Some musicians just have a freakish amount of talent.
Most of us learn at a young age that we are not those people.
For those who do have that talent go on to be the singer-songwriters, there's something
almost magical about listening to them perform.
But it's easy to forget that behind all of the music is a very ordinary person, and sometimes,
that ordinary person is a terrible human being.
Johnny Cash's women troubles
There's a lot of dark stuff in Johnny Cash's life, but let's talk about just how horrible
he was to women.
Vivian Cash's book I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny was a heartbreaking tell-all detailing
how she continued loving her husband even through the drugs and the affair with his
more famous second partner, June Carter Cash.
It was Vivian who gave him four daughters, raised them, and who stuck with him through
the worst, but June gets all the credit.
Behind closed doors, June Carter didn't actually have it any easier, in spite of the storybook
romance performed for the public eye.
According to biographer Robert Hilburn, Cash had cheated on her when she was pregnant with
her son John Carter.
There were more than a few women, but the one that had to hurt the most was June's own
sister, Anita.
John Carter has also gone on record talking about his parents' less-than-perfect marriage,
and has said his mother's drug addictions and descent into paranoia came from a near-constant
fear he was cheating yet again.
That fear spread to their son, who grew up well aware his family could fall apart at
any time because his father couldn't stay faithful.
Elvis's flings
Elvis was only 21 when he became ridiculously famous with the success of "Heartbreak Hotel,"
and after that, all bets were off when it came to how far he would go.
Along with the fame and fortune came the admiration of countless women, but according to biographer
Joel Williamson, there was a particular type of woman Elvis liked: the really, really young
ones.
When the newly made megastar went on those early tours, he took along a group of 14-year-old
girls, and Williamson says he was a huge fan of tickling and pillow fights.
Future wife Priscilla was 14 when they met, and just what went on behind closed doors
is debated.
What's not debated is that he lost interest in her after Lisa Marie was born, and went
on to court another 14-year-old.
There was the potential for violence in Elvis, too.
Years later, he was engaged to 21-year-old Ginger Alden, who claimed he once pulled out
a gun and put a bullet in the headboard of the bed she was sleeping in.
He called it "an attention getter."
Johnny Paycheck's attempted murder
Johnny Paycheck was one of the Grand Ole Opry's most respected members, and was known as something
of a country music outlaw, too, as his entire career was colored by drug and alcohol use.
His difficulty staying out of trouble started way before he was a star, though, and when
he was still a teenager he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, punched a superior officer, and
spent a few years in prison.
The record deal came after that, and so did the check forgery and the attempted murder.
"Johnny Paycheck, one of the outlaws of country music, is now singing the blues behind bars."
Paycheck was on his way home for the holidays in December 1985 when he stopped off at a
Hillsboro, Ohio, bar for a drink.
He was recognized by a local named Larry Wise, they got to chatting, and … no one's entirely
sure what happened next.
Whatever offenses were caused, it ended with Paycheck grazing Wise's head with a bullet,
and he'd later testify the music legend had, quote, "blowed my hat off."
The case dragged on, and Paycheck was sentenced… again.
Chuck Berry's icky past
Chuck Berry was a legend who helped shape rock and roll.
He also once punched Keith Richards in the mouth, and what could Richards have done to
deserve that?
"His guitar was laid out in his case, and I thought, 'Ah, come on Keith, you know, just
a touch.'"
Berry's attitude got him into all kinds of trouble, and he even had a name for those
incidents: his "naughties."
It started when, as a teenager, he did three years in a reform school for stealing cars
and a bit of armed robbery.
Fast-forward to 1962, when Berry was 36 years old.
He was tossed in the clink for violating the Mann Act, a law that prohibits taking a woman
across state lines with "immoral" intentions.
Oh, and she was 14.
"Berry, you are under arrest for transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose
of…"
"I did not touch, first of all, I didn't transport anyone, I didn't solicit anything."
That's not all.
