THE FUNNIEST PEOPLE IN MUSIC, VOLUME 3: 250 ANECDOTES

By David Bruce

Dedicated with love to Caleb Bruce

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright 2009 by Bruce D. Bruce

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THE FUNNIEST PEOPLE IN MUSIC, VOLUME 3: 250 ANECDOTES

Alcohol

• Some American towns are wet (they allow alcohol); other American towns are dry (they don’t allow alcohol). During his 1885 American tour, Colonel James H. Mapleson had the misfortune to stop in Topeka, Kansas, a dry town. His opera troupe had drunk all the wine available on their train, and they were very displeased when water was placed before them while they dined at their Topeka hotel; in fact, Colonel Mapleson’s baritone drew his knife and said that unless he had something suitable to drink soon, he would not perform that evening. Hard pressed, Colonel Mapleson sought a physician and explained the situation to him. The understanding physician wrote a prescription in Latin, Colonel Mapleson took it to a pharmacist, and the pharmacist filled the prescription by giving him three bottles of something much more stimulating than water.

• People who drink to excess are found throughout the world—even in the high arts. At a production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème at the Dublin Grand Opera Society, the tenor was drunk, but he managed to make it to the intermission. During the intermission, the audience speculated on whether the tenor would be able to continue the part. As the intermission grew longer and longer, the audience then speculated on what excuse would be given for the tenor’s non-appearance. Eventually, a man appeared in front of the curtain and announced that the tenor had just returned from West Africa and was suffering from malaria. A member of the audience shouted, “I wish I had a bottle of that!”

• Good things can come out of evil. Someone once put LSD in Richie Ramone’s drink. He had a very bad reaction to it, and he had to be carried away in a strait jacket. However, he wrote the great Ramones’ song “Somebody Put Something in My Drink.” Of course, Richie gets the credit for writing a very good song. Whoever put the LSD in his drink gets a ticket to h*ll—or at least a few more hundred years climbing the Mountain of Purgatory. By the way, the Ramones insisted on canned soft drinks in their dressing room. Yoohoo chocolate drink was also a favorite dressing-room tipple.

• Conductor Luigi Mancinelli, a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in the early 20^th century, used to dine often at a restaurant and order a $5 bottle of Italian wine (quite expensive at the time), which was brought to him by his favorite waiter. One evening, his favorite waiter was ill and at home, so Mr. Mancinelli ordered his favorite bottle of wine from a new waiter. He was shocked to learn that his favorite wine cost only $1.50 per bottle—his favorite waiter had been deliberately overcharging him for months.

• Rolling Stones Keith Richard and Ron Wood attended a party hosted by Dudley Moore and Peter Cook at the Cobden Working Men’s Club in London. The party was upstairs, over a bar, and so when Mr. Richard and Mr. Wood felt like getting a pint, they went downstairs. Mr. Richard talked with some of the people in the bar, and one of them asked, “What do you do?” Mr. Richard replied, “I’m in a band.” “Which one?” “The Rolling Stones.” “Oh, yeah. I think I’ve heard of them.”

• During the days of Prohibition, tips sometimes consisted of something other than money. Besides being a radio announcer, Glenhall Taylor was also a pianist. Once in a while, a bootlegger would call him up to request that he perform “Twelfth Street Rag” on the radio, then the bootlegger would send over a fifth of gin to show his appreciation.

• Young rappers tend to be pretty crazy. Older rappers can settle down. Beastie Boy Adam Yauch went to a health-food store to buy a present for his parents one holiday season, and he said that he wanted a carrot juicer. The health-store employee recognized him and said, “So I guess you guys don’t drink forties anymore?”

• John King owned the music studio where Run-DMC and many other hip-hop groups did their recording: Chunking Studios. So many hip hoppers worked there in the 1980s and 1990s that Mr. King took the soft drinks out of the soda machine and replaced them with the hip hoppers’ beverage of choice: Olde English 800.

