Groupie Accidentally Sleeps with Bass Player
LOUISVILLE, KY – The day after The Academy concert, Victoria Jorgensen, 22, was terrified to realize that she had accidentally slept with the band’s bass player – mistaking him for someone important in the band.
“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” said Jorgensen. “I mean, I went up to the guy and was like ‘are you in the band’ and he was all like, ‘yeah, I’m in the band’ so I did him. Then this morning I was telling my friends and I realized he was just the bass player. This happens to me all the time.”
Jorgensen plans to do more research before sleeping with another band member. “This won’t happen again,” said Jorgensen. “If I’m going to sleep with someone, they’d better be important. I mean, I could find someone here in town as important as a bass player.” Adam Siska, The Academy bass player, was unavailable for comment.
Bass players are the Rodney Dangerfields of the rock world, it seems. I tell ya, they just don’t get no respect. And no wonder! On the day after God created rock stars (sometime around 4 am on a gin-soaked Saturday night in Memphis), he created groupies. And he commanded them: “Thou shalt honor thy singer and thy lead guitarist and have no false rock Gods before thee.”
Meaning, pants-on-fire frontmen and swaggering lead guitarists with cigarettes dangling from their lips get their pick of the chicks. Drummers may not get a lion’s share of booty, but most people can at least name one or two of rock’s most famous beat-keepers.
But who really knows or cares about the lowly bassist, standing stone-faced and static in the shadows? Heck, there are over a dozen websites devoted to bass player putdowns. (Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A: A bass player.) There’s even a Facebook page called “Bass Player Jokes.” (Go ahead, it’s okay to LIKE it.) Are bass players really just one rung up the ladder from roadies when it comes to getting laid?
Okay, bassists Paul McCartney (understandably) and KISS reptile Gene Simmons (inconceivably) were highly desired by the types of rock nymphs who haunted hotel hallways and paid roadies in blowjobs for the chance to be smuggled into backstage dressing rooms. But there is one bass player whose sexual adventures far outnumbered Paul’s, Gene’s, and nearly everyone else’s back in the trailblazing days of cocksure rock gods. Yes, one man whose insatiable appetite for women shatters all myths of the ain’t gettin’ any bassist. And that man is Bill Wyman, the dark, diminutive musician who played with the Rolling Stones from 1962 through 1993.
In 2006, Maxim estimated that Wyman bedded 1,000 woman during his career, placing him at number 10 on the magazine’s list of Sex Legends. Only two other rock stars made the list: Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, at number 8 with 1,200 women, and Simmons, at number 3 with 4,600 conquests. (As a historical footnote, a Venetian hotel porter named Umberto Billo tops the list with 8,000, giving room service a whole new meaning.) And Elvis is, of course, in a class by himself.
Many suggest that Maxim greatly underestimated Bill Wyman’s prowess. It’s actually rumored that he had sex with more than 2,000 women during his tenure with the Stones, sometimes partaking of two or three fans per night over a 31-year period.
In his 1990 memoir, Stone Alone, the poker-faced Wyman presents the following scenario from the Stones’ touring days: “Brian [Jones] and I liked to share [hotel rooms] because we were on the prowl all day long and every night, chatting up girls in shops, girls backstage, reporters interviewing us, fan-club secretaries. In 1965 we sat down one evening in a hotel and worked out that since the band had started two years earlier, I’d had 278 girls, Brian 130, Mick about 30, Keith 6 and Charlie none. People always assume that Mick, particularly, was very active sexually, but that wasn’t so in the sixties.” (Keith Richards has frequently joked about Bill’s accountant-like obsession with tallying tail.)
By Wyman’s own accounts, he started his womanizing ways shortly after marrying his first wife and fathering a son, feeling no sense of guilt because the marriage was “a failure.”
In a 2006 interview with Simon Hattenstone of The Guardian, Wyman describes a favorite pick-up process: “Me and Brian used to look out of the windows, cos we shared a suite, and we would ask the night porter to go out and get the one in the striped thing and the one in the shorts next to her, and they’d come up, and you’d spend a couple of hours with them and say bye and give ’em a kiss, and then about half an hour later you’d say, ‘That one in the red dress.'”
