Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?

Some questions are purely theological: Can one actually barter one’s soul to the devil for guitar lessons? If so, do the infernal exchange rates fluctuate? Can Joe Satriani ask for a refund? So when we consider the story of legendary blues-man Robert Johnson (1911-1938), it’s more useful to ask whether Johnson believed he made such a deal, or whether he wanted other people to think he had. You won’t find much evidence of a supernatural bargain in his music. Although Johnson recorded a few songs with satanic references—including the memorable, atypical “Hellhound on My Trail”—other contemporary blues singers, such as Bessie Smith, sang many more such numbers without people concluding they had encountered Satan at the metaphysical swap meet.

Scholars have recently pinpointed the origin of the myth, which started decades after Johnson’s death. In a 1965 interview, blues guitarist Son House told the story of how he knew Johnson when he was a good harmonica player but a terrible guitarist; between House’s sets at juke joints, Johnson would borrow House’s guitar and “drive the people nuts.” The next time House saw Johnson, he was much better; as House told the story, the improvement took only six months, although later research has revealed it had to be at least two or three times that long.

When House’s tale was reprinted a year later, a postscript (probably inaccurate) had been appended, quoting House as saying that Johnson made a deal with the devil. From there, the tale kept getting “improved,” until the Faustian bargain became an indelible part of Johnson’s image. But the people who actually knew Johnson in the ’30s, such as his frequent traveling companion Johnny Shines, scoffed at the notion that Johnson had sold his soul, or even suggested he had. “He never told me that lie, no,” Shines said. “If he would have, I’d have called him a liar right to his face.”

A huge caveat: Answering this question requires more subjectivity than most of the others in the book do, so you might not agree with the next few paragraphs, even though I’m right. Conventional wisdom has historically oscillated between B and C among all but the most devoted Beatlemaniacs, but lately, more people would opt for A. (Paul McCartney has also gone through a long-term critical resurgence, possibly because he no longer gets lightweight but massively successful ballads on the radio, so people can remember why they liked him in the first place. But that’s another story.) Personally, I would say the truth lies somewhere between A and B, and if you made me pick one option, I’d plump for A.

Starr was the least nimble instrumentalist in the Beatles, and he wasn’t flashy, but his great virtue was his impeccable timing, which is the single most important quality in any drummer. He was always in the pocket, always laid down a solid groove, and never got in the way of the other performances. Sure, lots of other drummers had more chops, but that doesn’t mean that, say, Charlie Watts (to pick a random excellent rock drummer with jazz training) could have done a better job playing on those Beatles tracks.

Let’s check in with Lenny Kravitz, another underrated drummer: “Next to Ringo, I like [Stevie Wonder] best. Both of those guys are very lyrical drummers. They’re the kind of drummers that a lot of other drummers just don’t get. Like I hear musicians say, ‘Yeah, Ringo can’t play.’ You know what? Fuck you. Because you obviously have no ears at all. Ringo was so sick, it was ridiculous. I mean, nobody played a tom solo like Ringo.”

A few Beatles tracks where Starr really shines, and worth listening to while just paying attention to the drums, are “Drive My Car,” where he’s particularly inventive on the breaks; “Ticket to Ride,” where he basically invents heavy-metal drumming; and “Rain,” where he’s playing like a man possessed. The “Strawberry Fields Forever” outtakes on the Anthology 2 collection also show him doing some really interesting stuff (basically inventing the trip-hop beat).

Also, Ringo had star power (no pun intended). As John Lennon said, “Whatever that spark is in Ringo, we all know it, but we can’t put our finger on it. Whether it’s acting, drumming, or singing, I don’t know. There’s something in him that is projectable and he would have surfaced as an individual.” That doesn’t really add to his value as a drummer, but it certainly added to his value as a Beatle.