In December 1989, Berry was accused of videotaping women in the not-so-private privacy of the
bathroom of one of Berry's restaurants.
The following June, his property was raided, with law enforcement finding weapons, pot,
and the videotapes in question, placing him at the center of a class-action lawsuit.
Berry's camp eventually settled, but that seriously tarnished his legacy.
Brian Jones: anti-establishment and abusive
Brian Jones passed away when he was 27, not long after the Rolling Stones had made the
decision to move on without him.
It wasn't a surprising choice: Jones made Keith Richards look like the one you'd choose
to bring home to meet your parents.
There were, of course, the drugs and the pills, but his troubles started long before that.
How long?
He was kicked out of his grammar school for inciting rebellion, and it sort of spiralled
from there.
In public, he got in the face of anyone who didn't understand their music, and behind
closed doors he had a violent streak a mile wide.
Anita Pallenberg was one of the original muses for the Stones, and she'd eventually go on
to have a long-term relationship with Richards.
But she started out with Jones, and Rolling Stone magazine says it was an abusive relationship
that ended when he hit her so hard he broke his hand on her face.
"It end up very badly, cause by then Brian had become very abusive and very kind of,
um envious, and Keith couldn't bear the way Brian treated me."
Sympathy for the devil, indeed.
Steven Tyler's child girlfriend
There are two sides to every story, and really, both sides to this one are uncomfortable.
When Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler wrote his 2011 memoir Does the Noise in My Head
Bother You?, he talked a bit about early girlfriend Julia Holcomb.
Tyler wrote he had nicknamed her Little Bo Peep, said they liked to get it on in public,
and left out a lot of other details.
Holcomb wanted to clear the air about what she says really happened, so she took to Life
Site to tell her side of the story.
According to her, she was a 16-year-old from a broken family when she met Tyler and kicked
off a relationship with him that really started when her troubled mother signed documents
making Tyler her legal guardian.
Holcomb says she was already pregnant by the time he asked her to marry him, and plans
for a family started to fall apart when his grandmother refused to pass on her ring.
Five months into the pregnancy, Holcomb was trapped in a house fire and sent to the hospital,
where she says Tyler convinced her to have an abortion.
Holcomb left him, and returned to her parents.
Tyler returned to the rock star life, but has since spoken openly about regretting the
decisions he's made in the past.
Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism
Even people completely unfamiliar with classical music know the work of Wagner.
[Classical music]
Wagner died in 1883, decades before the rise of Hitler and his Nazis.
That means he wasn't around to see his music heralded as the soundtrack of the rise of
anti-Semitism, but he probably wouldn't have hated the association.
Wagner wrote a ton of jaw-dropping hate, including the idea Jews could only mimic art they'd
seen and heard.
When he struggled as an up-and-coming composer, he even blamed Jewish critics for keeping
him from success.
Frank Sinatra's destructive temper
Frank Sinatra was iconic on stage, but there was a lot of shady stuff that happened off-stage.
According to The Telegraph, his temper was so bad that one of his wives once described
him as a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde character, and there's a whole list of physical altercations
he was involved in.
First, the ones where someone got seriously hurt.
According to legends about the man who did things his way, he punched a reporter in 1948,
but eventually settled the assault and battery charges filed against him.
In an unrelated incident, he threw a phone at a random businessman who was staying at
the Beverly Hills Hotel, and cracked the man's skull.
Keeping with the theme of throwing things, he nearly killed then-wife Ava Gardner by
throwing a champagne bottle at her so hard it cracked the bathroom sink.
Sinatra destroyed an insane amount of stuff, too, usually in fits of rage.
Further legends say that he took a knife to a friend's Norman Rockwell painting, threw
a malfunctioning TV out of a window at the Sands Hotel, and smashed a car radio when
The Doors' "Light My Fire" came on.
So he must have really loved it when his daughter, Nancy, covered the song on her 1969 album.
Not a gentle man, to say the least.
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