The shameless shagaholic goes on: “They [the girls] helped get over the boring times. And it became habitual…It was better than drugs because you couldn’t OD on it. If you’d had enough your body didn’t work any more, and it was as simple as that. So I thought it was quite healthy.”
But despite the old in-and-out routine, Bill Wyman did attempt to settle down — with a girl he started dating when she was 13 and he was 47. In 1989 he married Mandy Smith, with her mother’s consent, when she hit the ripe old age of 18. They were divorced 2 years later. At about the same time, Bill’s son Stephen was having a fling with Mandy’s mother! Oh, the one-night stands are so much less complicated.
So, there you have it. One bass player has scored with enough women to make up for the thousands who are ridiculed as nothing more than sexless pieces of rhythm machinery. Bill Wyman is an inspiration. He’s a legend. He’s alive and kicking at 79. And we’re grateful he had access to good antibiotics.
Here’s an interesting clip of Bill on a British TV show. Check out his Mick imitation:
By Dana Spiardi, October 24, 2012
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Where a rock-n-roll martyr plays
You’ll find the enchanted neighborhood
Of Brian Jones’s drug-haze days.
Brian the posh, Brian the posh,
A randy little dandy – all fine, divine.
He’s Brian the posh, Brian the posh,
A ritzy little glitzy old soul.
I’d hate like hell to be sued by the Disney Empire for parodying their Winnie the Pooh tune, but what better way to introduce the tale of a Rolling Stone who spent his final days in the former domain of Pooh’s creator, author A. A. Milne? Were British society highbrows appalled by the idea of a long-haired rock guitarist/drug deviant romping the idyllic grounds that inspired Milne to create cutesy make-believe animal playmates for his son Christopher Robin? Probably. But it mattered not. The late 1960s marked the dawn of the Age of the Rock God, and like the deities of yore, they required grand pantheons. They found them in the form of once-venerated estates that dotted the tranquil British countryside. And the old gentry had no choice but to get over it.
In November 1968, Rolling Stones founder, multi-instrumentalist, and fashion plate Brian Jones purchased the Milne estate – Cotchford Farms in East Sussex- for £35,000 ($679,000 today). The 26-year-old musician was a train wreck of a man. He’d already been convicted twice for drug possession and had fathered at least five children with five different women by the time he was 23. British blues pioneer Alexis Korner described the once-beautiful lad as now looking like “a fat, mummified Louis XIV.” What better place for the delicate Brian to relax and play his music than the “House at Pooh Corner”?
He quickly set about renovating the mid-16th century abode to his mod liking. Several items from Brian’s upgrades remain today, including panes of colored glass and a still-functioning pink fluorescent light tube he put in one of the bathrooms. And of course, there’s the pool where Mr. Jones drowned on July 3, 1969, just weeks after his bandmates fired him for bad behavior. Whether Jones’s drowning was the result of his prodigious drug and alcohol intake, or a scuffle between him and building foreman Frank Thorogood, we’ll never know. But the death certainly casts an eerie shadow over the bucolic setting.
Alastair Johns, who purchased Cotchford Farm in 1970 and remained its guardian for 42 years, has plenty of interesting tales of Brian Jones fans who dropped by the house, unannounced, to pay homage to the rock star. He once told the Daily Telegraph, “On the whole the Brian Jones lot are incredibly nice and polite. They apologize for the intrusion. The Winnie the Pooh bunch, on the other hand, think they own the place. One afternoon we caught a couple in the garden who had lined up 16 teddy bears to photograph.”
But oh, that famous pool! Old utility bills show that Brian Jones purchased 4,000 gallons of oil trying to heat it during the 9 months he lived there. To finance its renovation, Johns and his wife Harriet sold the original pool tiles to the musician’s fans for £100 each. Imagine owning a piece of Brian’s death tank!