Animals

• People in opera sometimes gamble. At the Chicago Opera, Geraldine Farrar sang in Königskinder, in which a bunch of trained geese play a role. At the farewell performance, a poker game as usual was going on backstage, and thinking that the trained geese would no longer be needed, the players quickly used them as stakes in the game. Of course, the geese were taken home that night and eaten by the winners. However, Ms. Farrar’s popularity was so great that another performance of Königskinder was given by popular demand, and this time Ms. Farrar had to sing not with trained geese, but with untrained geese which honked at all the wrong times and which flew around the stage.

• Noël Coward once wrote a song titled “Chase Me, Charley” for two cats. When the song was sung on television, the BBC insisted that the lyric “Bound to give in” be replaced with “Waiting for you.” Mr. Coward commented, “I think it is very silly. Apparently the BBC thinks that the idea of a cat giving in is more likely to create immoral thoughts in listeners’ minds than the idea of a cat waiting to achieve its objective.”

April Fool

• On April 1, 1998, world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma made a startling announcement on National Public Radio. He stated that he would never again play the cello. Of course, when shocked listeners called NPR, they were told, “April Fool.”

Audiences

• An opera-knowledgeable audience can be h*ll on an opera singer. The night before she was scheduled to sing in Parma, soprano Frances Alda and her singing teacher attended a performance there at which Alice Zepelli sang the role of Anna in Verdi’s Lorelei. Ms. Zepelli was a fine singer, but unfortunately she broke on a high note. The audience immediately began to hiss. Ms. Alda writes in her autobiography, “And then, as the poor woman stood there, defenseless, the audience began to sing that aria through, as with one voice, and perfectly!” Ms. Alda, her face white, immediately turned to her singing teacher and said, “I can’t sing here tomorrow night. I simply can’t face an audience like that.” However, Ms. Alda did sing the following night—and fortunately, she did not break on a high note.

• When Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was performed in Vienna, it was a huge and immediate success. The members of the audience applauded wildly, but Beethoven, who was deaf by that time, could not hear them and was unaware that they were applauding. Finally, a soloist turned him so he faced the crowd. The members of the audience then added a visual element to the expression of their appreciation by throwing their hats into the air and by waving their handkerchiefs.

• Walter Damrosch pioneered the playing of classical music in American towns where classical music had never been played. In one town, he was conducting a Beethoven symphony when someone in the audience loudly requested that the orchestra play “The Arkansas Traveler.” Mr. Damrosch conducted his orchestra in “The Arkansas Traveler,” then resumed conducting the Beethoven symphony.

Auditions

• Early in his career, Douglas Colvin was not musically sophisticated. At an audition to join the New York band the Neon Boys, he was asked to play a C. He knew how to play a few musical notes, so Douglas played a note, then looked at the Neon Boys. But he had played the wrong note, so they shook their heads. This went on for a few notes, and Douglas failed the audition. Later, Douglas, who was then well known as Dee Dee Ramone of the Ramones, became a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

• Tenor Richard Tucker scored a huge success at his 1944 audition for the New York Metropolitan Opera. After Mr. Tucker had sung, from the darkness of the theater came the voice of conductor Emil Cooper: “I will assume full responsibility for this man’s career.”

Bathrooms

• John Lennon could behave erratically at times. He and fellow musician Harry Nilsson once spent a drunken evening together. After getting kicked out—with good reason—of a Smothers Brothers concert in Los Angeles, they went to the Lost on Larrabee restaurant. John disappeared into a bathroom, and then he reappeared with a feminine-hygiene product on his forehead. He asked the waitress, “Do you know who I am?” The waitress looked at him and said, “Yes, you’re some a**hole with a Kotex on his forehead.”

• Sarah Johns moved to Nashville, sang, and to support her singing, washed tour buses. A few years later, she had a contract with a music company, and she was touring in her own tour bus. Does that mean she doesn’t have to clean tour buses anymore? No. She has to clean her own tour bus. She says, “I clean the toilet every morning, because, you know, I’m on there with a bunch of guys, and they always miss.”

