Doobie Doo
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Jerry Lee Lewis introduces Britain to his child bride
Britain might be a strange sort of place, what with its endless cups of tea and citizens' insistence on talking about the weather like it's an actual topic of worthwhile conversation, but there's "strange to American eyes" and then there's "so strange they're totally down with the idea of incestuous child brides." In 1958, rock 'n' roll icon Jerry Lee Lewis accidentally mistook the former for the latter and decided to take his underage wife with him on his tour of England. As History Channel details, career-destroying chaos ensued.
The Killer had neglected to tell anyone he was newly married, so when he rocked up with Myra Gail Lewis (pictured) in tow, the British press were naturally curious. A Daily Mail reporter, Paul Tanfield, happened to ask how old the newlywed was. Lewis said she was 15. His transatlantic career was over.
The truly shocking part is that Lewis was lying. Myra was actually 13. Worse, she was actually Lewis' cousin. Let that sink in. Jerry Lee Lewis flew to Britain with the barely teenage blood relative he was (presumably) having massively illegal sex with and didn't think this would somehow come back to bite him. Bite him it did. His British tour collapsed. Those that showed at his gigs went only to boo him. Concerts were canceled. His expensive hotel kicked him out. When he finally high-tailed it back home to the States, he found he'd been blacklisted by the music industry. Even America has standards.
Eric Clapton goes on a drunken anti-immigrant tirade
British guitarist Eric Clapton is the only person to have been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame three separate times. He's also the only musician to have sparked an anti-racism movement in direct response to a speech he made. Rock Against Racism was a major music movement in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. The BBC has described it as a "turning point in British culture." It was the forefather of the Love Music Hate Racism movement that you'll find at most modern British festivals. And it only exists because Clapton once acted like a drunken Archie Bunker.
The year was 1976. Race relations were at an all-time low in Britain. The far-right National Front was attracting millions to its marches. Asian teenagers were being murdered in the streets. Even David Bowie was expressing admiration for fascism (admittedly while also doing all the cocaine). At the height of all this, a drunk Eric Clapton clambered onto stage in Birmingham and yelled "Enoch was right … we should send them all back" (via The Guardian).
The rest of Clapton's speech reads like a Dummy's Guide to inflaming racial tensions. The guitarist said Britain was becoming a "black colony" and his audience should vote the controversial politician Enoch Powell (like a British George Wallace) to "keep Britain white."
While Clapton's outburst didn't see him totally ostracized, it did permanently stain his career in his native country. Forty years later, his name is still synonymous with racism.
Marilyn Manson gets blamed for the Columbine massacre
On April 20, 1999, two kids named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into their Columbine high school and started shooting. They kept shooting until 13 people were dead and over 20 injured. In the aftermath of the tragedy, America started casting around for someone to blame. Enter Marilyn Manson.
At the time, Manson was already seen by Middle America as the antichrist. When word got out that Harris and Klebold had listened to his music and were goths, the nation's moms and pops went nuts. In an interview with The Guardian, Manson later said the massacre destroyed his "entire career." His concerts were protested. He received hundreds of death threats. Bomb threats were called in to his gigs. The most aggravating part? As Manson later wrote in an article for Rolling Stone, Harris and Klebold weren't goths. They weren't even fans of Manson's music. They were into KMFDM and Rammstein.
Manson would later tell NME (recounted here via CNN) that "When it comes to things like Columbine, it would have been different if [Harris and Klebold] had actually liked my music, but I think that I have had more blame accredited to me than any person in the history of music," although, to be fair, he qualified this thoughtful take with the claim "there should be some sort of Grammy for that." What's that old adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity?
Michelle Shocked tells San Francisco that God hates LGBT people
For someone who once told Dallas Voice that she'd "be honored" to be called an honorary lesbian, Michelle Shocked sure seems to have a strange grasp of what "honored" means. In 2013, the famously leftie country singer dropped an H-bomb's worth of LGBT slurs while playing a club in, of all places, San Francisco. According to The Guardian, Shocked took time out from her set to yell on stage "When they stop Prop 8 and force priests at gunpoint to marry gays, it will be the downfall of civilization, and Jesus will come back," before adding, "You are going to leave here and tell people, 'Michelle Shocked said God hates f—-ts.'"
