Here’s the logistical problem with having an active sex life on tour: Generally speaking, the band’s bus rolls out of town around midnight, an hour or so after the show’s over. (To save on hotel bills, most rock groups just sleep in their bunks while the bus rolls down the highway to the next city.) So if you’re looking to score with a lithesome young local, you either have to work extremely quickly or convince her that although she’s parked her car in Detroit, she really wants to wake up in Milwaukee.

I once witnessed Rivers Cuomo of Weezer throw caution to the wind in the pursuit of post-show nookie (this was on the Pinkerton tour, long before he even contemplated a vow of celibacy). We sat in a club’s basement dressing room, chatting idly about drugs (his management wouldn’t give him any), and then his head snapped up. “Fuck!” he shouted. “I’m sitting here dicking around and all the girls are escaping!” He ran up the stairs in pursuit of the escaping girls. Apparently he netted one, because shortly thereafter, the band and road crew watched him head back into the Holiday Inn with her.

“Rivers just got here.”

“Does he have some hot little number?”

“She’s not really hot. She’s not even Asian.”

“Man, he’s slipping.”

Time passed and it became clear that Cuomo wasn’t emerging from that hotel room. After a nervous phone call back to the West Coast management office, the road manager ultimately told the bus driver to move out. Cuomo made the show the following evening, but it required his buying a plane ticket to St. Louis.

Did Rod Stewart really get rushed to a hospital emergency room one night to get his stomach pumped after giving too many blow jobs?

No, no, no. Everybody knows that was Henry Kissinger!

There doesn’t appear to be a whit of truth to the stomach-pump story, which was one of the best salacious rumors ever to circulate through a junior-high cafeteria. (And one of the most enduring—other names that have been attached to the story over the years include Jon Bon Jovi, Lil’ Kim, and Britney Spears.) When asked about the rumor, the cheerfully bawdy Stewart has roared with laughter and said: “I was on my honeymoon with Alana in 1979 in Italy, and it was on the news that I’d been rushed to the hospital and they’d pumped out twelve pints. Can you imagine that? It must have been one after another! C’mon, get your head down! I firmly believe that a guy who used to work for me started the rumor.”

I heard the Bee Gees wrote a bunch of their hit songs on the set of a porno movie. Can that be right?

The three Gibb brothers wrote most of their songs for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in a three-week-long marathon just outside Paris in 1977, holed up in the Château D’Hérouville Studio. (The studio had previously hosted David Bowie, when he was recording Pin Ups, and Elton John, when he was making Honky Chateau.) Two years later Robin Gibb said, “There were so many pornographic films made at the Château. The staircase where we wrote ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’ ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ all those songs, was the same staircase where there’ve been six classic lesbian porno scenes filmed. I was watching a movie one day called Kinky Women of Bourbon Street, and all of a sudden there’s this château, and I said, ‘It’s the Château!’ These girls, these dodgy birds, are having a scene on the staircase that leads from the front door up to the studio. There were dildos hangin’ off the stairs and everything. I thought, ’Gawd, we wrote “Night Fever” there!’ ”

The Bee Gees contained twins Robin and the late Maurice Gibb; for some of the other twins in rock, Chapter 6.

Did Mick Jagger write “Angie” for Angela Bowie to calm her down after she caught him and David Bowie in bed together?

Did they make the beast of burden with two backs? As Angela Bowie told the story (after her post-divorce gag order expired), she came home one morning in the ’70s and found the “Dancing in the Streets” duet partners in bed—naked but not actually satisfying each other’s every need. “I felt absolutely dead certain that they’d been screwing,” she said. “I didn’t have to look around for open jars of KY Jelly.” Jagger called her tale “complete rubbish,” while David Bowie declined comment, saying in 1995, “About fifteen or sixteen years ago, I really got pretty tired of fending off questions about what I used to do with my [penis] in the early seventies.”