Blues

• Joe Williams became famous singing the blues, but for a long time he was paid more to sing popular songs such as ballads—which he and others called “pretty songs” and “pretty tunes.” In 1941, Mr. Williams was being paid $45 a week to sing the blues. In between the blues shows, he remembers, he would sing “all kinds of pretty tunes of the day.” Coleman Hawkins listened to the pretty tunes, liked what he heard, and told him, “I want you to come with me and travel as my vocalist. I don’t want you to sing the blues. I want you to sing the pretty songs, and I’m gonna give you $80 a week.” Mr. Williams jokes, “I lost my allegiance to the blues just like that!” The same thing kept happening. Andy Kirk wanted him to sing the pretty songs and let Beverly White sing the blues. And Lionel Hampton wanted him to sing the pretty songs and let Dinah Washington sing the blues. In 1954, Mr. Williams started singing with Count Basie’s band. He sang “Everyday I Have the Blues” and kept singing the blues after that.

• It’s possible to fall in love with another culture. In Japan, Yoko Noge fell in love with Chicago blues, and after going to college she went to Chicago to sing the blues. There, she sang like a black woman. Sometimes, a black man would ask her during a break in her act, “Was that you I heard singing?” She would answer, “Yes,” and he would say, “D*mn. I thought I was listening to a black woman sing. That’s why I decided to come on in from the street and listen. You sounded good.” This, of course, is a compliment. Also, of course, one needs to respect one’s own culture, and Ms. Noge sings some songs in Japanese, making her act a hybrid of Chicago blues and Japanese folk music that she calls “Japanesque.”

Children

• Henry S. Rosenthal and his wife, Carola Anderson, along with their children, George and Lou Lou of the band Lou Lou and the Guitarfish, lead lives of artistic accomplishment in film and music in a six-story warehouse in San Francisco that they have converted into a home. Back in the late 1980s, Henry and Carola decided to have children. According to Henry, they made the decision because their parrots declined to talk and their first cat, Django, couldn’t talk. Of course, their two children were raised among art, including some art that most children (and adults) are not exposed to, such as Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Carola thought that her children—before they had learned to read—would benefit from seeing a video of the Ring Cycle, so she showed it to them over a few days—it is something like 15 hours long—and she read the subtitles to them. So how do children with artistic parents rebel? By going mainstream. These days, George and Lou Lou like the same things, including music and films, as their parents, but when she was in the second grade Lou Lou wanted an album by ’N Sync, and for a while, George enjoyed Hollywood action films. The rebellion did not last long. The children have the same tastes as their parents now, and the children inherited the artistic and musical talents of their parents. Their six-story warehouse is fabulous. It is filled with art, including Henry’s collection of 36 stuffed calves—all of which have two heads. One floor is the home of George and Lou Lou, who have separate “houses” decorated the way they like. George’s house looks like an ocean liner, while journalist Jennifer Maerz describes Lou Lou’s house as “a miniature collapsed Palladian villa.” By the way, Daniel Handler fictionalized Lou Lou and put her in a Lemony Snicket book. She is called Madame Lulu, and she is “slightly mysterious and a terrific dresser.”

• So what is it like being the parent of a rock star? Dave Simpson of the British newspaper The Guardian asked some parents of rock stars just that question. 1) Roy Newman, a retired electrical power engineer, is the father of Colin Newman, a singer with the group Wire. Roy remembers that Colin was a very imaginative child—at age five, he used to walk behind his parents and hold his hand up while making clicking noises with his tongue because he was taking his imaginary horse for a walk. As you would expect, he liked music. His parents took him and Janice, his younger sister, to a store so that Colin could buy the most recent Beatles album. Quickly, Colin turned up missing. Two hours later, they found him. He had been so eager to listen to the album that he had run home, climbed in through a window, and started playing the album. 2) Meat Loaf’s daughter is named Pearl Aday, the first name coming from the title of an album by Janis Joplin. Meat Loaf, who is himself a rock star, says, “Even though she’s a woman in a very tough, male-dominated industry, the only time I was concerned was when she went on the road with Mötley Crüe.” He attended the concert, and his daughter was wearing a tiny G-string. He says, “I went up to [bassist] Nikki Sixx and said ‘I wanna talk to you NOW!’ and scared the h*ll out of him. But it was a joke.” 3) Ed Marnie is a retired Scottish Enterprise development worker and the father of Ladytron singer Helen Marnie. He admits, “It is weird being a pop star’s parent. At one gig my pal and I were standing with our black Ladytron T-shirts on thinking we were cool and this kid looked at us and said, ‘You must be parents.’” In addition, Mr. Marnie remembers, “I was once in a bar and this bloke said he was a big Ladytron fan and had a screensaver of Helen on his computer. I looked at him and said, ‘That's my daughter!’”

