Backstage Secrets Hidden And Not Meant For The Audience

Our favorite musicians give us great performances in the studio and on stage, but backstage glimpses and behind-the-scenes facts tell us even more. They are human beings who sometimes keep it real and other times behave like divas. Some of their behavior is relatable and other things they do will blow your mind. In the end, it's a loop that tells you more about the music you already love -- take a look at these scenes of performers living everyday lives, and enjoy these tales of what happened backstage and stories behind the moments that made them pop stars and rock gods.

Part of the formula of the Spice Girls' success was doing things differently than girl groups that had preceded them. Rather than wear matching outfits, they decided to express their individuality, and the different, often conflicting fashion choices helped cultivate their five separate identities. Geri Halliwell tells a story that in the early days of the group, they all wore matching Adidas t-shirts for a performance and it just wasn't working.

Though they were known for being somewhat outrageous and free-spirited in their personal behavior, but Mel B.'s 2019 revelation was a bombshell: that she and Geri Halliwell had a one-off sexual encounter. Mel B. (that's Scary Spice) spilled the beans to Piers Morgan on his Life Stories show as the group members were all gearing up for their reunion tour:

It’s a fact. It just happened and we just giggled at it and that was it.

Halliwell (Ginger Spice, whose last name is Horner), said the story was untrue, and tension ensued, with some back-and-forth sniping in interviews. The Girls seemed to put it behind them once the tour got underway.

Leibovitz dressed Ronstadt in red lingerie and set about getting some playful shots of the star -- including one taken while Ronstadt's back was turned. It had been agreed that Leibovitz would show Ronstadt and her manager Peter Asher the photos before publication. Leibovitz "brought the projector over and very politely showed us the pictures," Ronstadt told Goldmine. "We said, 'Oh, we can't use those,' and she said, 'I didn't say that you could choose them. I just said I could let you see them.' At which point Peter unceremoniously threw her out of the house."

And here's the tricky part about stardom -- the bed photo was indeed printed in the magazine over Linda's objection and, along with the sexy come-hither cover portrait, no doubt helped sell even more Linda Ronstadt records and concert tickets.

In truth, Spears was in a downward spiral, and the deranged behavior wasn't a celebrity performing for the tabloids. It was actually just deranged behavior. Spears was, at this point in her career, constantly hounded by a press posse happy to write story after story about a teen star who'd run off the rails. She had recently lost her aunt to ovarian cancer, and the day before the head-shaving incident she had checked into and out of a rehab center in Antigua. It was a dark time for the singer, and though the episode was theatrical, it was not an act.

The late bassist Dee Dee Ramone's account is pretty scary. He wrote in is autobiography that Spector

leveled his gun at my heart and then motioned for me and the rest of the band to get back in the piano room…. He only holstered his pistol when he felt secure that his bodyguards could take over. Then he sat down at his black concert piano and made us listen to him play and sing “Baby, I Love You” until well after 4:30 in the morning.

Jessica Simpson's career as a secular pop star might never have happened if she were flat-chested. She developed at age 13, and though she was attempting to sing Christian music for the spiritual benefit of churchgoing audiences, she made pastors nervous.  She told The Mirror in 2004: 

I had very big boobs at a young age and it kept me from a lot of things in the church. I couldn't sing solos because supposedly the men lusted when I would get up there. I was a teenager in overalls, and I didn't even really know what sexy was. But they were telling me I was too sexy to sing.

Simpson recorded an album of Christian music at age 14 but couldn't get gigs because church elders wouldn't put her in front of their congregations -- even though she attempted to conceal her double-D breasts by wearing two sports bras. She went into pop music and became a favorite of middle America because she continued to tout Christian values and wore less revealing outfits than Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. It's all relative -- a girl who's too sexy to sing in church might still be the most wholesone thing on the pop chart.