Angela says her blasé response to finding Mick and David in bed was to make them breakfast, so it seems unlikely that Jagger needed to calm her down with a song. In addition, Keith Richards says he wrote the 1973 ballad “Angie” without Jagger; friends of Richards say it was about his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. (A competing theory is that it’s about his daughter, but since she was then known as Dandelion, that seems unlikely.) Describing how it was impossible for Jagger to modify the lyrics, Richards said, “You try and change it, man, and it never sounds right. It’s only two syllables, it could be ‘bank note,’ but you always come back to ‘Angie.’ Once you’ve put something together with a musical phrase like that, it’s like it’s locked in, you never pull it out.”

Mick Jagger’s been in more than one celebrity’s bed: Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” is often thought to be about him. For the full story, Chapter 10.

I love Belle & Sebastian’s album The Boy with the Arab Strap. But what’s an Arab strap?

It’s both a sex toy and a rock band. You want to know about the sex toy, but I’m going to tell you about the band first, anyway. Arab Strap is a Scottish indie duo; their best album is probably 2001’s The Red Thread. They started in 1995; three years later, fellow Glaswegians Belle & Sebastian paid them tribute with their album The Boy with the Arab Strap, which is how people like you first heard of the band (and the toy). Now you’re ready for the sex toy: “An Arab strap is basically a cock ring of metal with two leather straps. The ring goes around your dick and the leather straps go around your balls and it keeps you erect for longer,” Malcolm Middleton, one-half of Arab Strap, told me. He says their name came from the band’s singer, Aidan Moffett. “About ten years ago, his girlfriend asked him to order a large orange dildo from a magazine. And there was an offer: if you spent an extra five pounds on a video, I think it was called Naked Werewolf Lady, you got a free Arab strap.” Moffett still has the original strap, which he carries around in his drum-machine case for good luck. Middleton said, “I believe he’s not used it with anyone else, but he’s tried it on a few times.”

I’ve heard the stories about white panties, but I need the real deal—what did Elvis Presley like in bed?

One answer is “the costars of his movies.” But the King loved to introduce the ladies to “Little Elvis,” and many of them wrote tell-all books, so we know a fair bit about his preferences. Some of them are unsurprising: Presley liked girls who could give “great head,” for example. Others confirm his status as a gentleman: His chosen method of birth control was to pull out and finish with his hand. And some of Presley’s proclivities are legendary: He liked girls in lacy white panties, with some pubic hair coming out the sides. His biggest turnoff was women who were mothers; if he found out a girlfriend had ever had a baby, he lost all sexual interest in her.

As he got older, Presley sometimes just wanted a girl to sleep with—literally. He found it easier to fall asleep if there was a woman in bed with him. Presley preferred petite women, and he especially didn’t want them to have large hands or feet. And although he was straight, Presley handled passes from gay men gracefully, usually turning them down by saying, “Hey, that just ain’t my style.”

What porn movie did the sample in 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny” come from?

“Me so horny! Me love you long time!” promised a woman’s voice on the 1990 rap single. Although actress Papillon Soo Soo sounded like she should be talking to Ron Jeremy in Pretty Peaches 2, she was actually speaking to Matthew Modine in Full Metal Jacket. (She played “Da Nang Hooker,” who asked, “Hey, baby, you got girlfriend Vietnam?” Modine haggled, “Five dollars is all my mom allows me to spend.”) While Stanley Kubrick’s drama was nominated for an Academy Award, the 2 Live Crew single became the first record ever declared obscene in a United States court.

What’s the story with Bebe Buell? Are Elvis Costello’s late-’70s albums really about her?

These days, many people just know Bebe Buell as the mother of Liv Tyler, but in the ’70s, she was a model and Playboy centerfold who had romantic liaisons with just about every major figure in rock, including Steven Tyler, Todd Rundgren, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, and Rod Stewart. “At the time, relations between models and rock stars were rare,” she mused. “Apres moi, le deluge. ” Buell was close enough to the Rolling Stones to report in her deliciously trashy autobiography, Rebel Heart, that Keith Richards was the best-endowed member of the group and that Jagger objected to her liaison with Steven Tyler, asking her, “Why do you want the fake Mick when you’ve got the real one?”