Shocked is a one-time big artist who once shared a stage with Madonna and Sinead O'Connor. After suing her record label under the 13th Amendment (which bans slavery), Shocked dropped out of the big time and started self-releasing, relying on her hardcore fanbase to make ends meet. Her hardcore fanbase who just happened to be largely made up of liberals and lesbians. Whoops.
The LGBT-slur controversy left Shocked at the center of a media storm and on the wrong side of her own fans. In a long interview piece with the singer, Dallas Morning News claimed in 2017 that the outburst sent Shocked's career into a near-terminal nosedive, losing her bookings and wiping out a planned tour. For her part, Shocked says her comments were misunderstood and weren't meant literally. So that'd make them … figuratively homophobic?
Sly Stone gets busted for cocaine possession
Getty Images
The collapse of Sly Stone's career was less a single moment than a whole series of increasingly desperate moments that finally culminated in one uber-moment that effectively ruined his reputation forever. Having ended the '60s playing Woodstock as the head of pioneering funk outfit Sly and the Family Stone, he segued into the '70s stuffing enough cocaine up his nose to get a whole galaxy of Scarfaces high.
The singer started missing concerts and collapsing on stage. In 1976, his pet dog mauled his son. His wife left him. His band broke up. Still, Sly could have probably recovered from all this. Failed marriages, band breakups, and drug addiction are part of the job description for troubled musicians. But there's one thing record labels in the '80s still took a much dimmer view on. In 1983, Stone was busted for cocaine possession. As People detailed in a 1996 profile, he didn't work again for over a decade.
Amazingly, getting caught with quantities of cocaine big enough to be measured in Escobars wasn't the only ruinous moment of Stone's career. After starting to work again in the 2000s, he was invited to play Coachella in 2010. It was meant to be his comeback. Instead, Sly rocked up late dressed in a blonde wig (pictured), rambled incoherently, played some stuff off his iPod, and then gave up. Only a year later, the former funkmaster was homeless and living in a van.
Britain might be a strange sort of place, what with its endless cups of tea and citizens' insistence on talking about the weather like it's an actual topic of worthwhile conversation, but there's "strange to American eyes" and then there's "so strange they're totally down with the idea of incestuous child brides." In 1958, rock 'n' roll icon Jerry Lee Lewis accidentally mistook the former for the latter and decided to take his underage wife with him on his tour of England. As History Channel details, career-destroying chaos ensued.
The Killer had neglected to tell anyone he was newly married, so when he rocked up with Myra Gail Lewis (pictured) in tow, the British press were naturally curious. A Daily Mail reporter, Paul Tanfield, happened to ask how old the newlywed was. Lewis said she was 15. His transatlantic career was over.
The truly shocking part is that Lewis was lying. Myra was actually 13. Worse, she was actually Lewis' cousin. Let that sink in. Jerry Lee Lewis flew to Britain with the barely teenage blood relative he was (presumably) having massively illegal sex with and didn't think this would somehow come back to bite him. Bite him it did. His British tour collapsed. Those that showed at his gigs went only to boo him. Concerts were canceled. His expensive hotel kicked him out. When he finally high-tailed it back home to the States, he found he'd been blacklisted by the music industry. Even America has standards.
Eric Clapton goes on a drunken anti-immigrant tirade
British guitarist Eric Clapton is the only person to have been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame three separate times. He's also the only musician to have sparked an anti-racism movement in direct response to a speech he made. Rock Against Racism was a major music movement in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. The BBC has described it as a "turning point in British culture." It was the forefather of the Love Music Hate Racism movement that you'll find at most modern British festivals. And it only exists because Clapton once acted like a drunken Archie Bunker.
The year was 1976. Race relations were at an all-time low in Britain. The far-right National Front was attracting millions to its marches. Asian teenagers were being murdered in the streets. Even David Bowie was expressing admiration for fascism (admittedly while also doing all the cocaine). At the height of all this, a drunk Eric Clapton clambered onto stage in Birmingham and yelled "Enoch was right … we should send them all back" (via The Guardian).