Here's another one of those rock 'n roll stories that has been embellished and misunderstood over the years -- did Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a live ___? Yes he did, and it happened more than once. In March 1981, Ozzy was attending a meeting with his new label, and he was not exactly the most desirable artist. He'd been kicked out of Black Sabbath, and CBS had signed him for cheap, and his manager (later wife) Sharon thought that some sort of gesture of goodwill might endear him to the label.

The strange idea was that Ozzy would attend this sales meeting, and at some point he wouold stand up and say some nice words to the suits -- Let's have a great relationship, we're all one big team, that sort of thing -- and then he'd pull a dove out of each pocket and release them. Unfortunately, as was his style back then, Ozzy was completely drunk by the time he arrived at this 10 AM meeting, and the vibe was bad from the start. Here's how Ozzy described the climactic moment to Black Sabbath biographer Mick Wall:

I just remember this PR woman going on and on at me. In the end, I said, ‘Do you like animals?’ Then I pulled out one of these doves and bit its f---ing head off. Just to shut her up. Then I did it again with the next dove, spitting the head out on the table, and [the woman] fell on the floor screaming. That’s when they threw me out. They said I’d never work for CBS again.

Dancing for Beyonce is no easy job. Her dance captain Ashley McEverett, who's been with Bey for over a decade, told Metro UK that rehearsals can go on for three months -- and that they never nail the routine the first time. Not to Beyonce's satisfaction, at least. "People have breakdowns and exhaustion and get mentally and physically drained because it’s a lot putting on a huge production like this," McEverett said.

Beyonce is intense, but she's not heartless -- in fact, she once allowed a performance of "Single Ladies" to be completely disrupted mid-song for McEverett's personal reasons. McEverett's boyfriend came up on stage and, as the lyrics suggest, he "put a ring on it." After the touching moment, it was time to get back to work; McEverett danced the rest of the song as planned, only now she was wearing her new diamond ring.

Debbie Harry is not Blondie -- she's the singer in a band called Blondie. But the band did get its name from Harry's experiences as an attractive blonde performer in grimy New York clubs. Men in the audience would try to get her attention with cat-calls, whistles, and, inevitably, "Hey, blondie..."

Harry told Elle UK that she dyed her hair platinum when she was 15. "'I felt drawn to Marilyn Monroe," she said. "She had a big effect on women and was such a magnetic character. Having come up through the era of misogyny, I felt she had been misunderstood and undervalued."

"We were way out on the water," Poltz continued, "and [the Mexican cops] got a call and said, 'We don't have time to drop you off. We're trying to catch these drug smugglers, and there might be a shoot-out.' They asked us if we wanted AK-47s, so we had guns, and they caught the guys. We helped them load the pot back onto the boat and they took us back to shore."

"We got this picture of Steve holding a kilo of marijuana and me holding an AR-15 with the federales," Jewel added. At some point, during the course of this surreal getaway, Jewel wrote "You Were Meant For Me," the platinum-selling #2 single off her debut album.

And so the Virgin tour got underway, and audiences absolutely hated the Beasties, booing through their entire six-song set (they didn't have much material). In Beastie Boy fashion, the trio egged on the crowds, behaving like heels at a pro-wrestling event. Tour organizers wanted to drop them from the bill, but Madonna liked the energy, and insisted they stay on. 

"The audience always booed them and they always told everyone to f*** off," Madonna later recalled. "I just loved them for that. I couldn’t understand why everyone hated them."

As an added bonus, the Beastie Boys proved to be a brilliant way of warming up the crowd for the headliner. When they left the stage, audiences were ecstatic to see them go, and seemed all the more excited that Madonna was coming out to rescue them.

The Smoking Gun obtained the document, and it just seemed a bit excessive (especially considering the event in question was a charity thing). It stated that Lopez required a "45-foot trailer with triple side outs and two entry doors," and then there were the requirements for the dressing room: 

• White room
• White flowers
• White tables/ and or tablecloths
• White drapes
• White candles
• White couches

Additionally she specified seven kinds of fruit, a musical selection of over 40 hip-hop/R&B artists, and "NO TOMATO, APPLE OR GRAPE JUICES."

