Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?

Yes—but only for one night. In 1989, at the Hollywood premiere of Depeche Mode’s concert film 101, the Guns N’ Roses singer introduced himself to the band as a huge fan—and then proved it by reciting the lyrics to their mournful song “Somebody.” He then took them to the Cat House, a favorite heavy-metal club. But when Rose left the Mode, he continued his evening at a friend’s barbecue in Beverly Hills, where he reportedly shot a pig. A spokesman for Depeche Mode soon announced that “as strict vegetarians, the band were appalled by [Rose’s] behavior and do not wish to associate themselves with anyone who goes round shooting pigs for fun.”

It was a pairing stranger than Felix Unger and Oscar Madison, but for the 1964-65 academic year, Wolf and Lynch were roommates at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The housing office wasn’t to blame; Wolf had moved to Boston from the Bronx without a place to live, and spent his first week in town sleeping in a flophouse hotel and at the YMCA. On the first day of school, Lynch spotted him looking at ROOMMATES WANTED notices on a school bulletin board and invited him to share his small apartment. The furniture was provided by Lynch, which meant that they slept in bunk beds: Wolf on the top, Lynch on the bottom.

“I drove David crazy two ways,” Wolf told me. “I was always late with the rent, and I was very into progressive jazz at the time—I never stopped playing Thelonious Monk.” Both were studying painting, but Wolf was a devotee of German expressionism, while Lynch subscribed to abstract expressionism, so they had heated arguments about the two approaches. Wolf remembered the director of Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive: “David was a very mellow, very kind guy. But the days we spent together, we were all in a deep shadow of gloom. It was a very nihilistic period. And there were a lot of cockroaches.”

One advantage to being a platinum recording artist is that after a breakup, you can write a bitter kiss-off song and your ex will have to change stations when it comes on the radio. And Crow’s had no shortage of celebrity boyfriends who might want to lunge for the dial, including Clapton, Jakob Dylan, Kid Rock, Owen Wilson, and Lance Armstrong. But Clapton can rest easy, according to Crow: “‘My Favorite Mistake’ is about several people in my life who weren’t very good ideas—but not Eric. I’ve known Eric for over ten years, and I can’t look at that relationship as a mistake.” Crow has also learned from the decades-long intrigue surrounding the inspiration for Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” Crow’s declared that when asked who her song’s really about, she’s “gonna say Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger.”

That encounter is as shrouded in mythology as the first meeting between Batman and Robin. Some even claim that Dr. Dre found a copy of The Slim Shady EP on the floor of the gym belonging to Jimmy Iovine (president of Interscope Records). In fact, in 1997, Eminem appeared on the syndicated radio program The Wake Up Show, where he did some freestyling, which Dre heard and remembered. But Dre wasn’t motivated to do anything until Iovine gave him a tape of The Slim Shady EP. “In my entire career in the music industry, I’ve never found anything from a demo tape,” Dre said. “When I heard it, I didn’t even know he was white.”

Dre wanted to meet this unknown talent right away, so Eminem’s managers scraped together some money to fly him out to Los Angeles. When he met Dre, a nervous Eminem couldn’t even look him in the eye—which made Dre think that Em didn’t like his music. “I told him later that I’ve been a fan of his since I was little, since N.W.A,” Eminem said. “I was like, ’Dog, you’re mother-Fuckin’ Dr. Dre!’” The dynamic duo quickly went into the Batcave Studio, where they promptly put together four songs in six hours, including “Role Model” and “My Name Is.”

“He was really cute and he was elegant,” Nicks has said of Henley. (Not to cast aspersions on her judgment, but did she look at his hair? Henley sported a ’fro in the ’70s that seemed to make up 70 percent of his body weight.) So after Nicks and her Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham broke up, circa 1976, she and Henley began an affair. As Nicks remembered it, “This is not popular. Sure, Lindsey and I are totally broken up, I have every right in the world to go out with people, but I spend most of my time with the band, and it’s not real conducive to having a relationship.” So although Nicks and Henley would later pledge “lovers forever, face to face” on the 1981 hit duet “Leather and Lace,” the on-and-off affair lasted only about two years, and they did not found a California rock dynasty.

As for Henley, he’s said, “I believe, to the best of my knowledge, [that Nicks] became pregnant by me. And she named the [unborn] kid Sara, and she had an abortion—and then wrote the song of the same name [on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk] to the spirit of the aborted baby. I was building my house at the time, and there’s a line in the song that says, ‘And when you build your house, call me.’ ”

Marley’s manager, Don Taylor, tried to arrange a collaboration between the two legends in 1979, but he was unsuccessful in his efforts, largely because of Prince’s wardrobe, or lack thereof. After a Prince show in Los Angeles, the reggae giant visited him backstage. Taylor said, “When we called on Prince, he met us in this skimpy leopard G-string undergarment, which immediately aroused Bob’s Jamaican macho feelings, and so our stay was as brief as Prince’s G-string, and Bob’s discomfort was shown all over his face.”

Nico and Morrison did have a brief, intense romance circa 1967. Their courtship involved lots of arguing and hair-pulling; Stone focused on blow jobs. (Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek lauded Nico’s oral technique on Morrison at [creepy] length in his autobiography, saying she understood “the proper use of the tongue on the underside of the penis.”) Nico (1938-1988), a German-born model and chanteuse, had a long list of liaisons with other rock stars, including Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground (she sang on the group’s first record). She said she liked to make pancakes for Reed; John Cale described their affair as “consummated and constipated.” After Nico left the Velvets, she had an affair with a teenaged Jackson Browne, who played in her band and wrote “These Days” for her. Her other lovers included Iggy Pop; when the Stooges were getting started, she moved to Ann Arbor and spent three months living with him. (“Nico would try to cook for us,” Pop later said, “but she would cook a pot of brown rice and pour half a container of Tabasco sauce in it.”) She gave Pop expensive bottles of wine, lessons on how to deal with record-company executives, and, as a bonus, his first case of VD.

It wouldn’t be a Darkness lyric if singer Justin Hawkins didn’t deliver it in an overdramatic falsetto: You can find the line in their song “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” (Touching Me, Touching You was Neil Diamond’s breakthrough fifth album.) You can’t copyright titles, and it wasn’t a sufficiently distinct lift, so the metallists didn’t have to contribute to Diamond’s royalty statements. “I didn’t realize what I’d done until after,” Hawkins informed me. “It was subliminal. It’s astonishing when you look back, at how many of the all-time great songs he’s written—he does influence everyone’s songwriting.” An even more obvious Darkness tribute to Diamond is their track “Love on the Rocks with No Ice,” referring to Diamond’s number two hit ballad from 1980, “Love on the Rocks.”

“I like the way he’s so sincere it hurts,” Hawkins said. “And I love the way that when he’s struggling with a high note, something too painful for him to reach, he has a whole bunch of backing singers back him up on it.” There have been press reports that the Darkness and Diamond plan to write a song together—inevitably a historic collaboration—but Hawkins said that although he would love to, they haven’t contacted each other and he doesn’t even know if Diamond is aware that the Darkness exists. So what do Diamond and Hawkins have in common? “Reveling in the idea of being miserable,” Hawkins said. “And receding hairlines.”