When you were at school, did you have some strange ideas about bands and music? We were struck by various odd notions/rumours. I don’t know where they came from but we seemed to believe them or want to believe them because rock music was this big mysterious world to us where strange things happened.
The first of these concerned Black Dog by Zeppelin. The rumour was that there were chords in that song which were impossible for anyone else to play and even Page had forgotten how to do it!. Clearly ridiculous and provably untrue but we really believed that. It added to the overall mystique of the band.
The next one did have some basis in fact. The cover for the Grateful Dead’s 1974 album From the Mars Hotel really did feature a bit of hidden text and if you take the front cover and turn it upside down or hold it up to a mirror, what looks like patterns spells out Ugly Rumours. This much is true but on top of that, we thought it had to be a secret message to a drug dealer and indicated dissatisfaction with the quality of the drugs! Why they’d not just ring him up and tell him instead of putting a cryptic message on an album, I don’t know. But the world of drugs and rock was an unknown universe to us.
There was also a rumour that there was a ‘banned’ Suzi Quattro album cover on which she appeared naked but it was withdrawn by the record company. I think this was more pubescent boys wish fulfillment more than anything else. Of course, there isn’t, any more than the other rumour that she’d unzip the leather jumpsuit on Top Of The Pops was true.
Then there was the belief that if you played Graham Bond’s Holy Magic album, because he was into the occult and a bit mad, it contained secret incantations to summon the devil! I was scared of that record for years.
As I’ve said previously, we were big fans of Mahogany Rush. We thought Frank Marino was the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix. Of course! Nevermind that for a while, they were alive at the same time. It was something said as a publicity stunt by management, I think.
Similarly, for a while we thought Uli Jon Roth was also the reincarnation of Hendrix because, and this makes no sense, his girlfriend was Monika Danniman who had been Jimi’s girlfriend too. No me neither.
The Who was banned from Top of The Pops. That was true, they were, but not for throwing flaming televisions out of Broadcasting House’s top floor. It was for general aggression and arsiness plus equipment trashing.
Hawkwind were similarly banned for having sex with Stacia on the same programme! As if that could even happen on telly! Febrile minds have teenage boys.
Tony Iommi knew a secret Beelzebub-inducing chord that, if played, would summon the Dark Lord. I don’t think we really believed that actually but it sounded good.
Finally, there was a strong rumour that one particular track on John Martyn’s Solid Air on the second side, was what we called at the time ‘a knicker dropper’ So sensual, it irresistibly seduced women. I don’t know where that came from. But I half believed it for many years until I proved it wasn’t true and that a bottle of Armadillo sherry was much more effective.
There were dozens of these silly ideas. I’ve forgotten most of them. Occasionally one was actually true. The one about Rick Wakeman ordering a curry on stage was actually grounded in fact, though the one that swept through the Rock Society at college about Gary Moore holding the Guinness Book Of Records record for sustaining a note for the longest time (as if there’d be a record for that) absolutely wasn’t.