Rison and Lopes' relationship was known to be tempestuous. One night in 1994, when Rison opted to go out with his friends and leave her at home by herself, she dumped several pairs of his new shoes in a bathtub, doused them with lighter fluid, and tossed in a match. The fiberglass tub melted, and her plan to destroy his shoes ended up burning down his entire house. Lopes was convicted of first-degree arson. Strangely enough, she and Rison reconciled and stayed together (more or less) for another seven years. Lopes died in 2002 in a car crash in Honduras.

Then, as she revealed in her autobiography, something strange happened in 1987 in "the middle of Europe." During a show, halfway through "Purple Rain," Prince turned to his drummer and mouthed "Marry me?" She said yes, then "[h]e blew me a kiss, turned to the audience, and took the most amazing guitar solo ever," she wrote. They kept their engagement secret, and though they were happy and (she believes) monogamous for a time, the relationship seemed to fall apart. They never got married, and Escovedo kept their ill-fated engagement a secret for over 25 years.

During Shakira's performance at the 2020 Super Bowl, she looked into the camera, opened her mouth, and let out a ululation with very noticeable tongue action. Many viewers were puzzled, but those of Arabic heritage recognized that Shakira was attempting a zaghroota. The vocal sound, which is a little like a howl with a trilling element to it, is commonly made at Middle Eastern weddings as a sign of honor.

It turns out Benatar is a fan of science-fiction, and not just the bad stuff. "[Cat-Women Of The Moon] this absolute cult, crazy, horrible movie," she told Reuters. "It’s the most awful thing. but I love sci-fi, and I love really junky sci-fi. I have to tell you, I saw Avatar seven times. I really love it."

Osbourne had been warned by the venue not to pull any funny stuff with animals, and it seems he had no plans of doing so. Then someone in the audience threw an immobilized bat onto the stage. Was the bat alive but stunned, or was it already dead? We may never know the answer, but after Ozzy raised it to his mouth and chomped off its head, it was most definitely no longer alive. Osbourne said he believed it was a rubber bat, and only after he'd been into it did he realize it was not rubber. After the show, he went to a local hospital, where he received shots for tetanus and rabies.

They settled in, made nice with the guests, and partied anyway. There was beer at the event, and the band soon moved on to the "half gallon" of bourbon they had allegedly smuggled in. After two spins of Nevermind, they said they wanted to hear something else, and attempted to take over DJ duties. They ripped the Nirvana posters off the wall, then Krist Novoselic tossed a tamale at Kurt Cobain. Like the first shot fired at Fort Sumter, this small faux pas soon erupted into something larger, and the food fight was most definitely not how planners wanted the party to end. Re-bar owner Steve Wells was very nervous about losing his liquor license, and hustled the band and some others out the door. 

Sonny and Cher rose to fame with the chart-topping single "I Got You Babe" in 1965, but had seen their relevance evaporate by the late '60s. They went from hip to square in a hurry, and Sonny's taste in music was nothing like the heavy rock the kids wanted to hear. Cher was a beautiful 22-year old celebrity, and the couple got the not-unreasonable idea that the movies might want her if the pop charts didn't. They scraped together $500,000 of their own money to make Chastity, a road movie about a young woman on a journey of self-discovery, or something. Easy Rider it was not. The movie was a critical and commercial failure, and Cher didn't appear on the big screen for another 13 years.

Sesame Workshop decided not to air the video as part of the show -- because Perry had too much cleavage. The company put out a statement that began

Sesame Street has a long history of working with celebrities across all genres, including athletes, actors, musicians and artists. Sesame Street has always been written on two levels...

And didn't really say why the video was being pulled from the show. Perry was disappointed by the move, but got the last word. Soon after, she wore a low-cut Elmo t-shirt in a sketch on Saturday Night Live about acceptance of the female body.

