Intellect PlusMusicians and composers
1,494 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 19 of 25.
The passacaglia began as street music strummed between Spanish songsThe word passacaglia comes from Spanish for walking the street. In the early 1600s it was a quick strummed filler between dances. Within decades Frescobaldi turned it into chains …
Al Green's father threw him out for listening to Jackie WilsonAs a teenager, Al Green was kicked out of the family home when his devout father caught him playing Jackie Wilson records. A few years later, Memphis producer Willie Mitchell coac…
Borodin composed Prince Igor in his spare time from chemistryAlexander Borodin is remembered for Prince Igor and In the Steppes of Central Asia, but he considered himself a chemist first and wrote music mainly on days off or when ill. In th…
Casting directors called young Angelina Jolie too dark, then she won an OscarAt sixteen Angelina Jolie decided to act professionally, only to be rejected at auditions for seeming too dark. She was so dismayed by her first lead, a direct-to-video robot sequ…
Queen's guitarist finished his astrophysics PhD 36 years after starting itBrian May began doctoral research in astrophysics in 1971, then got rather busy as Queen's lead guitarist. He finally received his PhD from Imperial College London in 2007. Since …
Charles Lamb spent his life caring for the sister who killed their motherIn September 1796, Mary Lamb, in the grip of severe mental illness, killed their mother at home in London. Her younger brother Charles, just 21, refused to let her be locked away …
Glen Campbell learned guitar on a five-dollar Sears instrument in rural ArkansasGlen Campbell grew up on a cotton farm without electricity, the seventh son among twelve children, playing a five-dollar guitar from Sears. He was on local radio by six. Years lat…
Guns N' Roses began the night a manager fired Axl RoseIn March 1985 a manager sacked singer Axl Rose from L.A. Guns. That same night, guitarist Tracii Guns decided to start a new band with him, fusing the names of their old groups. T…
Offenbach rented his own theatre when the Paris opera ignored himJacques Offenbach, a cantor's son from Cologne, wanted to write comic musical theatre, but the Opéra-Comique showed no interest. So in 1855 he leased a tiny theatre on the Champs-…
Slash's famous top hat began as shoplifted goods from Melrose AvenueBefore a 1985 club show, a young guitarist lifted a black felt top hat from one Melrose Avenue shop and a silver concho belt from another, then combined them into custom headgear.…
Slipknot took shape during night shifts at an Iowa gas stationMuch of Slipknot's early planning happened late at night at a Sinclair gas station in Des Moines, where drummer Joey Jordison worked the graveyard shift. There, in late 1995, he p…
Yo-Yo Ma wanted a double bass at three and settled for a celloAt three, Yo-Yo Ma asked his father for a big instrument. A leading Paris violin maker lent the family a tiny sixteenth-size cello, and by seven the boy was playing for Presidents…
Germany's second TV channel exists because a court blocked Adenauer's own networkChancellor Konrad Adenauer thought Germany's first public broadcaster was too friendly to his opponents, so in 1960 he founded a rival that critics nicknamed Adenauer television. …
Warren Beatty has 14 Oscar nominations across acting, writing, directing and producingFew film careers look like Warren Beatty's Academy Award record: four nominations for Best Actor, four for Best Picture, two for directing and four for screenplays. He won Best Di…
London fishmongers still give Westminster Abbey a salmon every yearLegend says a young Thames fisherman saw Saint Peter near the spot where Westminster Abbey now stands. The Fishmongers' Company still presents a salmon each year in honour of that…
Critics shrugged at Morning Glory, then it became Britain's best-selling studio albumWhen Oasis released their second album in October 1995, many reviewers called it weaker than the debut. It still sold 345,000 copies in its first British week, a record, and in Ju…
How a Latin word for rest became a genre for the concert hallRequiem simply means rest in Latin, taken from the opening plea of the Catholic Mass for the dead: grant them eternal rest, O Lord. That funeral liturgy inspired so much music, fr…
The jeweller who gave away his fortune and invented how Carnatic music is taughtPurandara Dasa was a rich dealer in gold and silver who renounced everything to wander as a singer devoted to Vishnu. Along the way he designed the graded exercises that South Ind…
Queen Latifah picked her name at eight and hip-hop firsts followedDana Owens was eight when she found the Arabic name Latifah, meaning delicate and very kind, in a book of names. A decade later she was a rapper challenging how Black women were t…- Quincy Jones learned the hard way that music and the music business differBefore Thriller and We Are the World, Quincy Jones led what he called the best jazz band on the planet, and went broke doing it. That failure taught him a lesson he never forgot, …
