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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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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Today is the 26th anniversary of the start of the Velvet Revolution, a peaceful student-led anti-government protest movement that led to the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in December 1989. The name of the revolution stemmed directly from Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground, the house band of Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory art gallery/performance space in the 1960s. The Velvets’ stripped-down, subterranean sound and nihilistic attitude made them a favorite among avant-garde Czechs seeking mind-expanding alternatives to bland Soviet-spun art, literature, and music.
Within six weeks of the first demonstration on November 17, a playwright-poet-philosopher who had been imprisoned as a leading dissident became the country’s first democratically elected president in 41 years. His name was Vaclav Havel. He loved rock and roll, and was undoubtedly the first head of state to invite rockers to share their ideas. The photo above shows him with Lou Reed, Frank Zappa, and the Rolling Stones: all the president’s men.
During a trip to the U.S. in either 1967 or 1968, Havel bought a copy of a Velvet Underground album; no one is really sure if it was the band’s debut disc or “White Light/White Heat.” Said music writer Rob Jovanovic, “Havel took it home, along with Frank Zappa’s debut, and managed to smuggle it through Customs. Soon it was being copied and passed around the Prague underground, influencing the avant-garde set to play secretive gigs around the capital…” When Havel met Reed for the first time, early in his presidency, he was rumored to have said, “Did you know I am president because of you?” Following their first encounter, the hard-to-impress Lou Reed described Mr. Havel as a “heroic, intellectual, music-loving amazing person.”
The very serious Frank Zappa, whom Havel appointed a special “cultural ambassador,” was overcome with emotion when the president told him that Czechs used to be beaten by the Secret Police for listening to his music. In fact, Zappa’s song “Plastic People” inspired the name of a popular dissident Czech band, The Plastic People of the Universe, formed in 1968 following the Soviet clampdown that ended Czechoslovakia’s short-lived Prague Spring. Following the arrest and imprisonment of the group’s members in 1976, Havel declared that the Plastics were defending “life’s intrinsic desire to express itself freely, in its own authentic and sovereign way.” This led to the creation of a human rights organization known as Charter 77, a group of 242 petition signers who called for the human rights guaranteed under the 1975 Helsinki accords. Havel’s role in this movement, and his subsequent creation of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted in 1979, led to multiple imprisonments.
The Rolling Stones, bad-boys of the British rock scene, appealed to Havel’s rebellious nature. “For me, the Rolling Stones have always been a sort of counterweight to the more amiable, more lyrical and often more easygoing Beatles,” the president told Rolling Stone writer Roman Lipcik in the magazine’s October 4, 1990, issue. “I used to listen to their music often. Songs like ‘Satisfaction’ can hardly be forgotten.”
The Stones invaded Prague on August 18, 1990, three days before the twenty-second anniversary of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Mick Jagger appeared on Czech state TV with a rallying cry: the Stones are rolling into town! Posters covered the city, announcing the tanks are rolling out! Keith Richards noted the president’s playful side: “We gave Vaclav this little white remote control with a tongue on it. He walked around lighting up the palace, and suddenly statues came alive. He was like a kid, pushing buttons and going, whoa!”
Czechoslovakia split into two separate entities in early 1993: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. I made 10 business trips to the CR in the early ’90s, during the height of Prague Spring Redux. I never had a chance to encounter any of my rock idols while there, but I could feel the spirit of rock and roll in my soul as I walked the cobblestone streets of marvelous, mysterious Prague, knowing that music truly did bring power to the people.
RIP, President Havel: October 5, 1936 – December 18, 2011.
RIP, Frank Zappa: December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993.
RIP, Lou Reed: March 2, 1942 – October 27, 2013.
Here are the Plastic People of the Universe, with their rendition of the Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run.”
© Dana Spiardi, Nov 17, 2015
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When it came to facial hair, The Beatles were always adventurous. At various times both John and George sprouted wild, full-coverage beards. Those two were at their absolute bushiest in the Ethan Russell photo featured on the cover of the 1969 “Hey Jude” compilation album.
And who can forget the silly matching mustaches all four Beatles sported for the Sgt. Pepper album?
Ringo, always a trendsetter, wore a close-cropped beatnik beard way back in his pre-Beatle days — an unusual look at the time in the U.K.
Even baby-faced Paul went through a shaggy phase. Maybe he was styling himself after his sheepdog Martha.
The Stones, on the other hand, mostly remained clean shaven for the duration of their careers – even at the height of hippie culture. But leave it to yer blogger to find evidence that Rolling Stones really can gather facial moss, at least now and then.
One British teenybopper magazine was all abuzz when drummer Charlie Watts grew a conservative mustache back in the ’60s. Check out this hilarious page: Well, look what Charlie Watts has gone and done! He’s grown a mustache. And judging by the looks on the faces of the other Rolling Stones, they can’t quite make up their minds whether they like it or not. Poor Charlie – the most low-key member of the band, subjected to this scrutiny!
Now, here’s one of the few photos of former Stone Brian Jones sporting fuzz. Somehow it just doesn’t suit his Prince Valiant image.
Keith Richards never sprouted facial hair of any type back in the ’60s and ’70s. Funny…even during his most comatose heroin days he found the time and energy to shave.
But just check out Mick, looking like a true Norseman with his reddish Fuller Brush face! Proving once again that the Midnight Rambler is the most manly of them all.
© Dana Spiardi, Aug 26, 2015
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