Immediately after getting off stage, she was up-front with the gathered press. "You all know I had a wardrobe malfunction," she yelled. "We ran out of time getting the dress zipped up." She later explained her viewpoint to fans on Instagram -- unsurprisingly, she wasn't terribly fazed: "God is good. As long as a nipple didn't come out to play, I'm fine. Love my team."

Supposedly at a tour stop in Memphis, Tennessee Vince Neil and Ozzy went out for a night of partying and stumbled upon a car with its keys still in the ignition. Not wanting to let this opportunity go to waste, the guys stole the car and took it for a ride before cutting up the interior and smashing all the windows. 

Strummer actually hid out in Paris, shacking up in a girlfriend's apartment, going to museums, growing a beard, and drinking his fill at the local brasseries. Oh, and he also ran the Paris marathon -- as you do. This wasn't Strummer's first marathon; he'd run the London marathon, and in both cases he followed a strict training regimen that he later shared with an interviewer:

Drink 10 pints of beer the night before the race. Ya got that? And don’t run a single step at least four weeks before the race… None at all. And don’t forget the 10 pints of beer the night before. But make sure you put a warning in this article, ‘Do not try this at home.’ I mean, it works for me and Hunter Thompson but it might not work for others. I can only tell you what I do.

Faltskog's fear of persistent fans predated ABBA -- she had been a solo artist before the group formed, releasing four albums and notching a (Swedish) chart-topping single. Young, attractive and blonde, Faltskog was more or less the ideal Swedish babe, and the press tended to objectify her as such. Many years later, she attracked a stalker named Gert van der Graaf, a forklift operator who was 17 years younger than her, whom she actually dated for a couple of years. After their breakup, he became a superstalker. For his refusal to leave her alone, he has been deported and was subsequently barred from entering Sweden. To Faltskog's dismay, he keeps coming back. Van der Graaf is known in Sweden as the "Agnetha-man."

Aguilera had sought Perry's help a year after Perry collaborated with Pink on Pink's album Missundaztood. The two singers had already rubbed each other the wrong way during sessions for "Lady Marmalade." Pink now felt like she was being copied by a rival, saying:

I took it really personally when [Perry] started working with other artists, particularly artists I didn't like. I don't think imitation is the highest form of flattery, I think it's annoying.

They tried the song again, and the freshly-divorced Sinatra still wasn't giving it the vibe Hazlewood wanted. "I was still singing like Nancy NiceLady," she recalled. "Lee hit the talk-back switch in the booth and his deep voice blew my ears off.

For chrissake, you were a married woman, Nasty, you’re not a virgin anymore. Let’s do one for the truck drivers. Say something tough at the end of this one… Bite the words.

"Let's do one for the truck drivers" may be a sanitized quote -- witnesses who were in the studio say Hazlewood's directive was that she sing like "a sixteen-year-old girl who [copulates with] truck drivers." Yeah, you couldn't say that today.

Warner Bros. wanted to sign Morrison, but the label would have to satisfy his new masters and buy him out of his existing contract. Though the music industry can often be a bit seedy, this was exceptional. Warner Bros. executive Joe Smith was instructed to bring $20,000 in cash to an address on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. He recalled:

I had to walk up three flights of stairs, and there were four guys. Two tall and thin, and two built like buildings. There was no small talk. I got the signed contract and got the hell out of there, because I was afraid somebody would whack me in the head and take back the contract and I’d be out the money.

The Go-Go's liked to party, as revealed in the 2020 documentary The Go-Go's. They may have shed their punk hairdos and outfits, but they lived that rock-star life as if there were, as Johnny Rotten would say, no future. For their first Saturday Night Live appearance, they spent the day drinking and then hit the booger sugar to pep up before the 11:30 curtain call. "We were like cross-eyed drunk,” said drummer Gina Schock. Over time, though, a little booze and a little blow just doesn't do it anymore, and guitarist Charlotte Caffey ended up with a serious heroin habit by 1984. “Charlotte was so out of control that Ozzy Osbourne threw her out of his dressing room,” Schock recalled. “That’s pretty f***in’ bad.”

