Random Most Infamous Rock and Roll Urban Legends (17 items)

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  (#11) Takin' Care of Pizza

  Was one of the most iconic songs of the '70s, Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business,” written in part by a pizza delivery guy who happened to be at the studio? Various versions of this rumor have gone around for years, putting the band in a scenario where they’re working on the song but something is missing – and that something is a piano part. Some versions have the pizza guy actually playing the iconic barrelhouse piano part on the song, others have him just sketching out the chords on a pizza box for someone else to play. Then he vanished, leaving the band to find him and give him a check.

  Neither version is true, though both are espoused by various members of the band. In reality, the piano player on the song was a professional musician who was in the same studio as BTO, recording commercial jingles. The band’s engineer asked him to play piano on the song, and the musician, Norman Durkee, did so – banging out one take of a boogie-woogie that became the best known part of the song. Durkee claims pizza had nothing to do with it. Durkee, who died in 2014, claimed he was paid $90 for the take.
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  (#9) The 27 Club - Not Actually a Thing

  Rock’s most exclusive club isn’t on the Sunset Strip, it’s made up of musicians who died at age 27. Foremost are Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix, who all succumbed to drugs and/or alcohol, around the same time and all at the same age. This coincidence lead to the media dreaming up a mythical “27 Club” where rock stars of that age go when their time is up. Later, Kurt Cobain would take his own life at the same age, and this, combined with his mother's grief at him “joining that stupid club,” revived the mythos of the 27 Club.

  While it’s true that many rock legends, including Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain,  Amy Winehouse, and members of the Stooges and Badfinger all died at the same age, it denotes the occupational hazard of being a musician, not a curse. These rockers didn’t die because they were 27, they died because of drugs and alcohol. Some died in car crashes, showing the risk of spending months at a time on the road. A few were murdered. Regardless, their age had nothing to do with their death, other than that’s the age they were at when they died. Moreover, while there is a large number of musicians who died at 27, there’s a much larger number who didn’t.
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  (#12) Lou Reed

  Lou Reed’s album Berlin is widely hailed as one of the bleakest records of all time. Capping off the horrific tale of a marriage gone wrong is the song “The Kids” which actually features album producer Bob Ezrin’s kids crying and wailing. Legend has it Ezrin and Reed got this effect by telling them their mother was dead and recording the horrifying aftermath.

  In reality though, Ezrin got his kids to cry on tape in a more old fashioned way – recording them refusing to go to bed.
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  (#7) Waylon Jennings Curses Buddy Holly

  While history remembers the trio of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper being killed in a plane crash on “The Day the Music Died,” most people don’t know that future outlaw country superstar Waylon Jennings played bass in Holly’s band - and might have indirectly caused his death.

  Holly had chartered a plane to take him and the band to the next show, and being a nice guy, Jennings gave up his seat to the Big Bopper, getting on the bus instead. While the band members figured out their travel arrangements, Holly chided Jennings, “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up!” to which Jennings replied, equally, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!” Which it did.

  Thinking he’d cursed Holly, Jennings blamed himself for the crash and carried the guilt with him the rest of his life. But words and curses don’t make planes crash, and in this case, it was pilot error and bad weather, not the ill-advised joke of Waylon Jennings that sent Holly to his death.
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  (#4) Van Morrison

  • Band/Musician

  Why would someone record three dozen intentionally bad gibberish songs? In 1967, Irish troubadour Van Morrison was stuck in a brutally unfair record deal, and tangled in a dispute with his manager’s widow. Finally, he managed to get his contract bought out by Warner Brothers, but was still bound to the terms of his old deal, which required him to write and record 36 more songs.

  But Morrison got the last laugh. Knocking out over 30 songs in one day, Morrison fulfilled his end of the deal, recording short, out-of-tune, nonsensical tracks about ring worms, Danishes, and overdue royalty checks. These so-called “revenge songs” were useless to his old record company, but they did the trick, freeing Morrison up to start a run of albums that are hardly surpassed in rock greatness.  
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  (#5) Cass Elliot

  • Band/Musician

  A half-eaten ham sandwich was found by the body of singer Mama Cass Elliot in a London flat, leading the media to put two and two together and declare she choked to death on it. It’s not true, and never had any truth to it. In fact, Elliot’s death from heart failure was probably due to the stress she put on herself through an extreme form of fasting, attempting to quickly lose a large amount of weight.

  Like so many other urban legends, the ham sandwich rumor has become accepted as fact, despite it not being true in the least. Unlike Phil Collins’s drowning victim, or the woman murdered by the Ohio Players, this urban legend has a real victim behind it: a great singer who died before her time, whose legacy is burdened with an ugly, fat-shaming smear, and should be debunked at every opportunity.

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