The 3,779-square-foot home and its 9.5 acres was put up for sale in 2014, listed at £2 million, or about $3.15 million. Picture yourself sitting in Christopher Robin’s garden, sipping port or smoking pot, and daydreaming about Eeyore and Piglet and Tigger, to the strains of Brian’s sitar work on “Paint it Black.” It doesn’t get any more surreal than that, folks.
Not to be upstaged by the guitarist he sacked, Mick Jagger spent £55,000 to acquire his own ostentatious crib, Stargroves, in 1970. This Hampshire County estate was the home of the Goddards, a landed family, from 1565 until about 1830. Oliver Cromwell, the 17th century Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, once slept there – back when it was quiet. Three hundred years later, Stargroves would be overrun with racket, when the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and other rock groups recorded songs in a mobile recording studio installed on the grounds. Rod Stewart bought Stargroves in 1998, but never moved in because he was in the process of divorcing wife number 2, Rachel Hunter.
Several other Rolling Stones also inhabited pedigreed mansions. Low-profile drummer Charlie Watts purchased the one-time estate of Baron Shawcross, the lead British prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal. And in 1968 Stones bassist Bill Wyman acquired Gedding Hall, below, a stately home that boasted a moat (alligators not included). Britain’s famous twin-brother gangsters, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, fled to the hall after killing Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie in 1967.
One month after John Lennon married Yoko Ono, the Beatle purchased a quaint little love nest: the 72-acre Tittenhurst Park in Sunningdale, Ascot. The couple bought the £145,000 estate from Peter Cadbury, whose father Egbert was managing director of the famous chocolate company that bears his surname.
However, it turned out not to be such a sweet deal. The Lennons ended up spending twice the purchase price on renovations and additions, including the creation of a lake and the installation of a sound studio where John recorded his Imagine LP. He spent a mere two years in his stately home, selling it to Ringo Starr after he permanently relocated to New York City in 1971.
Beatle George Harrison may have felt musically overshadowed by bandmates Lennon and McCartney, but when it came to real estate, he trumped them all. In 1970 he purchased the grand Friar Park, a 120-room Victorian neo-Gothic mansion in Henley-on-Thames. Sir Frank Crisp, an eccentric lawyer, first owned the estate and designed many of its attractions, including an Elizabethan garden, a white garden, a Japanese garden, a rock garden, plus an assortment of unusual topiary and exotic plants. Other features included fountains, whimsical statuary, a sandstone replica of the Matterhorn, and caverns under the property’s lakes that revealed waterways and a grotto!
Upon Crisp’s death the estate passed to an order of Roman Catholic nuns who abandoned the home in the late 1960s, leaving it in such a state of disarray that it was scheduled for demolition. George and his first wife Patti set out to slowly renovate the massive estate. They completed only a handful of the many rooms, one of which George converted to a 16-track recording studio where he produced all of his albums from 1973 onward.
Through the years the Beatle became a passionate gardner, lovingly tending the grounds right up until his death in 2001. His second wife, Olivia, is devoted to maintaining the gardens that brought her husband such pleasure.
From peaceful gardens we move on to unholy houses — in particular, one purchased by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page in 1971. The guitar wizard had long been fascinated with the work of English occultist, poet, novelist, and satanist Aleister Crowley. Between 1899 and 1913, the self-proclaimed “most wicked man in the world” owned Boleskin House, located on the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland. The late 18th century secluded estate was known to be a center of black magic and sorcery, and was the scene of several tragic deaths, both before and after Crowley’s ownership.
Jimmy Page once called Crowley “a misunderstood genius of the 20th century.” He believed the estate was haunted, but he’s long maintained that the house was possessed of demons well before Crowley purchased it to perform his black magic rituals. Said Page in a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, “There were two or three owners before Crowley moved into it. It was also a church that was burned to the ground with the congregation in it. Strange things have happened in that house that had nothing to do with Crowley. The bad vibes were already there. A man was beheaded there, and sometimes you can hear his head rolling down.” Well, at least now you know what inspired some of those mystical Zeppelin tunes and symbols.