• Sheila Escovedo, aka percussionist-drummer Sheila E., grew up around drums and percussive instruments. Her father is big-time percussionist Pete Escovedo, and her godfather is Latin percussion master Tito Puente. Sheila E. and two of her three siblings became percussionists. Sheila E. explains, “That’s Pop’s fault. We grew up listening to him play around the house. He practiced to records all the time. And if his band wasn’t rehearsing, they’d have jam sessions in our living room all the time. So pretty much the percussion instruments—timbales, congas, bongos, hand toys—were set out in the house as part of the furniture most of the time.” When Sheila E. was 16, a percussionist in her father’s band, Azteca, became ill and unable to play, so she asked her father if she could sit in. He agreed, and at one point during a song he wanted her to take a solo. She remembers, “It was an overwhelming experience because I’d never been able to express myself in that way. To be onstage with 16 musicians in a band signed to CBS in front of 3,000 people, for me, it was as if there was an out-of-body experience. If this is what heaven was supposed to feel like, then I wanted to feel like this every day.” Sheila E. received a standing ovation and the sight of her father looking at her with his jaw dropped open. Offstage, he told her, “I can’t deny you what you already know. I don’t even know how you know all the things you just did tonight.” She replied that she didn’t know how she knew all the things she had just done either. After this concert, her dream changed. She wanted to be a professional percussionist and not a sprinter in the Olympics.

• Kimya Dawson became famous after several of her songs appeared in the hit 2007 movie Juno. After the movie made her famous, she started creating an album titled Alphabutt for children. Her humor, as shown when she was a member of the anti-folk duo The Moldy Peaches with Adam Green, can be crude and can involve bad language. She thinks that all of her albums are “child-appropriate, but not all parents agree—a lot of kids who like my stuff say, ‘I wanted to take your CD to show and tell, but my teacher doesn’t like it when you say ‘f**king c*ck.’” For that reason, she felt obliged to make what she calls “a show-and-tell-friendly album.” In 2008, her daughter was two years old, and Ms. Dawson was thinking of starting a curfew-friendly tour: “I’ve been thinking about doing a tour called ‘The Nine O’ Clock Curfew Tour,’ where I don’t play any shows that end after nine. This staying up ’til 11 stuff is bullsh*t.”

• Laurie Anderson was forced to study violin when she was a child—it was not a pleasant experience. She says, “I had a teacher who said, ‘If you don’t put your fingers in the right place, I am going to put nails where they shouldn’t be and you’ll prick yourself.’” Ms. Anderson, of course, composed and recorded “O Superman,” figuring that 100 copies of the song would be enough to meet what she thought would be a limited demand. However, British deejay John Peel played it on his radio show, and suddenly demand skyrocketed. She says, “One day, I got a call from London with an order for 20,000 copies of the single, immediately followed by another 20,000 by the end of the week. I looked at the cardboard box of records, which had almost run out, and said, ‘Listen, can I just call you back?’”

• Long ago, singer/songwriter Billy Bragg made a music video for a song called “The Boy Done Good” with some of his nieces and nephews. During a visit, a niece mentioned the video, and Billy’s son, who was a toddler when the video was made, wanted to see it. So Billy spent a week looking everywhere in his home for the video, including getting out a ladder so he could look in the attic. Finally, he gave up and telephoned his niece to ask, “Where did you see the video? ’Cause I can’t find it anywhere. Have you got a copy?” She replied, “Duh, Uncle Bill, it’s on YouTube.” Perhaps unnecessarily, Billy says, “I felt such an idiot, such an old guy.”

• For one of his televised Young People’s Concerts, conductor Leonard Bernstein presented Benjamin Britton’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. He needed a child to narrate, and he settled on the young son of his friend Schuyler Chapin: Henry. Henry did a fine job, and he grew up and taught music to young children at a school in New York. Once, he showed his pupils the Young People’s Concert that he had narrated. The children liked the program, but one girl asked, “Who was that nerdy kid who spoke the words?” Henry confessed that he had been the nerdy kid, and the children applauded him.