"I don't know if I'm supporting them, or they're supporting me," she has said.

Even if you weren’t a fan of country music, chances are pretty darn good that you knew who Dolly Parton was, men and women alike. Dolly has always been comfortable with her attention-getting figure, even dubbing herself a "backwoods Barbie."

Over 40 years after the song was released, Simon opened up about the famous mystery. She reportedly had three different men in mind while composing the song. She revealed that Warren Beatty was the lover she'd written about regarding that famous second verse. For his part, Beatty still believes the entire song is about him -- continuing to prove her initial point.

Whatever the case, the televised performance ended with a much bigger bang. According to stage manager Bob LeHendro, the explosives that went off were about three times the planned amount. Pete Townshend has blamed his hearing loss on this incident, although that may just be his way of sweetening the story. Townshend has been known for cranking it up to 11 throughout his career, so his eardrums have been taking a beating for decades.

"The Di thing was a bit naff (tacky, unfashionable)," Simon Le Bon recalled for The Guardian in 2003. "It was something your mum and dad liked, so there was a part of me that bristled at it."

Still, all these years later, Le Bon was able to crack a joke about their royal admirer: "Every time we opened the dressing-room door, there she bloody was - under the table trying to get an autograph. It was like, 'Can't your husband keep you under control?'"

Though somewhat forgotten today, Sex was the scandal of 1992, involving not only Madonna but a cast of celebrities she drafted to appear in the book with her. Vanilla Ice, Big Daddy Kane, Isabella Rossellini, Naomi Campbell and others posed with the Material Girl in various states of undress, although nobody was as frequently naked as the author herself. Like all good smut, the book was generally condemned but sold like hotcakes, moving 150,000 copies on its first day. Though many American localities banned it, and a number of countries tried to stop its import, Sex went on to sell 1.5 million copies worldwide. 

But a certain category of his ink is clearly meaningful -- the portraits of musicians who've influenced him. Across his knuckles he's got seven deceased heroes: Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Lennon, George Harrison, Dimebag Darrell, and Bankroll Fresh. Malone also has a larger portrait of Cobain on his left arm, and he has the words "whatever" and "nevermind" (lyrics from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit") on his palms. He's got three other musicians on his left arm: Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the rapper Lil' Peep, a close friend of Malone's who died in 2017. Two other music-related tattoos he has are the Motorhead mascot Snaggletooth and the words "So Far, So Good... So What," which is the title of an album by Megadeth. Add to all these the portrait of himself (dressed as a knight). That's a lot of musical ink, and there surely will be more.

Love claimed the story was totally false, and seethed over the whole episode, at one point writing a song called "Bring Me The Head Of Lynn Hirschberg." For three years, the two never crossed paths, until they finally came face-to-face at an Oscars after party in 1995. In a fit of rage, Love grabbed the nearest heavy blunt object -- which happened to be the Oscar statuette Quentin Tarantino had won for his Pulp Fiction screenplay -- and threatened to smack Hirschberg with it.

Joplin played Woodstock in August 1959, but her performances were not used in the famous film, nor were they included on either of the original albums Woodstock and Woodstock 2. Scheduling was an issue throughout the festival, and Joplin and her crew, the Kozmic Blues Band, were kept waiting for 10 hours before they could finally take the stage. Janis being Janis, she indulged -- it's rumored that she took heroin, and famous photographs show her drinking Champagne while waiting. Whatever she had in her system, it affected her performance, and she refused to let the documentarians include her footage in the movie.

Ray wasn't actually there to take Brown off the stage -- it was part of the act. Ray would throw the cape over Brown's shoulders and begin to shuffle the star away -- only to have Brown throw off the cape, seize the mic, and continue with the song. He'd get through another verse, then go down again. Ray would again put the cape on him and Brown would again throw it off and return to the mic, pantomiming physical and emotional pain, perhaps even physically steadied by his backup singers. Watching James Brown get through "Please, Please, Please" was like watching the last 10 minutes of Rocky. Only better, because James Brown had his very own cape man, Danny Ray.

