Edwards - Is tiny dancer really Eltons little John? : musics most enduring mysteries, myths, and rumors revealed

Rock songs, you may have noticed, are full of questions. How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man? Do you know the way to San Jose? Can your pussy do the dog? Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself when youre old enough to repay but young enough to sell? Scaramouche, Scaramouche, can you do the fandango?

The best music makes you want to answer all those questions. (For example: five; not without Google Maps; with enough lubricant; yes; let me get my fandango shoes on.) Thats not where the questions end, of course. Rock music (and by rock, I mean the whole megillah of popular music since 1955, based on the union of blues and country, but encompassing soul, folk, hip-hop, distorted electric guitars, and the funky chicken) inspires entire new lines of inquiries. If youve ever wasted hours ingesting intravenous MTV, or spent an afternoon with headphones on, trying to decipher the lyrics of either 50 Cent or Michael Stipe, you know the landscape of modern music is a strange place, weirder than even its most devout fans sometimes realize.

That doesnt stop them from going on a quest for knowledge, not unlike the one for fire engaged in by Rae Dawn Chong. Once you start asking questions, you never stop. Why is Metallicas One in waltz time? Why didnt the word hateration from Mary J. Bliges Family Affair catch on? If you stripped Tom Petty and Bob Seger to the waist and gave them each a machete, who would win in a fight?

For several years, I wrote a column in Rolling Stone called Rolling Stone Knows, where I answered similarly inscrutable queries from the magazines readers. I avoided trivia stumpers designed to test the boundaries of my knowledgethey just werent that interesting. (The guitarist for Strawberry Alarm Clock went on to play in what band? asked one letter; the answer is, of course, Lynyrd Skynyrd.) If you want to use any of the contents of this book in trivia contests, well, who could blame you? But my goal was to increase the human races sum total of rock knowledge, one question at a time. That meant debunking or detailing myths, researching the half-forgotten origins of favorite songs, and uncovering the secrets of music in general.

So, if you want to know what grades Mick Jagger got while he was a student at the London School of Economics, turn. If you yearn to know the secret meaning behind the Guns N Roses album title The Spaghetti Incident? you should head. And if youd like to know the answer to the question that this books title posesin Tiny Dancer, is Elton John actually singing to his penis?then I suggest you head. Or you could keep reading this introduction; itll be over soon enough, anyway, and then the questions start.

This book not only compiles material from my column, it expands many of the answers (there wasnt always space in the magazine to give as detailed a response as I would have liked) and adds dozens of new entries. For the most part, however, I stayed away from questions of judgment. If you want to know the five greatest rappers in history, the ten best Bob Dylan songs, or the three greatest uses of the woodblock, youve come to the wrong place. Its not that Im shy with my opinions, as anyone whos ever had dinner with me will attest. In my life, Ive written literally hundreds of record reviews; musical opinions bubble out of me like natural spring water from, well, a natural spring. But when you look up something in this volume, I want you to be rest assured that its as thoroughly researched and documented as possible; if an answer is a matter of conjecture or my opinion, its clearly labeled as such.

Rock music also asks questions without words, interrogations that express the primal longings of the human heart. A rough translation of the best possible answer to most of those questions: Yes, I do want to get up and dance with you.

Of all the bands Ive ever met, the one most fully committed to the absurdity of rock n roll was probably the Darkness. And considering that I once interviewed Spinal Taps David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean, staying in character on the phone), thats no small praise. But the Darkness bring a lot to the party: catsuits, an insane falsetto, and a video where a pterodactyl humps a spaceship.

This was the philosophy of lead singer Justin Hawkins: Less is more? Thats bollocks. More is more. Thats why its called more. If it was actually less, itd be called less.

Theres something about rock n roll that brings out the smoke machines, secret backward messages, and other strange experiments. Hawkins, unsurprisingly, has a philosophy about such matters. He told me, My favorite catchphrase is If somethings worth doing, its worth overdoing. Even subtlety. If youre going to be subtle, you should really fucking be subtle.

I heard that Stevie Wonder lost his sense of smell. Is that true?

Yesbut he got better. Blind since infancy, Wonder was in a serious car accident on August 6, 1973, while on tour in North Carolina. (No, he wasnt driving.) His cousin John Harris was chauffeuring him from Greenville to Durham on Interstate 85, heading for a concert to benefit a black radio station. Wonder had his headphones on and was listening to the two-track mix of Innervisions. When the logging truck they were following hit its brakes, Harris tried to swerve around it but didnt quite succeed. A log from the truck smashed through the windshield and hit Wonder in the face. Wonder was in a coma for four days; his associates knew he was feeling better only when he started grabbing at nurses. Only twenty-three years old at the time of the accident, Wonder had lost his sense of smell and gained ascar on his forehead. He simultaneously lost his sense of tastewhich some would say explains the existence of I Just Called to Say I Love You. Fortunately, Wonder largely recovered. I lost my sense of smell a little bit, my sense of taste for a minute, he said. But Im pretty straight. I came out at the end of it with the blessing of life.

Lenny Kravitz thinks Stevie Wonders one of the two greatest drummers ever: .

Whats an MBE , anyway? Why did John Lennon give his back?

The MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) was an award invented by King George V in 1917 to commemorate services to the war effort by people who werent at the frontlines. All the Beatles received the medal in 1965, which entitled them to a payment of forty pounds a year and free admission to the Whispering Gallery at St. Pauls Cathedral (ordinarily about a shilling). The Beatles were somewhat mystified as to why the Queen was honoring them, but they were generally cheerful about the notion. As Ringo Starr put it, Were going to meet the Queen and shes going to give us a badge. I thought, This is cool. Lennon later said that the Beatles had gotten stoned at Buckingham Palace before the ceremony, smoking a joint in the bathroom; George Harrison said it was just tobacco. When the Beatles finally met Queen Elizabeth II, they thought that her majesty was a pretty nice girl, but she didnt have a lot to say. (Really.)