Intellect PlusMusicians and composers
1,494 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 22 of 25.
George Jones hid his rockabilly records behind the name Thumper JonesWhen Elvis exploded in 1956, a broke young George Jones reluctantly cut some rockabilly, but insisted it be credited to Thumper Jones so the flops would not shame him. He tried to…
Georges Bizet died believing Carmen had floppedGeorges Bizet left the premiere of Carmen in March 1875 convinced he had written a failure. Three months later he died of a heart attack at 36. He never learned that the opera wou…
Gerald Ford had the Navy band play Michigan's fight song before state eventsGerald Ford never lost his attachment to Michigan football. As president he often asked the Navy band to strike up The Victors, the university fight song, in place of Hail to the …
A broken record player at a birthday party launched Gladys Knight and the PipsWhen the record player failed at her brother Bubba's tenth birthday, young Gladys Knight, her siblings and cousins sang instead. Her mother urged them to keep going, and the group…
A magazine insult about Varèse sent teenage Frank Zappa hunting for modern musicA LOOK magazine article sneered at a Varèse percussion piece as a weird jumble of drums. Young Frank Zappa took that as a recommendation, searched more than a year for the record,…
The French Resistance began with slashed tyres and a museum newspaperIn summer 1940 French resistance meant cutting phone lines, defacing posters and letting air out of German truck tyres. Only one to three percent of the population ever joined org…
Most people who speak English learned it as a second languageEnglish began in early medieval England, yet the typical English speaker today is not a native. Of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion Anglophones, roughly 400 million grew up wit…
Erik Satie was called the laziest student in Paris, then rewired French musicA teacher at the Paris Conservatoire labelled the teenage Erik Satie the laziest pupil in the building, and another dismissed him as worthless. He was expelled, got himself out of…
Everybody Loves Raymond built nine seasons of comedy on parents living across the streetThe premise was tiny: a Long Island sportswriter whose meddling mother, insulting father and jealous older brother live directly opposite his house. Everybody Loves Raymond ran fo…
Faye Dunaway paid to escape a film contract and landed Bonnie and ClydeEarly on, Faye Dunaway signed a six-picture deal with the director Otto Preminger, clashed with him on her second film, and bought her way out at real cost. Had she stayed, she la…
Mozart's piano needed a quarter of the force a modern key doesThe instruments Haydn and Mozart wrote for were not quiet versions of today's concert grand. Fortepianos had leather hammers, thin strings, no iron frame and a range of around fiv…
The Four Seasons took their name from a bowling alley that turned them downAround 1960 a struggling New Jersey vocal group auditioned at a bowling alley lounge in Union and was rejected. They kept the venue's name anyway and became the 4 Seasons. Two yea…- Grieg said his most famous tune reeked of cow dung and troll smugnessIn the Hall of the Mountain King is one of the most recognisable pieces of classical music, yet its composer, Edvard Grieg, told a friend in 1874 that he could hardly bear to hear…
Before Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte spent decades inventing an island called GondalEmily Bronte published one novel, died at 30, and was mocked by critics who found her characters coarse. Behind Wuthering Heights lay a private universe: from about thirteen she a…- A babysitter's overheard conversation launched Emmylou Harris into country musicIn 1971 Emmylou Harris was a broke single mother who had, in her words, quit the music business for good. One night at a Washington club she sang a country song half as a joke. So…
Earth, Wind & Fire took its name from its founder's star signMaurice White was a Sagittarius, a sign whose classical element is fire, with seasonal qualities of earth and air. So when he renamed his Chicago band the Salty Peppers, he left o…
In 1952 Stalin offered a neutral, reunited Germany, and the West declinedThree years after East Germany was founded, Joseph Stalin proposed reuniting the country as a neutral state, promising free speech, free assembly and democratic parties. The Weste…
Edith Cavell faced a German firing squad saying patriotism was not enoughOn the eve of her execution in 1915, the British nurse Edith Cavell told her chaplain she felt no hatred or bitterness toward anyone, because patriotism was not enough. She had nu…- Strauss's champagne-soaked operetta is really one long revenge prankDie Fledermaus, Johann Strauss II's 1874 operetta, turns on a grudge. Years earlier Gabriel von Eisenstein left his drunken friend Falke asleep in the middle of town dressed as a …