Rage Against the Machine signed to a major label and stayed furious anywayA band with revolutionary, anti-capitalist lyrics signed to Epic Records, topped the Billboard 200 twice and sold more than 16 million records. Rage Against the Machine fused meta…- The Ramones borrowed a Beatle's alias and played songs under two minutesFour friends from Forest Hills, Queens, none of them related, all took the surname Ramone, lifted from a stage name Paul McCartney used in the Silver Beetles days. Their songs rar…
Reba McEntire nearly talked her mother out of the drive to NashvilleIn March 1975 a young Oklahoma ranch girl kept inventing reasons for her mother to pull over rather than continue to Nashville. Her mother said she would turn around if asked, but…
Berlin's Reichstag went from ruin to glass-domed parliament over a centuryGermany's parliament meets in a building that burned in 1933, sat as a shell through the Cold War, and was once wrapped entirely in fabric by artists. Today visitors climb a walk-…
Rekha, the reluctant teenage actress who reinvented herself into a Hindi film iconRekha wanted to be a flight attendant. When money ran short in 1968, her mother asked her to act, so she left ninth grade at 13 or 14 and went to work. Critics mocked her looks an…
Pula, the Croatian port whose Roman arena has outlasted every empire that ruled itAt the southern tip of Istria sits a city of about 52,000 people built around one of the best preserved Roman amphitheatres anywhere. Pula has belonged to Romans, Byzantines, Fran…- Pattie Boyd inspired Something, Layla and Wonderful Tonight, then picked up a cameraFew people can claim songs by two rock legends as love letters. Pattie Boyd, a model who met George Harrison on the set of A Hard Day's Night, prompted his Something and later Eri…
A Sydney Harbour Bridge rigger talked his way onto TV and became Crocodile DundeePaul Hogan was working high on the Sydney Harbour Bridge when he decided a talent show's sneering judges needed a taste of their own medicine. Billed as a tap-dancing knife-throwe…- The Sound of Silence became a hit after a producer secretly added electric guitarsSimon & Garfunkel's first album flopped, and Paul Simon went off to play folk clubs in England. Back home, radio listeners kept requesting one track, so producer Tom Wilson overdu…
Peter Gabriel's fox head and red dress doubled Genesis's fee overnightMidway through a Dublin gig in 1972, Genesis's singer slipped offstage and came back wearing his wife's red dress and a fox's head. His bandmates later said they first took him fo…
Before Genesis, Phil Collins was the Artful Dodger and a Marquee Club sweeperLong before In the Air Tonight, Phil Collins was a child actor earning £15 a week as the Artful Dodger in the West End, until his voice broke mid-show. He swept floors at a Soho r…
Dolly Parton wrote I Will Always Love You about leaving Porter WagonerOne of the most famous love songs ever recorded is really a professional goodbye. Dolly Parton wrote I Will Always Love You about breaking away from Porter Wagoner, the rhinestone…
The Psalms were songs first, and their headings still carry the choirmaster's notesOpen the Book of Psalms and many poems begin with odd little instructions: for the choirmaster, with stringed instruments, according to lilies. They are traces of performance. The…- An honour capped at 24 living members, chosen by the monarch alonePrime ministers have tried for over a century to steer appointments to the Order of Merit, and the palace has kept shutting them out. Edward VII created it in 1902, and it still a…
Otis Redding got his big break because he was the driverIn 1962 Otis Redding drove guitarist Johnny Jenkins to a recording session in Memphis because Jenkins had no licence. The session fizzled, the studio let the driver sing two songs…
Nick Jonas was spotted in a barbershop at sixWhile his mother had her hair cut, a six-year-old Nick Jonas caught the attention of someone who referred him to a showbusiness manager. By seven he was on Broadway, and a Christm…
Nina Simone trained for Bach and became the High Priestess of SoulEunice Waymon spent her youth training to become a classical concert pianist. Rejected by the Curtis Institute, she took a job playing an Atlantic City bar whose owner insisted sh…- Norah Jones went from lounge singer to five Grammys in one nightA three-track demo passed along by a bandleader's wife landed Norah Jones at Blue Note, where executives worried about her direction but let her find it. Her debut, Come Away with…
- Olivia Rodrigo's first single broke Spotify records within daysIn January 2021 a Disney actor released her debut single and watched it set Spotify's daily streaming record for a non-holiday song twice in two days. Olivia Rodrigo, who had nego…
- The one-off Bond film that followed Fleming almost word for wordGeorge Lazenby, a model with no acting credits, beat hundreds of candidates to replace Sean Connery, then announced mid-shoot that he would play James Bond only once. His single o…