Ray was a close friend of Brown's whom Brown called the "second hardest working man in show business." When Ray died in 2021, James Brown's daughter laid a cape over his coffin.

Many years later, Flav shared a story from the same time period, about how Shakur prevented him from committing murder (or "murk" in Flav slang). "Tupac was 17 or 18 years old when he stopped me from hitting this guy over the head with a fire extinguisher," Flav said. "If I had hit this guy over the head, the whole tour would have had to go home, I would have gone to jail, I might not be sitting here talking to you today. So I really got to thank God for Tupac stopping me from committing a murk."

"I was perspiring a lot," he explained to NPR's Terry Gross, "so these ladies were handing me table napkins. And then this one woman stood up and took her underwear off and, you know, handed them to me. And it was written up in the newspaper the following day." Throwing panties on stage soon became the customary way of showing appreciation at a Tom Jones concert. When he took his act to Vegas later that year, it wasn't just lingerie landing on the stage -- many smitten fans also tossed their hotel room keys at the singer.

Now, why he has chosen to wear a pair of ladies' underwear during this boxing workout, that's a mystery...

MTV VJ Mark Goodman explained that Roth "had the barriers in front of the stage painted different colors on the side that faced him: red, blue, and green, to denote the different areas of the audience. He’d look for hot girls in the crowd, and between songs, go to his assistant Eddie on the side of the stage, and say, 'Green, right, fourteen rows back, three seats in.'" The assistant would deliver backstage passes as instructed, and after the show "there’d be twenty-five girls in the dressing room who all thought they’d been singled out to be with Dave that night."

This is all lovely Bowie history, but it has the unusual twist of being history that was a mystery to Bowie. Biographer Nicholas Pegg wrote that "Bowie himself remembers almost nothing of the album's production, not even the studio, later admitting 'I know it was in L.A. because I've read it was.'"

Thanks to his drug habit and odd diet, Bowie was simply not in his right mind in '75-'76, a condition that another biographer described as "a state of psychic terror."

"We create the dances to structure everything around her, all the moving, all the staging to make her feel involved and like we’re encompassing her," her former creative director Anthony Burrell told Metro. "It was really effective because she’s not a mover at all." While she doesn't dance, it should be noted that in the physical sense, she does technically move -- as in change location and altitude -- in true diva style. "She did have this one saying, 'Pick me up, put me down,'" Burrell explained. "So whenever she said 'pick me up,' you pick her up. That’s why I had to hire guys that were aware… Guys that were big enough to pick her up and put her down."

Parsons' stepfather wanted him buried in Louisiana, and the body was shipped there. But Kaufman was intent on honoring his late friend's wishes. To this end, he and an accomplice managed to steal Parsons' body and drive it back to California from New Orleans in a hearse. At Joshua Tree Park, them men attempted to burn Parsons' body in the coffin, but only partially succeeded. They were arrested by police, and the remains of Parsons' remains were shipped back to New Orleans and buried there.

There is no law against stealing a dead body, so Kaufman and is friend were only fined $750 for stealing Parsons' coffin.

Nicks developed a close friendship with bandmate Christine McVie, which helped her overcome the loneliness she was feeling. She also attracted a mysterious group of attractive blondes who dressed in flowy black garments -- in other words, the Stevie Nicks look. "My first impression of touring with Fleetwood Mac was seeing Stevie and her acolytes," Kenny Loggins recalled. "She seemed to collect talented, young, beautiful girls who would then dress like her and follow her around all the time.”

The group did indeed smoke their former leader's ashes. Speaking to Vlad TV, they described a wake-like event at the beach that included things Shakur's favorite things, like chicken wings and orange soda. At one point, they rolled some marijuana cigarettes, with a dash of Tupac ash added, and smoked them. "That was a request that he had," one member of The Outlawz said. "Now, how serious he was about it? We took it serious."

