All Time Low fans and members who watch Mental Floss.
Another poorly reviewed rock band was the Sex Pistols. Also in 1976, NME wrote up “Anarchy in the UK” and claimed Johnny Rotten sings flat; the song is laughably naive, and the overall feeling is of a third-rate Who imitation. Speaking of The Who, there’s a legend that they were banned from all Holiday Inn hotels after a 1967 incident in which they backed a Lincoln Continental into a pool in Michigan. No one knows for sure what happened, least of all the members of The Who, but lead singer Roger Daltrey has claimed that they were billed $50,000 for whatever went down that night.
Another rock band that’s a nightmare for hotels is The Black Keys. They like to stay at the Columbia Hotel in London, and according to singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach, once when the staff wouldn’t serve them anymore, they took a tablecloth, wrapped it around the beer tap, and the beer flowed all night.
Beginning in 1960, The Beatles had a 56-night residency at a club called the Kaiserkeller Club in Germany. They worked every day of the week and played from 7:30 to 9 p.m., then 9:30 to 11:00 p.m., then 11:30 p.m. to 1:00 a.m., and then 1:30 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. They alternated sets with a band called Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, whose drummer at the time was none other than Ringo Starr. No, Ringo Starr is truly the luckiest man ever to walk into the Kaiserkeller Club.
Speaking of The Beatles, they recorded “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” at Abbey Road, the same place and time that Pink Floyd recorded their debut album, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”
Okay, let’s jump forward to the ’90s. The dancing janitor in the music video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a reference to the fact that Kurt Cobain worked as a janitor in a high school very soon after dropping out of that very same high school. Aerosmith’s biggest hit, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” wasn’t on any of their albums; its only album release in the U.S. was on the soundtrack for the 1998 film “Armageddon.”
Speaking of big hits, Joe Elliott of Def Leppard has admitted that he has “not a clue” about what “Pour Some Sugar On Me” means. “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie was kind of a fluke; Bowie just happened to be in the studio with the band helping out with the song “Cool Cat,” and then they sat down and wrote a new song. Later, Vanilla Ice turned it into “Ice Ice Baby,” ruining “Under Pressure” forever.
While touring in the ’80s, U2 performed as their own opening act a couple of times. They’d put on wigs, call themselves The Dalton Brothers, and sing country songs. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. once said about the band’s hit “Shiny Happy People,” “I hate that song.” Recently, he’s toned down his criticism a bit and just says that it has “limited appeal” for him.
In 2003, Green Day was about to finish an album titled “Cigarettes and Valentine,” but 20 song recordings got stolen, so they had to scrap the album and start on a new one, “American Idiot.” The Talking Heads’ album “Speaking in Tongues” is called that because it initially contained gibberish. David Byrne once explained, “I originally sang nonsense, and I made words to fit that, and that worked out all right.”
Pearl Jam has a lot of stories about how they got their name. Early on, they said it was named for the great-grandmother of Eddie Vedder, who laced her jam with peyote. Of course, that sounds like nonsense and probably was. Later, they said they just liked the word “pearl” and added “jam” when they went to a Neil Young concert in which he did some versions of his songs in jam style.
It’s a myth that KISS stands for “Knights in Satan’s Service.” According to Gene Simmons, they just liked the name. In his autobiography, he wrote that at one point they were stopped at a red light, and Paul said, “How about KISS?” Peter and I nodded, and that was it. It made sense.
The Foo Fighters had a 52-page tour rider in 2011, but not because they were super high maintenance. It was actually a fun activity book with coloring pages and word searches. On the most recent and allegedly final Mötley Crüe tour, Tommy Lee had a 55-foot drum roller coaster. According to him, drumming upside down that high in the air is twice as difficult.
Originally, Eddie Van Halen played the drums, and Alex played guitar, but Alex eventually got better than Eddie at the drums, so he switched to guitar. Similarly, Paul Simonon, who played bass for The Clash, originally tried to learn guitar but switched because, according to him, the bass is easier and has only four strings.
Cherie Currie called into a radio station while Joan Jett was being interviewed years after their band The Runaways had broken up. Currie had heard Jett being interviewed, so she dialed to let Jett know that she was proud of her. In 2007, Arnel Pineda became the lead singer of Journey. Before that, he was actually the lead singer of a cover band called The Zoo, and yes, he performed Journey covers. The band discovered him on YouTube, which reminds me: Guns N’ Roses say if you can’t get Axl Rose to come out of retirement, it’s actually me singing “Welcome to the Jungle,” but in a copyright-acceptable way.
Two members of Metallica, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, voiced dragons in an episode of the animated Disney series “Dave the Barbarian.” In 2010, Florida officials pardoned Jim Morrison for a 1969 incident at a Doors concert in which he supposedly unzipped his pants on stage and flashed the audience. It only took four decades, and he was dead, you know, but still.
To return to Guns N’ Roses briefly, they reportedly paid $1.5 million to make the “November Rain” music video; allegedly, the custom-made coffin in the video alone cost $88,000. In the late 1990s, it was estimated that Jerry Garcia’s estate was paid $400,000 a year by Ben and Jerry’s to use the name “Cherry Garcia.” The instruments used in the Beach Boys’ brilliant album “Pet Sounds” included Coke cans, bicycle horns, water jugs, and finger symbols.
Finally, I return to my salon to tell you my all-time favorite fact from rock and roll history, which is that Michael Bolton may have auditioned as the vocalist in Black Sabbath after Ozzy Osbourne left. Bolton has denied this in interviews, because of course he has, but Tony Iommi insists that it was Bolton on the audition tapes.
Thanks for watching this video, which was made with the help of all of these nice people and made possible by our friends at Ginkgo. In the comments, let me know the first concert you ever went to. Mine was The Cure, and as we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome!
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Let me know if you need any further modifications!
Rock – A genre of popular music that originated in the 1950s, characterized by a strong beat and the use of electric guitars. – The rock concert last night featured some of the greatest hits from the 1980s.
Bands – Groups of musicians who play instruments and perform together, often specializing in a particular genre of music. – Many famous bands from the 1960s, like The Beatles, changed the course of music history.
Music – The art or science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion. – Classical music has a rich history that dates back hundreds of years.
History – The study of past events, particularly in human affairs, which can include the development of music over time. – The history of jazz music is a fascinating journey through cultural and social changes in America.
Album – A collection of recordings issued as a single item on CD, record, or another medium, often by a single artist or band. – The band’s latest album topped the charts within a week of its release.
Guitar – A stringed musical instrument played with fingers or a pick, commonly used in many music genres, especially rock and pop. – The guitarist played an amazing solo during the concert, showcasing his skills.
Song – A short piece of music with words that are sung, often telling a story or expressing emotions. – The song became an anthem for the youth during the 1970s.
Tour – A series of concerts, performances, or appearances that an artist or band gives in different places. – The band announced their world tour, which will include stops in over 20 countries.
Artists – Individuals who create music, often performing or composing songs and albums. – Many artists draw inspiration from their personal experiences to write their music.
Collaboration – The action of working with someone to produce or create something, often seen in music when artists work together on a song or album. – The collaboration between the two famous singers resulted in a hit single that topped the charts.