The rest of Clapton's speech reads like a Dummy's Guide to inflaming racial tensions. The guitarist said Britain was becoming a "black colony" and his audience should vote the controversial politician Enoch Powell (like a British George Wallace) to "keep Britain white."
While Clapton's outburst didn't see him totally ostracized, it did permanently stain his career in his native country. Forty years later, his name is still synonymous with racism.
Marilyn Manson gets blamed for the Columbine massacre
On April 20, 1999, two kids named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into their Columbine high school and started shooting. They kept shooting until 13 people were dead and over 20 injured. In the aftermath of the tragedy, America started casting around for someone to blame. Enter Marilyn Manson.
At the time, Manson was already seen by Middle America as the antichrist. When word got out that Harris and Klebold had listened to his music and were goths, the nation's moms and pops went nuts. In an interview with The Guardian, Manson later said the massacre destroyed his "entire career." His concerts were protested. He received hundreds of death threats. Bomb threats were called in to his gigs. The most aggravating part? As Manson later wrote in an article for Rolling Stone, Harris and Klebold weren't goths. They weren't even fans of Manson's music. They were into KMFDM and Rammstein.
Manson would later tell NME (recounted here via CNN) that "When it comes to things like Columbine, it would have been different if [Harris and Klebold] had actually liked my music, but I think that I have had more blame accredited to me than any person in the history of music," although, to be fair, he qualified this thoughtful take with the claim "there should be some sort of Grammy for that." What's that old adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity?
Michelle Shocked tells San Francisco that God hates LGBT people
For someone who once told Dallas Voice that she'd "be honored" to be called an honorary lesbian, Michelle Shocked sure seems to have a strange grasp of what "honored" means. In 2013, the famously leftie country singer dropped an H-bomb's worth of LGBT slurs while playing a club in, of all places, San Francisco. According to The Guardian, Shocked took time out from her set to yell on stage "When they stop Prop 8 and force priests at gunpoint to marry gays, it will be the downfall of civilization, and Jesus will come back," before adding, "You are going to leave here and tell people, 'Michelle Shocked said God hates f—-ts.'"
Shocked is a one-time big artist who once shared a stage with Madonna and Sinead O'Connor. After suing her record label under the 13th Amendment (which bans slavery), Shocked dropped out of the big time and started self-releasing, relying on her hardcore fanbase to make ends meet. Her hardcore fanbase who just happened to be largely made up of liberals and lesbians. Whoops.
The LGBT-slur controversy left Shocked at the center of a media storm and on the wrong side of her own fans. In a long interview piece with the singer, Dallas Morning News claimed in 2017 that the outburst sent Shocked's career into a near-terminal nosedive, losing her bookings and wiping out a planned tour. For her part, Shocked says her comments were misunderstood and weren't meant literally. So that'd make them … figuratively homophobic?
Sly Stone gets busted for cocaine possession
Getty Images
The collapse of Sly Stone's career was less a single moment than a whole series of increasingly desperate moments that finally culminated in one uber-moment that effectively ruined his reputation forever. Having ended the '60s playing Woodstock as the head of pioneering funk outfit Sly and the Family Stone, he segued into the '70s stuffing enough cocaine up his nose to get a whole galaxy of Scarfaces high.
The singer started missing concerts and collapsing on stage. In 1976, his pet dog mauled his son. His wife left him. His band broke up. Still, Sly could have probably recovered from all this. Failed marriages, band breakups, and drug addiction are part of the job description for troubled musicians. But there's one thing record labels in the '80s still took a much dimmer view on. In 1983, Stone was busted for cocaine possession. As People detailed in a 1996 profile, he didn't work again for over a decade.
Amazingly, getting caught with quantities of cocaine big enough to be measured in Escobars wasn't the only ruinous moment of Stone's career. After starting to work again in the 2000s, he was invited to play Coachella in 2010. It was meant to be his comeback. Instead, Sly rocked up late dressed in a blonde wig (pictured), rambled incoherently, played some stuff off his iPod, and then gave up. Only a year later, the former funkmaster was homeless and living in a van.
