All modern rock stars are fucking dull. Give them a mountain of money, thousands of slutty groupies, a sack full of narcotics, and the most controversial thing they can conjure up is a miserable drug habit like Amy Winehouse. Rock stars have been boring for years now. Drug habits are boring. It’s wild salacious behaviour we want from our rockers, and although the older generation might pretend to be outraged by Amy’s weight loss, what they’re really outraged by is how completely lame she is. Come on guys, get creative like these old timers!
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TED PEARCE
Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin’s guitarist, famously spent a night at the Edgewater Inn, where one could fish from the room balconies. By 4am, with a few red snappers in tow, he had decided to hide them in a 17-year-old groupies frilly bits. He also once boasted that he fed a girlfriend a sandwich filled with razor blades. Jimmy gets a gold star for creativity.
Touring can be boring, so to spice up the experience for the beleaguered roadies, Dave Lee Roth - the altruistic front man of Van Halen - gave each Roadie a selection of backstage passes to issue to hot girls in the crowd. The roadie who gave the pass to the girl Dave slept with that night would win $100. Dave gets a lollipop.
They say the forbidden fruit is always the sweetest. Rock stars in years gone by have been keen to test this theory by carrying out as many sexual perversions as possible in horribly amoral ways. Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones dated a 13 year-old girl when he a spritely 47. The behaviour that would later land Gary Glitter in jail was a little more tolerated in those days, and the couple eventually married when she was 18. They divorced fairly soon after. Bill gets a trench coat for his efforts.
It’s pretty standard fair for a Rock Star to trade in his girlfriend for a younger model once he’s famous, but Jerry Lee Lewis took this to the extreme. When he came to Britain from the States at 22, he brought a very young-looking wife who he claimed was 15 (still very young by most standards). Turned out she was actually 13, and his marriage to her was not only pretty creepy, but very illegal given that he was already married - 5 years earlier in fact, to a then 14 year old girl. Eeeew. Jerry gets a wide berth.
Still, to their credit, at least those never hurt anyone (physically)…