James befriended local Toronto musicians, including Levon Helm (of The Hawks) and Neil Young. James formed The Mynah Birds, who played a mixture of soul, rock and folk music, and they even released a single on Columbia records. They headed to Detroit to record for Motown, and Young joined the group there. When Motown found out that James was a fugitive, they put the kibosh on working with him. While James was away doing five months hard labor to atone for his draft-dodging, Neil Young bought a hearse and drove west, where he formed Buffalo Springfield with four others. After his release, James formed a new Mynah Birds in Toronto and again took them to Motown to record, but very little of the music they made has ever seen the light of day.

The truth is, Nico helped the Velvets get a contract with MGM, who, like Warhol, saw her as a star. She soon moved on, releasing her solo debut Chelsea Girls, and her second album, a total downer called The Marble Index. The latter was a flop -- producer John Cale remarked that "You can’t sell suicide." Maybe not, but bands that pioneered got rock, including Bauhaus and The Cult, would later cite The Marble Index as an inspiration.

Sometimes, though, a wicked sense of humor and an abundance of alcohol is a recipe for disaster. In 1978, Jefferson Starship was in Hamburg, Germany, to play a concert and Slick got incredibly loaded. And the things that struck her as funny in this state were not funny at all. She took to the stage taunting the audience, repeatedly asking the question "Who won the war?" She called them Nazis and gave the heil-Hitler salute. The audience rioted and set the band's instruments on fire, then tossed them in the river.

Slick was asked by Paul Kantner to resign from the group, and she did.

Keren Woodward, Siobhan Fahey and Sara Dallin really were big De Niro fans, and the song did earn them a meeting with the star himself. "When the song came out, he was in the UK filming Brazil, and he invited us for a drink at Kettners in Soho," they recalled for The Guardian. "We were all sitting there when this guy knocked on the window. It was a freezing winter’s night and he had a bobble hat and glasses on, and we just thought: 'Who is that person trying to catch our attention?' We’d no idea it was him. He had his producer with him, who did most of the talking. I think De Niro was quite shy. But of course the whole place was filled with our friends and boyfriends – all sitting at different tables trying to sneak a look at him."

The couple had met at a Taylor Swift concert five years earlier and were self-described "Swifties" who'd forged their romantic relationship to the soundtrack of Taylor's albums. The proposal caught Swift off guard; in tweets that went viral, the groom wrote that "[Taylor] called me a baller and said that she is never surprised. She also said we were incredible and to go get married!!!! IS THIS REAL LIFE?!?!"

Though it happened right in front of her and had a lot to do with her music, Swift was not in on it -- she was really just the backdrop. She acknowledged this with the hashtag "#thirdwheel" in an Instagram post that earned 2.3 million likes.

Bonzo dressed as a waiter and rolled Jimmy Page, fully naked and covered in whipped cream, on a service cart into a room full of groupies. Needless to say, the girls dove into their human sundae. The story has been neither confirmed nor denied by the bandmates.

Due to departures and replacements, there were nine members of The Runaways, with the classic five-piece lineup staying together from late 1975 through mid-'77. Many years after their breakup, in the 2004 documentary Edgeplay: A Film About The Runaways, it was revealed that these members had each modeled their rock personas on their favorite established musicians. Keyboardist Cherie Currie took after David Bowie; guitarist Joan Jett emulated Suzi Quatro; guitarist Lita Ford claimed Ritchie Blackmore (of Deep Purple) and Jeff Beck; drummer Sandy West took after Roger Taylor (of Queen); and bassist Jackie Fox emulated Gene Simmons.

That is, until the final date of the tour, which was a show in Liverpool, England. The dynamic between the crowd and the rappers was confrontational from the start. The Beasties performed for just 12 minutes. Things turned ugly, and Ad Rock started lobbing cans of beer into the audience. As a riot broke out, the crowd was dispersed with tear gas. Unfortunately, one of the beer cans that was either thrown or deflected (using a baseball bat) by Ad Rock hit a female audience member in the face. The rapper was arrested and hauled into court, and the whole ugly incident led to the Beasties' being dropped by their label, Def Jam.