Over the years, many a stiff-lipped British Lord and Lady no doubt proclaimed “there goes the neighborhood” when nouveau rich rockers began running wild in the country. If Downton Abbey stays on the air long enough, will we see benevolent Lord Grantham selling out to bad-ass Lemmy Kilmister?
This delightful music video of George Harrison’s “Crackerbox Palace” was filmed on the lovely grounds of Friar Park in 1976. Monty Python member Eric Idle directed it. In 1978, George put up the entire Friar Park estate as financial collateral to fund the Pythons’ “Life of Brian” after the project’s original investors backed out. Why? He said he simply wanted to see the film. Idle called it “the most expensive movie ticket in history.”
© Dana Spiardi, Jan 3, 2015
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British Prime Minster Tony Blair, however, was a huge fan of the band, especially Mick. According to the memoir of Peter Mandelson, a former British Labor Party politician, Blair once approached the singer a party in 1997, saying, “I just want to say how much you’ve always meant to me.” Insiders say the Stones frontman had inspired the PM’s schoolboy dreams of becoming a rock star. On numerous occasions Blair urged the Queen to consider knighting him, but she was adamant in her refusal. No wonder Mick often referred to her as “Chief Witch.”
To Her Majesty, Mick represented a hedonistic, rebellious lifestyle. He had been fined for public urination in 1965, was arrested for drug possession in 1967 and 1968, and was charged by police for allegedly assaulting a photographer in 1972. He was clearly NOT an asset to British culture in her mind. On top of that, he did little charity work and avoided paying U.K. taxes by living abroad.
But what really ticked her off was his long-time friendship — and rumored romantic liaison — with her sister, Princess Margaret (pictured), a drinking, smoking, partying free spirit. Despite her marriage to Lord Snowdon, she flirted shamelessly, particularly with younger men. The Princess chatted with Mick on the phone for hours and invited him to lots of posh events. Once, at a party in London celebrating the arrival of poet Allen Ginsburg, she, along with Mick and assorted pillars of British society, snacked on brownies that had been laced to the max with hashish. Margaret became so sick she ended up being rushed to the hospital.
According to Harold Brooks-Baker, publisher of Burke’s Peerage, “The Queen could tolerate the Beatles because they were clean-cut and sort of sweet — at least, that was their reputation at the time. The Stones were an entirely different matter.”
But, given the Stones’ huge international appeal as the second greatest British rock act of all time, she could no longer avoid the inevitable, and eventually approved his knighthood. And Mick had the gall to postpone the ceremony numerous times!
By then, the Queen wanted nothing to do with the event. She decided to have elective surgery on her left knee that day, to make sure she was as far away from Buckingham Palace as possible.
So, Prince Charles ended up doing the honors on December 12, 2003. Did Mick feel snubbed by Her Majesty? Maybe, but in the end, he had her under his thumb. He snubbed her by being the only member of the rock knights society – which includes Paul McCartney, Elton John, Cliff Richard, and Tom Jones – who didn’t perform for the Queen at the Golden Jubilee pop concert that marked her 50 years on the throne.
And how did Mick’s fellow Stones regard the knighthood? Said low-keyed drummer Charlie Watts in his memoir According to the Rolling Stones, “Anybody else would be lynched: 18 wives and 20 children and he’s knighted, fantastic!”
But it was guitarist Keith Richards who came down the hardest on his long-time mate. He called the knighthood a “paltry honour,” and said he did not want to occupy a stage with someone wearing a “coronet and sporting the old ermine.” [Hey, Mick could easily pull off that look.]
According to one source, an exchange between the so-called Glimmer Twins went something like this:
Keith: What the f**k would you want with that? That’s not what we’re about.
Mick: Paul has one, and Elton. It’s not really the kind of thing you turn down, is it?
Keith: You can turn down anything you like, pal. Tell them to stick it up their ass.