Dionne Warwick's first hit was named after an angry outburst at her producersIn 1962 Dionne Warwick learned that a song she had demoed and wanted as her debut had gone to Jerry Butler instead. She snapped 'don't make me over' at Burt Bacharach and Hal Davi…- Don Cheadle already holds a Grammy and a Tony, and chases the restDon Cheadle is best known as an actor, yet his two Grammys came for a jazz soundtrack and an audiobook, and his Tony for producing a musical. With an Oscar nomination and 11 Emmy …
A broken leg turned teenage dancer Doris Kappelhoff into Doris DayIn October 1937 a Cincinnati teenager heading to her own going-away party was badly hurt when the car she was riding in hit a freight train. Her right leg was broken, and with it …
Crowds chanted 'Rocky sucks' until Dwayne Johnson started insulting them backWhen Dwayne Johnson debuted in the WWF in 1996 as Rocky Maivia, a smiling third-generation hero, fans hated him so much they chanted for his downfall. After a knee injury he came …
In sheet music, 'loud' and 'soft' never mean a fixed volumeA tuba playing moderately soft will usually drown out a guitar playing loud, and a piccolo can seem piercing at a lower decibel level than its neighbours. Musical dynamics marking…
Diana Ross was named Diane, and a birth certificate error changed itHer mother named her Diane, and friends in Detroit still call her that. The clerk wrote Diana. In 1965, as the Supremes were piling up number-one hits, she started using the missp…
Dido's song became a hit only after a TV finale played it wholeDido's first single, Here with Me, was flopping on radio and her label was thinking of switching tracks. Then the TV series Roswell, which already used it as its theme, played the…- Did an emperor really tell Mozart his opera had too many notes?The famous story says Joseph II heard Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and complained of too many notes, and Mozart shot back that there were exactly as many as needed. Not ev…
Dave Grohl lied about his age to join a punk band at 17Dave Grohl never took a drum lesson. He learned by playing along to Rush and punk records, claimed to be older than he was to win an audition with the Washington band Scream, and …
David Fincher learned filmmaking by directing 53 music videosAt eight, David Fincher saw a behind-the-scenes film about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and realised a film could take months to shoot. He grew up with George Lucas as a nei…- How a flop night in Atlantic City created Martin and LewisTheir first show together at Atlantic City's 500 Club in July 1946 bombed, and the owner threatened to fire Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis before the second set. In the alley out bac…
Deftones grew from a Sacramento garage jam into a Grammy-winning metal bandThree skateboarding friends from the same Sacramento high school began jamming in Stephen Carpenter's garage around 1988. Their guitarist had taught himself while stuck in a wheel…
Dennis Wilson was the only Beach Boy who could actually surfThe Beach Boys sold the world an image of California surf culture, yet only their drummer rode the waves. Dennis Wilson, the wild middle brother, pushed Brian to write their first…
Before Destiny's Child, the girls rehearsed for tips in a Houston hair salonThe group that became Destiny's Child tested its routines in Tina Knowles's Houston salon, where customers tipped and critiqued them. They lost on Star Search, cycled through name…- Dharmendra nearly quit Mumbai before becoming Hindi cinema's He-ManA headmaster's son from a Punjab village, Dharmendra went to Mumbai with no contacts, failed, and took a job with a drilling company. A magazine talent hunt pulled him back, and a…
The same two notes can clash in Bach and soothe in DebussyPlay C and D together and in a Bach prelude from the 1700s the pair counts as a clash that must be resolved. Put the identical interval in a Debussy piece from the early 1900s and…- Mozart's widow turned his debts into a fortuneWhen Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died suddenly in 1791, he left debts and a widow with two small sons. Constanze Mozart secured a pension from the emperor, staged profitable memorial …
Cyndi Lauper rewrote a sexist song and helped push wrestling onto MTVCyndi Lauper thought the original lyrics of Girls Just Want to Have Fun were misogynistic, so she reworked it into an anthem for young women. Its video won the first Best Female V…
How Dancing with the Stars turns judges' marks into percentagesOn Dancing with the Stars, a perfect score from the judges does not decide who stays. Each couple's points are converted into a share of everything the judges handed out that nigh…- Hootie's frontman became country's first Black No. 1 in 25 yearsIn September 2008 Darius Rucker, best known as the singer of Hootie & the Blowfish, topped the country chart with Don't Think I Don't Think About It. No solo African American arti…
- Chaka Khan scored the first R&B crossover hit with a rapper on itIn 1984 Chaka Khan covered an obscure Prince song from 1979, added a Stevie Wonder harmonica solo, and let Grandmaster Melle Mel open it with a rap. I Feel for You sold a million …