Maurice Gibb had an odd artifact he pulled out backstage for a laugh -- it was a t-shirt he'd found that said "Shoot the Bee Gees." His brothers did indeed laugh -- shoot the Bee Gees? It was inconceivable that anyone would bear ill will toward a group of such unbridled success. But in the streets, a vicious backlash against disco had been percolating, and when it struck, the Bee Gees were indeed the primary target. In the space of six months, the group went from being a Beatlesesque phenomenon, dominating the airwaves, to pariahs who were effectively banned from radio. It may be the most precipitous fall from grace in music history. They hadn't been literally shot, but careerwise, the Bee Gees were dead.

David Lee Roth explained it in his autobiography:

We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages. ... So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

It was Van Halen's way of testing the venue staff. The presence of brown M&Ms indicated to the band that those responsible hadn't read the contract, and who knows what other -- actually serious -- problems might arise.

KISS's problem was that they were neither skinny nor hairless, according to Simmons:

Well, we were more like football players; all of us were over 6 feet tall, and it just wasn't convincing! The very first pictures we took when the band first got together, we looked like drag queens. But we knew we wanted to get outlandish. We weren't a Grateful Dead kind of band that would get onstage and look worse than the roadie delivering our stuff. Which doesn't negate what the Dead and other bands were doing; it just wasn't us. ... That's where the makeup and dressing up came in.

Another rock star of Elton John's vintage is often associated with British soccer -- Rod Stewart. Though Elton John was never going to be a professional player, the naturally athletic Rod Stewart was very good at the sport, and captained his school team. As Stewart became a famous musician, the story of his soccer chops was considerably upgraded, to the point where it was taken as a fact that he "could have gone pro." Stewart told the underwhelming truth in his 2012 autobiography: in 1960, he tried out for Brentford FC, but didn't get called back, and that was it. He had no regrets with his career path: "Well, a musician's life is a lot easier and I can also get drunk and make music, and I can't do that and play football."

Frey wasn't having that, and got into a physical altercation with Meisner. By the end of the year, Meisner had been pushed out of The Eagles. But that's not the most famous battle Frey was involved in. In 1980, a simmering feud between Frey and guitarist Don Felder erupted on stage, during a concert. As the band progressed through its set, Felder and Frey traded jabs over the hot mic, each promising to kick the other's ass after the show. An actual fight was narrowly avoided, but that was it for the band -- The Eagles were done.

The next morning, when his friends returned to check on the rocker, they found Scott slumped over in the vehicle, covered in vomit. The 33-year-old singer was dead. Conspiracy theorists speculated that Scott was murdered, but in all likelihood, his death was far less glamorous. He most likely choked to death on his own vomit, just as Jimi Hendrix had before him and as John Bonham of Led Zeppelin would do a few months later. The official cause of death was listed as “acute alcohol poisoning” causing “death by misadventure.” 

The role took a toll on Grande's natural hair. "I had to bleach my hair and dye it red every other week for the first 4 years of playing Cat… as one would assume, that completely destroyed my hair," she explained in a Facebook post in 2014. "I wear it in a pony tail because my actual hair is so broken that it looks absolutely ratchet and absurd when I let it down."

Moakler posted a fairly harmless statement to fans of their reality show, Meet The Barkers: "I am very devestated [sic] and very much heartbroken over the demise of my marriage and for the upset of my family....I wanted nothing more to overcome the challenges we faced but failed."

Barker struck back with his own MySpace post in all-caps that gave a vicious account of life with Shanna, painting a portrait of a spoiled woman who slept most of the day, didn't take a role in parenting their children, disappeared to get her nails done, didn't come home for dinner and instead stayed out drinking with her friends. Barker also speculated that she was having an affair.