• When Beyoncé and fellow Destiny’s Child member Kelly Rowland first heard a song of theirs—“No, No, No”—on the radio in her car, they stopped the car, jumped out of it, and started singing the song and running around the car. When Beyoncé’s younger sister, Solange, saw them, she was shocked at first. But when she was close enough to hear the song, she joined them in running around the car. Beyoncé remembers, “She dropped her bag and books and started running around the car, too. It was a really cool experience.”

• Rock goddesses have kids, too. Pat Benatar was a major 1980s rock star and continues to play today. Her songs such as “Heartbreaker” are on Guitar Hero, and lots of children—and adults—rock out to them, including her two daughters, Haley and Hana. Of course, kids can ask embarrassing questions, and Haley and Hana sometimes ask their mom this question about the Spandex pants she used to wear on stage: “How did you get into those pants?”

• Jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams was blessed with perfect pitch—she could identify any note and any key after hearing it. In the third grade, she heard her teacher hum a song, and she said that she could identify the key. Her teacher was skeptical and tested her by playing a note on a piano. Mary Lou immediately identified it.

• When Stevie Wonder was young, he sang in a church choir—until he was expelled because a church member heard him singing rock and roll.

Clothing

• Luisa Tetrazzini (1871-1940), a coloratura, was singing Lucia di Lammermoor in Puebla, Mexico, on a stage flooded because of a rainstorm and a leaky roof. To keep from ruining her dress, she held it a few inches above the water. This displeased a woman in a box, who commented on the shocking display of a lady’s ankles. Ms. Tetrazzini walked underneath the woman’s box, then improvised her own words to the music of the opera: “Madam, you are shocked, very shocked, I know it, yes I do. But do you know the stage is soaking wet and our dresses all are spoiling, yet just to please you I am ready, perfectly ready, to let my dress drag through the wet and be completely ruined if you, dear Madam, will promise to buy me a lovely new one.” This gave the audience a laugh and kept the critic quiet for the rest of the performance.

• Pianist Richard Goode was far from dressing with splendor, although at times he tried. He once ran the hot water in his bath in an attempt to steam wrinkles out of his tailcoat. Unfortunately, he forgot to stop the bathtub, and an hour later the ceiling of the apartment underneath his had collapsed. On another occasion, he put his newly washed white bow tie in a toaster oven so he could dry it. Unfortunately, he singed the bow tie, so he tried to cover up the singed places with talcum powder.

• Musician David Broekman used to know someone with the unconscious, but annoying, habit of picking lint off the suit of the person he was talking to, so Mr. Broekman used a small paint brush to paint a dot of white on his suit. Sure enough, the man with the annoying habit tried to pick off the piece of “lint” from Mr. Broekman’s suit.

Concerts

• Garth Brooks goes to great lengths to keep his concerts exciting. Near the end of a long tour that tired out pretty much everyone except the fans, Mr. Brooks livened things up by offering $500 to any band member who could knock him down that night. A band member asked what that meant: “Impress you with a guitar lick or ….” Mr. Brooks replied, “No, I meant physically knock me flat on my butt.” That night, all the band members tried to knock him flat on his butt, to the delight of Mr. Brooks—and his fans, who that night happened to be Canadian. During the final song, the entire band rushed him and knocked him flat on his butt—and split the $500.

• While Johnny Cash was attending Dyess High School, Charlie and Ira Louvin—aka the Louvin Brothers—performed there. Johnny arrived two hours early, and he saw his heroes arrive. Charlie even spoke to him—to ask where was the bathroom. Johnny saw Charlie eating soda crackers—and thereafter Johnny ate soda crackers. The concert was fantastic, and when the Louvin Brothers drove away in their limousine, Charlie even waved to Johnny. It was a magical night.

• In 1980, the parents of Plácido Domingo celebrated their 40^th anniversary. He invited them to attend Mass with him in a church in Mexico City, and when they arrived they found many friends and relatives there, as well as a symphony orchestra, which provided the music as their famous son sang for them.