Buell certainly had an intense affair with Costello; as she described it, it lasted from 1978 to 1979, then again from 1982 to 1985, and ended when she aborted their child. She said he was the love of her life, and she saw their relationship as being a pervasive inspiration for Costello’s work, down to the title of Blood & Chocolate (derived from her habit of demanding a candy bar whenever she got her period). Buell summarized: “It’s scary what Elvis does. He writes these lyrics because he knows I will see them, but he also knows that if I try to express this to people, they will think I am nuts. He wants people to think I’m crazy; it delights him. But deep down he knows the truth. ”

Costello, for his part, addressed Buell, although not by name, in the liner notes to a reissue of Armed Forces: “She turned up with eight pieces of luggage like a mail-order bride and moved in. I was too stupid and vain to resist. She’d later claim to have inspired most of the songs on this record—all of which were already written when we met. This was also said about the previous release—a chronological impossibility—and many of my other compositions to this day. It is a tragic delusion about which I wish I could say: ‘I shall not dignify that with a response’ but ‘dignity’ doesn’t come into this story.”

Buell called me up, objecting that she’d never claimed to be the inspiration for the songs on Armed Forces —which appears to be true. Although she’s written about Costello using her life for inspiration in that period, and on the albums Get Happy! and Blood & Chocolate in particular, she seemed perfectly sane about where her influence upon him began and ended. Buell dismissed Costello’s liner notes as more psychological gamesmanship. (And Costello’s carefully crafted comment was not actually a denial of her influence on his life and music, although it certainly was intended to give that impression.) For all that, Buell has often seemed overeager to find any trace of her influence, to validate herself as muse rather than groupie. Take, for example, her contention about “Little Red Corvette”: She believes that Prince wrote it about her, despite never having met her, and that he is actually singing “Bebe you’re much too fast.”

Who are the best-endowed male rock stars?

Since not every well-hung gentleman exposes himself on videotape like Tommy Lee did, and since I don’t carry around a tape measure backstage, the people to consult on this question are groupies. And trading gossip online, they have reported that the following musicians are men of great repute: Chris Isaak, Robin Zander (Cheap Trick), Tony Kanal (No Doubt), Anthony Kiedis (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Jon Langford (the Mekons), Phil Anselmo (Pantera), Jerry Cantrell (Alice in Chains), John Dolmayan (System of a Down), and especially Huey Lewis. The late Jimi Hendrix, hugely talented in more than one way, was the prize in Cynthia Plaster Caster’s collection of genital molds. And Iggy Pop’s unit is so big it should have its own zip code. (Honorable mention goes to Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath, possibly the only rock star ever to brag about having a small penis.)

Okay, so that’s what Jimi Hendrix had going on under his belt, but what about under his headband? The answer’s Chapter 11.

Was Marvin Gaye addicted to porn?

When Gaye died in 1984, people didn’t put it that way—but the short answer would seem to be yes. Of course, Gaye’s sexual proclivities were overshadowed by the circumstances of his death: Gaye was shot to death by his father, an apostolic preacher. Gaye had retreated to his parents’ house to try to get clean, but he spent his final months periodically demanding cocaine and pornographic videotapes. For years, he had sought out smut in any format available—even postcards—with particular interest in S&M magazines and the European bondage cartoonist Georges Pichard. (He also recorded some notorious bootlegged tracks that his friends considered homemade pornography, such as 1979’s sexual satire “Dem Niggers Are Savage in the Sack,” not released during his lifetime, and 1983’s “Sanctified Pussy”; both songs surfaced in sanitized posthumous versions on the 1985 collection Dream of a Lifetime.) When Gaye’s biographer David Ritz visited his home in Ostend, Belgium, in 1982 and saw the collection of porn that Gaye had amassed, he told Gaye that he needed some “sexual healing”—providing the title for Gaye’s last big hit single.

We’ve all seen the movie —is it true that the female backup singers for Ray Charles, the Raeletts, were called that because to be a Raelett, they had to “let Ray” have his way with them?