- N.W.A called it reality rap and took hardcore hip-hop to number oneBanned from much of mainstream radio and shadowed by an FBI letter, a Compton group still sold over ten million units in the United States. N.W.A lasted only from 1987 to 1991, ye…
Neil Diamond lived on 35 cents a day before writing hitsSelling roughly one song a week, a young Brooklyn songwriter could spend just 35 cents a day on food. Then, working alone in a room above the Birdland club, Neil Diamond wrote Sol…
From Joy Division's ashes, New Order made the best-selling 12-inch everWhen Ian Curtis died in May 1980, the three remaining members of Joy Division kept a pact to drop the name. Rebuilding as New Order, they discovered New York club culture, taught …
Newfoundland dogs are built for rescues in icy waterWebbed paws, an oily water-shedding coat and males that can top 80 kilograms make the Newfoundland a natural lifeguard. Bred to work alongside fishermen, one untrained Newfoundlan…- Nat King Cole meant to be a jazz pianist until a bar customer demanded a songIn the late 1930s Nat Cole led a piano trio in Los Angeles clubs. The story goes that one night a patron insisted he sing, and Cole, not knowing the requested tune, offered Sweet …
- Natalie Wood went from the girl in Miracle on 34th Street to Oscar nomineeNatalia Zacharenko, daughter of Russian refugees, was spotted by a film crew shooting in Santa Rosa and made her first screen appearance at four. By eight she was playing the doub…
The so-called Roman salute began with a French painting, not ancient RomeNo Roman sculpture shows a stiff raised arm, and no surviving Roman text describes one. Historians trace the gesture to Jacques-Louis David's 1784 canvas Oath of the Horatii, from…
Nehru called himself a mere prime minister before M. S. Subbulakshmi, a queen of musicAt eleven she sang in a temple hall in Tiruchirappalli; in 1966 she was the first Indian ever to take the stage before the UN General Assembly. M. S. Subbulakshmi went on to be th…
Michael Crawford did every Frank Spencer stunt himself and never used a doubleThe role of the accident-prone Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em was offered to Ronnie Barker and Norman Wisdom before Michael Crawford took it. A devotee of Buster Keaton…- Michael Douglas won his first Oscar as a producer, not an actorIn late 1971 Kirk Douglas handed his son the film rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, hoping to play its hero himself. Michael produced it, the director cast Jack Nicholson…
Mike Leigh builds his films from months of improvisation before any script existsMike Leigh starts a project with a set of unconnected characters, each invented by its actor. Only after long improvisation does he arrange meetings between them and sketch a bare…- Mike Nichols arrived in America at seven as a refugee and ended up with an EGOTIn April 1939, as the Nazis rounded up Berlin's Jews, a seven-year-old named Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky and his three-year-old brother were sent alone to New York to join their fath…
- Disco Dancer made Mithun Chakraborty a star from Mumbai to the Soviet UnionMithun Chakraborty won a National Film Award for his very first role, in an art-house film by Mrinal Sen. Six years later he was doing the opposite: a flashy dance musical, Disco …
- Motown started with an $800 family loan and a converted Detroit photo studioIn 1958 Berry Gordy needed $800 to release a single and persuaded his family to lend it from their shared savings account. He had wanted to call his label Tammy, after a Debbie Re…
- A Cleveland DJ gave the Canadian trio Rush its American breakRush's first album sold modestly in Canada and critics called it a Led Zeppelin knockoff. Then Donna Halper, a DJ at Cleveland's WMMS, started spinning Working Man. Its blue-colla…
- How a medieval nun's wish to trade hearts shaped a Catholic devotionA Cistercian mystic named Lutgarde, according to the story told of her, was offered any grace she wanted and asked to understand Latin better. The gift left her feeling empty, so …
- Ringo Starr first drummed on hospital cabinets with a cotton-bobbin malletAt 13, Richard Starkey entered a tuberculosis sanatorium for two years. To ease boredom, staff formed a patients' band, and he banged a makeshift mallet made from a cotton bobbin …
- Robbie Robertson won his first big break by writing two songs overnightAs a Toronto teenager, Robbie Robertson overheard rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins complain that he needed new material. He stayed up all night, wrote two songs, and played them for…
The cardinal who silenced Galileo also handed him his best defenceIn 1616 Cardinal Robert Bellarmine told Galileo to drop the idea of a moving Earth. Later he wrote Galileo a certificate saying he had only been informed of a decree, not forced t…
Robert Plant quit accountancy after two weeks to chase the bluesRobert Plant lasted only two weeks as a trainee chartered accountant. At 16 he left home to drift between Midlands blues bands, laying tarmac and stacking shelves to get by. Withi…