Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?

Pink Floyd’s symphonic fourth album remained untitled until the band was debuting some of the material on the BBC’s Radio 1—and the announcer needed to call it something. Album producer Ron Geesin told bassist Roger Waters to search through a copy of the Evening Standard, a London newspaper that was lying around the studio. Waters spotted an article about a pregnant woman with an atomic-powered pacemaker and borrowed its ATOM HEART MOTHER headline.

Yes. Guitarist Nile Rodgers was irate that he was turned away from the nightclub Studio 54, even though his band’s hit song “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)” was playing within. So he wrote a song about it. The chorus? “Aww, fuck off!”

“I’m a former Black Panther,” Rodgers told me, “but Bernard [Edwards, Chic’s bassist] was religious.” So they compromised. “Freak off” was watered-down and lame, but when they changed it to “Aww, freak out!” they had a song that would spend five weeks at number one in 1978, and establish Rodgers and Edwards as the preeminent producers of disco. Needless to say, Rodgers didn’t have any trouble getting into Studio 54 after that.

One early theory upon the album’s 2000 release was that the title was borrowed from “Kid A in Alphabet Land,” a collection of trading cards about French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose theories helped inspire postmodernism. Singer Thom Yorke quickly debunked that, but encouraged speculation that the title referred to the first genetically cloned child. “I’m sure somewhere it’s been done, even though it’s illegal now,” he said. Since the album was full of electronic treatments of Yorke’s voice, this inspired theorizing about the hidden architecture of the album being replicated DNA. The true inspiration was a bit more mundane, however; “Kid A” was a bit of studio technology—a software program of children’s voices that ended up not making the album’s final mix. If a different sequencer or synth setting had caught the group’s eye, their fourth album might have been called “Tenor Sax” or “Ocarina.”

No, that would be Swedish wood. According to John Lennon, the sitar-inflected “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” was about an affair he was having. (Lennon was routinely unfaithful to his first wife, Cynthia.) The title comes after the narrator has had an unconsummated evening with a girl and goes to sleep in the bath at two A.M. He wakes up alone and sings, “So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood.” Lennon said he wrote the song by himself—“ ‘Norwegian Wood’ is my song completely”—but soon before his death in 1980, he expressed bafflement about the song’s title, saying “I don’t know how the hell I got to ‘Norwegian Wood.’ ”

Paul McCartney, however, said he knew— because he came up with the title himself. In 1965, McCartney was living in an upstairs room in the home of the Asher family in London, which he found a most congenial arrangement: He enjoyed all the domestic comforts of home; he saw his girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, on a regular basis; and he spent hours hanging out with her brother, Peter Asher (of the folk duo Peter and Gordon). “Peter Asher had his room done out in wood; a lot of people were decorating their places in wood. Norwegian wood. It was pine really, cheap pine. But it’s not as good a title, ‘Cheap Pine.’ ”

So although Lennon thought the song was all his, McCartney remembers it as a collaboration; from his perspective, the affair was completely imaginary, so he felt free to embellish the girl’s home with inexpensive wood panels. Discussing the song’s ending, McCartney said that he and Lennon identified with the spurned narrator: “In our world, the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant ‘I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn’t the décor of her house wonderful?’ But it didn’t, it meant ‘I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge.’ ”

“It’s a very silly story,” warned Duff McKagan (formerly the bassist for Guns N’ Roses, now a member of Velvet Revolver) when I asked. The title has its origins in the summer of 1989, when singer Axl Rose wanted the band to relocate to Chicago. “The idea was Axl was from over the border in Indiana and he wanted to be close to home. So we got two condos and rehearsed above the Metro, and Axl never showed up.”

While McKagan, guitarist Slash, and drummer Steven Adler were waiting for Rose, they wrote a bunch of songs for Use Your Illusion and ate a lot of Italian takeout. “And Steven was doing a lot of crack cocaine at this point, and he’d keep his blow in the refrigerator. So his code word for his stash was spaghetti, ” McKagan told me. “Steven spiraled out of control. We said, Steven, we’re fucked-up individuals and we’re telling you that you gotta shape up, so you must be really fucked up.” Adler was fired in July 1990, the first member of the group to get canned (placing him years ahead of the GN’R curve).

Adler then sued the band under the novel premise that his drug addiction was their fault. While giving a deposition for the 1993 trial, McKagan was asked to cite instances of Adler’s bad behavior; he mentioned the Chicago drug stash. “So then I’m in court, with a jury and the whole thing, and this Fuckin’ lawyer gets up, and with a straight face says, ‘Mr. McKagan, tell us about the spaghetti incident.’ And I started laughing.” The band ultimately settled out of court, writing Adler a check for two and a half million dollars. When McKagan read through the trial transcripts, he was struck by the straight-faced absurdity of the phrase “the spaghetti incident,” which is how it ended up as an album title (complete with quotation marks) later that year.

You may have also wondered about the small semaphore message on the bottom of the cover of “The Spaghetti Incident?” McKagan never even noticed it was there; Slash peered at it and then told me, “It does have a meaning, but I’ve forgotten what.” Only Axl Rose knows what it means now, and he’s not talking.