• Jazz pianist Oscar Peterson was discovered in a very Hollywood-movie fashion. In his native Montreal, Canada, Mr. Peterson was playing in a small club. Producer Norman Grantz heard him, liked what he heard, and invited him to play at Carnegie Hall with the band Jazz at the Philharmonic on September 19, 1949. Mr. Peterson did exactly that.

• Vladimir de Pachmann, a classical pianist, enjoyed performing a joke on stage. He would walk on stage, sit on a stool that was too low, then call for a book to sit on. He would then sit on the book, grimace, stand up, tear out one page from the book, sit down on the book again, smile, and begin playing.

• When giving a concert, Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin used to give the audience a long numbered list of songs. He would look at the list during the concert, decide what to sing next, then announce the number of the song to his audience. (His accompanist must have carried around a huge pile of sheet music!)

• During his career, African-American actor/singer Paul Robeson frequently entertained audiences by singing Negro spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Early in his career, he sang a concert of 16 spirituals in Greenwich Village—then he sang 16 more spirituals as encores.

Compositions

• Singer-songwriter Baby Dee wrote and recorded a song titled “The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities,” which is described by celebrity interviewer Len Righi as “a Bowiesque cabaret number [that] uses a smashed piano as a metaphor for love let loose and the possibility of rebirth.” In the song, a couple of friends smash a keyboard with an axe on a sidewalk. Bobby Slot and Freddy Weiss, the friends in the song, are real; they were neighbors of Baby Dee when she was young and living in Cleveland, and they really did use an ax to smash a keyboard on a sidewalk. Baby Dee says, “They were bums, guys in their 30s, dumb and harmless,” she says. “They really wanted not to have a piano. That was their dream. So the whole neighborhood got together to make their dream come true.”

• Avant garde composer John Cage once created a music piece titled 4’33” in which the pianist sat at a piano for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds without playing a note. The music consisted of the sounds that the audience heard while the pianist was not playing.

Conductors

• Early in his career, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky was too frightened to be a good conductor. In January 1868 he debuted as a conductor at a benefit for the victims of winter famine. However, he was so nervous that he forgot the composition and gave the orchestra the wrong indications. Fortunately, the musicians knew the composition very well, so they ignored Tchaikovsky and played it correctly. For the next 10 years, Tchaikovsky did not conduct. However, when he started to conduct again, he quickly overcame his nervousness and did a good job.

• What if you were in a plane, a storm arose, and you realized that your life could possibly end in a few minutes? What would you think? What would you say? What would you regret not having done? Andre Previn was in a plane with the conductor Sir John Barbirolli when this situation happened. Sir John, dismayed, said, “Oh it’s too awful! I haven’t even done all the Bruckners!” Fortunately, the plane landed safely.

• Richard Wagner was a demanding conductor. Victor Borge’s father played violin in the Hamburg Opera Orchestra when Wagner was guest conductor for his Tristan und Isolde. Wagner kept the musicians rehearsing from 8:30 a.m. until 6 p.m., cursing them and bullying them—even though they had an evening performance to give. However, Wagner was able to get the thrilling effects he wanted from the orchestra.

• Conductor Serge Koussevitzky sometimes got very angry at his musicians. In one case, he yelled at a musician who stayed silent. Enraged, Mr. Koussevitzky stormed with his Russian accent, “Vy don’t you spik? Vy don’t you say something?” Before the musician could reply, Mr. Koussevitzky stormed, “Silence! I vill have no opposition!”

• Eugene Ormandy was once so displeased that he was ready to quit the Minneapolis Orchestra. He explained why to his manager, Arthur Judson—he had heard some of the musicians call him “a little son-of-a-b*tch.” Hearing this, Mr. Judson simply laughed and told Mr. Ormandy, “Congratulations, you’re a real conductor now.”

Crime

• In 1962, drummer Pete Best was kicked out of the Beatles, who of course went on to become the most successful rock band ever. He remembers how financially impoverished they were back then: They would get paid one day and be broke the next day. Therefore, he and John Lennon decided to rob someone. They jumped a sailor, who fought back. Pete and John then ran away. Pete remembers, “I looked at John and said, ‘Have you got the wallet?’ And he said, ‘No, I thought you had it.’” And so ended their life of crime.