No, although he probably could have. According to Walter Stern, Jagger’s tutor at the LSE, Jagger started as a promising student in October 1961. “He announced his intention of going into business but was worried about mathematics,” Stern remembered. Almost immediately, however, Jagger ran into Keith Richards and got distracted by blues music. He started cutting his classes, some of which started at the un-rock hour of ten A.M.; when he took his exams in June 1962, he got straight Cs. (The subjects were economics, British government, economic history, political history, and English legal institutions.) Nevertheless, he dutifully returned the following academic year, even working in the library—hedging his bets until the Rolling Stones had a contract to record their first single in May 1963, at which point he left school. “My father was furious with me,” Jagger said. “But I really didn’t like being at college. It wasn’t like it was Oxford and it had been the most wonderful time of my life. It was really a dull, boring course I was stuck on.”

The line is Rock’s fantasy about life on the West Coast. After rhyming scotch with crotch, he distills his pimp aspirations: “open an escort service for all the right reasons/And set up shop at the top of the Four Seasons.” Asked what the right reasons for opening an escort service are, Rock responded not with noble claims of helping wayward girls or reducing chlamydia outbreaks, but rather, “Awww. That’s just a silly line. There’s no deep thought process behind it. To get paid. To make money. Isn’t that what everything is the right reason for?” Not to overanalyze a comedic line, but it’s interesting how little space there is in Kid Rock’s world between the right reasons and the wrong reasons.

More than thirty-five years after the release of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” in 1967, questions linger about her haunting southern-gothic ballad. (Decades from now, will anyone still wonder who let the dogs out?) Gentry’s number one single tells the story of a family dinner where the narrator finds out that her boyfriend, Billie Joe McCallister, has jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge; the day before, people spotted her and Billie Joe throwing an unidentified object off that same bridge. “Everybody has a different guess about what was thrown off the bridge: flowers, a ring, even a baby,” Gentry has said. “What was thrown off the bridge really isn’t that important. The message of the song, if there must be a message, revolves around the nonchalant way the family talks about the suicide. The song is a study in unconscious cruelty.” Sinead O’Connor’s 1995 cover version didn’t shed much light on the song’s mysteries, but the 1976 movie adaptation, Ode to Billy Joe (with Robby Benson in the title role), provided some answers. They seem like arbitrary inventions of the filmmakers, but they’re the closest thing the song has to an official “solution”: In the movie, Billy Joe tosses his girlfriend Bobbie Lee’s rag doll off the bridge and then jumps the following day, tormented by uncertainty over his sexual identity.

Even worse than you think. During a 1989 Who concert in Seattle, Townshend missed the encore when he sliced open his hand on his guitar strings and was rushed to the hospital. During another show that year, Townshend actually impaled his right palm on the guitar’s whammy bar. Plus, the guitar strings routinely get underneath his fingernails and rip them off. This means he starts to bleed, and of course, when the guitar pick gets bloody, it becomes slippery and hard to hold. “It is terribly painful,” Townshend said in 1994. But he relishes it: “I think, ‘This is it. I’ve arrived. It is the place where I should be, like a boxer in the middle of a fight.’ ” Of course, before his painful hearing loss, he used to take the same pleasure in how physically punishing the Who’s loud amplifiers were; there’s clearly a masochistic element to his onstage abandon.

In 1972, cartoonist and songwriter Shel Silverstein visited Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show in the studio with a question: Would they like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone? Since they were struggling for a hit, they said absolutely, although they couldn’t imagine how he would manage the trick. Silverstein then proceeded to play them “Cover of the Rolling Stone,” a complaint song for jaded rock stars who haven’t yet achieved their dream of appearing on the front page of the publication: “We got all the friends that money can buy, so we’ll never have to be alone/And we keep gettiN’ richer but we can’t get our picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone. ” Guitarist Rik Elswit remembered, “The dope being excellent, we were in no shape to really evaluate the song. So after we picked ourselves up off the floor and stifled most of the laughing, we went right about recording it.” About three hours later, they had recorded a hit single, which peaked at number six. In March 1973, the magazine did feature the band on its cover, albeit with a cartoon of just three of their seven members and the caption WHAT’S-THEIR-NAMES MAKE THE COVER.