“That was a funny line, but not exactly true,” Charles said when asked about that story. By his own admission, he slept with “many, many of the Raeletts” over the years, but he insisted that he had never strong-armed any of them into bed. “I’d never want to make love to a woman thinking that the only reason she agrees is because I’m her boss,” he said.

Members of his band, however, said that when Charles was spurned by a woman, he could be exceptionally cruel to her, both offstage and on. One Raelett who turned down Charles’s advances found herself humiliated onstage; when she hit a bum note during a concert, he played the section of the song she had muffed over and over, shouting “Repeat, repeat!” at her, while the audience laughed.

Charles added the Raeletts (originally called the Cookies) to his band in 1957; the call-and-response between him and the backup singers became a trademark element of his sound. “There was suddenly more perfume in the air,” Charles said. That aroma led to Charles romancing many of the Raeletts, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes switching his affections from one to another. The seven other men in his band would also pursue whichever women Charles had spurned. Charles said he had no “policy against hanky-panky among the girls and boys in the band. How could I, as much as I loved to fuck?” Charles also loved to orchestrate orgies (or, as he called them, “parties”). “I don’t like to conclude a day without female companionship,” he confessed.

Charles also enjoyed the convenience of being able to sleep with his singers. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “If I was forced to look hard, I’d certainly look.” Charles did have three rules for band romances, though: The music had to come first, hands off the underage girls, and no rough stuff. “I didn’t put up with any fights where a chick might get hurt upside the head. I didn’t want everyone in the band looking scratched or bruised with puffy eyes and swollen jaws. I didn’t want the organization to look raunchy and tattered.”

Is Bryan Adams’s “Summer of ’69” really about performing the sex act of 69?

Back in the summer of ’85, Adams’s nostalgic tale of his youth and his first rock band was a top-five hit: “I got my first real six-string/Bought it at the five-and-dime,” Adams sang in “Summer of ’69.” Most people believed that he was referring to the year 1969; this was partially because of the apostrophe in the song’s title, and partially because Adams was a clean-cut Canadian boy. If it had been a Prince song, there would have been less wholesome assumptions. But for anyone who did the math, the timeline was inescapable: Bryan Adams was only nine years old in the summer of 1969. This would have made him a tad young for the song’s narrative, where his pal Jody gets married—either he was the world’s most precocious third-grader or the title’s apostrophe was just a fig leaf. Years later, Adams finally confirmed the dirty-minded suspicions: “That song always surprised me. From its inception it was always exciting, so I’m glad everyone else got it. One thing people never got, though, was the song isn’t about the actual year 1969—it’s about making love à la sixty-nine!”

I knew Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were lovers —but somebody told me she also had a fling with John Lennon! Is that true?

With more caffeine, it might have been. On consecutive nights circa 1964, both Baez and the Beatles performed at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver, Colorado. Baez had finished her tour, so when the Beatles invited her to tag along with them, she joined their entourage for a few concerts. “I saw all the inner workings: how you climb into Volkswagen buses and then send the limousine out to be beaten to death by loving fans,” she said. After the tour, the Beatles ended up in a large mansion in L.A. “They’ve sent their people out to bring in groupies so they can pick who they’re gonna, you know, hang out with. And these poor girls, just sitting downstairs waiting to see whether they’re gonna be picked by somebody—they don’t talk, they don’t even knit. ” There weren’t enough bedrooms for everybody, so Lennon told Baez she could stay in his room.

“So I went to sleep and he came in, in the middle of the night,” Baez said. “And I think he felt compelled—’Well, I’ve asked her and she is a star and oh, dear ’—and he started coming on to me, very unenthusiastically. I said, ‘John, you know, I’m probably as tired as you are, and I don’t want you to feel you have to perform on my behalf.’ And he says [in Liverpudlian accent], ‘Oh, luvly! I mean, what a relief! Because you see, well, you might say I’ve already been fooked downstairs.’ So we had a good laugh and went to sleep.”