Here’s what Sir Mick and scoundrel Keith had to say to reporters on the subject. If the anti-establishment John Lennon had lived, I can imagine him having a similar reaction to Paul’s knighthood!
© Dana Spiardi, Dec 12, 2014
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I never get my fill.
Some girls sell my love letters
To pay their electric bill. ”
My parody of Mick Jagger’s much criticized put-down song, “Some Girls,” refers to his one-time lover (and reputedly the inspiration for the song “Brown Sugar”) Marsha Hunt. On this date in 2012, a set of 10 love letters the Monkey Man wrote to her in 1969 were auctioned off for £187,250 ($305,929).
Hunt, a singer, novelist, and model who appeared in the original London production of Hair, met Mick in 1969. The couple secretly dated and produced a love child – Karis – born in 1970.
In his letters, Mick tells Hunt of the various literature he’s enjoying (the diaries of dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and the poems of Emily Dickinson, whom he referes to ad “Dix”) and mentions the moon landing. Hunt said she’ll use the money from the auctioned letters to pay her electric bill and fund home repairs.
Karis is the first of seven children that Mick fathered with four different women. Interestingly, he’s always taken an active role in Karis’s life. How does he find the time for all these family affairs?
© Dana Spiardi, Dec 13, 2013
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Following the good vibes of the Woodstock festival four months earlier, the Stones found themselves under pressure to perform a similar free concert that would include other big acts of the day. The location was to be Altamont Speedway in Livermore, CA. Upon the recommendation of The Grateful Dead, the Stones foolishly chose the Hells Angels – a motorcycle club long recognized as an organized crime syndicate by the U.S. Department of Justice – to manage “security” of the poorly and hastily organized event. Per the request of the Angels, the Stones management paid them in beer – $500 worth.
Roughly 300,000 people – many jacked up on LSD and amphetamines – attended the concert, which also included Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills & Nash. As the night wore on, the Angels became increasingly drunk and began to physically assault both audience members and performers. By the time the Stones took the stage the sky was dark and a thick cloud of doom hung over the crowd. As Mick ripped into the band’s usual crowd-pleasing repertoire, he soon began witnessing pockets of punching, kicking and flailing. He sensed the scene was ripe for a full-scale riot, but managed to keep his cool, imploring the crowd to calm down:
I can’t do any more than just ask you, to beg you, just to keep it together.
You can do it, it’s within your power everyone, everyone.
Hells Angels, everybody –
Let’s just keep ourselves together.
You know, if we, if we are all one, then let’s f_cking well show we’re all one.
[full transcipt]
Little did Mick know that a concert-goer was already dead: 18-year-old Meredith Hunter. The drug-crazed man, highly visible in his bright green jacket, had been hauled away and pummeled by various Angels when he attempted to mount the stage. Analysis of concert footage later revealed that during the melee Hunter had pulled a long-barreled .22 caliber revolver from inside his jacket, prompting Hells Angel Alan Passaro to stab him to death.
The media came down hard on the Stones, especially Mick. Rolling Stone magazine said that “Altamont was the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude, money manipulation, and, at base, a fundamental lack of concern for humanity.” The writer went so far as to say: “What an enormous thrill it would have been for an Angel to kick Mick Jagger’s teeth down his throat.” The 1960s had come to an end, brothers and sisters, and with it the “peace and love” ideals of a generation.
A 2008 FBI report revealed that the Hells Angels later plotted to kill Mick Jagger for the negative portrayal of the Angels in the concert film of the event, Gimme Shelter. Jagger was staying on Long Island following the concert, and Angels supposedly attempted to approach his residence via boat. Luckily, a storm got in the way of their plans. No one knows for sure if this is really true. Mick, who was devastated by the event and considered “retiring” afterwards, has never commented on the Angels’ vengeance.
Here’s a fascinating clip of Mick watching footage of the concert killing from the film “Gimme Shelter,” directed by Albert and David Maysles.
© Dana Spiardi, Dec 6, 2014
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