Since the song’s lyrics had promised “gonna buy five copies for my mother,” three members of the band visited the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco and demanded those five copies. “We were in full hippie regalia, with about thirty pounds of hair between the three of us,” Elswit said. “The receptionist didn’t know who we were or why we were there, and, furthermore, didn’t much care. We were frostily informed that we could buy some from the dispenser machines downstairs. At that point, somebody came out of one of the offices, recognized us, and we all had a good laugh—except for the receptionist, who still didn’t care. They then produced exactly five copies, and we were escorted out to the street.”

Something happened on July 29, 1966. The New York Times broke the news a few days later: Dylan had been in a motorcycle accident and would be canceling his concert at the Yale Bowl. If you ever wondered whether rumors spread before the Internet, the answer is yes—fans traded stories that Dylan was horribly scarred, paraplegic, insane, or even dead. These stories proved not to be true, but one thing was certain: He was gone.

Dylan spent the next nine months in seclusion in upstate New York; as he recovered, he and the Band made the much-bootlegged music that would ultimately be released as The Basement Tapes. He didn’t put out a new album until 1968, the deliberately low-key John Wesley Harding. So what actually went down that July day? The facts are fuzzy, but the gist appears to be that Dylan visited the home of his manager Albert Grossman in Bearsville, New York. There, Dylan picked up an old Triumph 55 motorcycle and was planning to ride it to a nearby repair shop. As he left the property, however, he took a spill. This is the way he told the story in 1967: “The back wheel locked up, I think. I lost control, swerving from left to right. Next thing I know I was in someplace I never heard of—Middletown, I think—with my face cut up, so I got some scars, and my neck busted up pretty good.” The official story at the time was that he broke some vertebrae in his neck, was knocked unconscious, and was in critical condition for a week.

Later, however, witnesses—including Albert Grossman’s wife, Sally, famous as the girl on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home—would tell the tale differently. Apparently, Dylan had poor eyesight and was notorious for his lack of skill on the bike; as he left the Grossman property, he just lost his balance and fell off the motorcycle in an undignified fashion. Although he could have been driven to a nearby hospital, he was instead taken to a doctor who was an hour away.

Rumors circulated that he was secretly in rehab for drug addiction, but the accident appears to have been genuine, if not as serious as was reported. Afterward, people spotted Dylan in a neck brace, and friends reported that he took up swimming and received ultrasound treatment.

So why did Dylan check out for so long? By 1966, he was not just hailed as the voice of a generation, he was expected to lead folk and rock fans in a new direction with every album and, very possibly, to redefine contemporary society as a hippie utopia. Plus, Dylan had been going virtually nonstop for a long time; he released five records in just over two years, from 1964 to early 1966. He had a full tour of sixty concerts scheduled, plus a contract renegotiation with Columbia Records. Fans and biographers have long assumed that Dylan seized on his injuries—real, if not as serious as reported—as an opportunity to step away from his white-hot celebrity and the pressure that came along with it.

Dylan said as much himself in 2004, in the first volume of his excellent autobiography, Chronicles: “I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race.”

Led Zeppelin decided to leave their 1971 album untitled, although they later conceded that Led Zeppelin IV is probably the easiest name for it. (People have sometimes called it “Zoso,” “Atlantic SD 7208,” or “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.”) Jimmy Page decided that each member should pick a symbol to represent himself, and that those four symbols would serve as the album’s title. Robert Plant claims that his (the feather in the circle) was from “the ancient Mu civilization which existed about fifteen thousand years ago as part of a lost continent somewhere in the Pacific Ocean between China and Mexico.” John Paul Jones picked his (the encircled petals) out of a book of runes (early Gaelic writing), because it signified somebody who is confident and competent. John Bonham picked his (the three circles) out of the same book because he liked the way it looked; later, the band realized it was also the logo for Ballantine beer. Page has remained mum on his glyph, saying only that he designed it himself and it’s not supposed to be the word Zoso. (Asked the meaning by a fan after a 1994 appearance on an Australian talk show, Page allegedly replied, cryptically, “Frying tonight.” Which might just have meant he was heading for a post-show burger.) He did once, however, divulge the true meaning to Plant, who later lamented, “Would you believe that I have since forgotten what it was and now Pagey won’t tell me?”