Chemnitz spent 37 years named after Karl Marx, then voted to change backOn 10 May 1953 the East German government renamed the Saxon industrial city of Chemnitz as Karl-Marx-Stadt, marking 135 years since Marx's birth. In a referendum held in April 199…- How the band Chicago lost its Woodstock slot to SantanaChicago was booked for Woodstock in 1969, but promoter Bill Graham held a contract letting him reschedule them for his Fillmore West, and he picked exactly the Woodstock dates. Sa…
Cicely Tyson won a Tony at 88 after decades of firstsIn June 2013, aged 88, Cicely Tyson won the Tony for Best Actress in a Play for The Trip to Bountiful, making her the oldest winner ever in that category. Half a century before, s…- Carole King wrote hits for others for a decade, then made TapestryAt four, Carol Klein perched on a phone book at the piano while her mother taught her to read music, and her parents discovered she had perfect pitch. By her late teens she was wr…
Celine Dion's manager mortgaged his house to record a twelve-year-old from QuebecThe youngest of fourteen children, Celine Dion slept in a drawer as a baby because the family could not spare money for a crib. At twelve she sent a homemade song to a manager, wh…- Béziers has shipped wine and stirred up trouble for over 2,500 yearsA Roman wine jar dug up near Rome carries a boast: it holds five-year-old wine from Béziers. The southern French town was founded by Greeks, rebuilt by Romans, and centuries later…
Bryan Ferry turned an art-school education into Roxy Music's sound and styleBefore he fronted Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry taught pottery at a London school and failed an audition for King Crimson. That rejection still paid off: the band's managers signed his …- A wrecked knee and a car crash steered Burt Reynolds toward actingBurt Reynolds planned to be a college football star until a knee injury and then a near-fatal car crash ended that. At a Florida junior college an English teacher heard him read S…
Why directors, authors and real people keep slipping into their own storiesHitchcock could not fit himself into Lifeboat, a film set entirely on one small boat, so he appeared in a newspaper advertisement instead. The cameo, borrowed from a word for tiny…
Cardi B went from viral videos to a record-breaking run on the chartsIn 2013 a young woman from the Bronx started posting short, loud, funny videos online. Four years later her first major-label single, Bodak Yellow, reached No. 1, making her the f…- Carl Maria von Weber, Mozart's cousin by marriage, helped invent German Romantic operaCarl Maria von Weber's father wanted another Mozart, and the family link was real: Mozart had married Weber's cousin Constanze. The boy could not walk until four, was running an o…
- Carl Wilson, the youngest Beach Boy, quietly held the band togetherIn the mid-1960s concert promoters booking the Beach Boys had to sign contracts naming Carl Wilson plus four other musicians. The youngest Wilson brother sang God Only Knows, took…
Carnegie Hall nearly fell to the wrecking ball before a violinist intervenedWhen the New York Philharmonic announced it was leaving for Lincoln Center, the city's most famous concert hall looked doomed. A public campaign led by the violinist Isaac Stern s…
Coconuts are named after a Spanish bogeymanPortuguese sailors thought the three dimples on a coconut shell looked like the hairy face of El Coco, the monster Iberian parents invoked to scare children to sleep, so they name…
Bohemia still carries the name of Celts who left it two thousand years agoThe heart of the Czech Republic is named after a Celtic tribe, the Boii, who were beaten by Rome in northern Italy and later drifted away. Roman writers called their old homeland …
One Springsteen song took six months to recordAfter two acclaimed albums that barely sold, Bruce Springsteen gambled everything on a record built like Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. The title track alone took six months in the…
Bradley Cooper nearly quit acting after tearing his Achilles tendonIn his late twenties Bradley Cooper was a sidelined supporting player on Alias, recovering from an Achilles tendon torn on a basketball court and wondering whether to give up acti…- Bryan Adams signed his first record deal for one dollarIn 1978 an 18-year-old Vancouver singer who had left school at 15 signed with A&M Records for a single dollar. The label sped up his vocals to turn a demo into a disco track he la…
- Björk made her first album at 11 after a school recital aired nationallyWhen a young Björk sang a Tina Charles disco hit at a school recital, her teachers sent the tape to Iceland's only radio station. It was broadcast nationwide, a record label calle…
- The Black Panthers began by legally following Oakland police carsIn 1966 two Oakland college friends, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, used California's open-carry law to trail police patrols and record their conduct. Within three years the Blac…