Blues Rock

Jerry Lee Lewis

He married his bass player's daughter

He married on 12 December 1957 in Hernando, Mississippi, Myra Gale Brown, aged 13, the daughter of J.W. Brown, his first cousin and bass player; he was 22 and still married to another woman, and the ceremony had to be repeated on 4 June 1958. The scandal did not break then, but on 22 May 1958 at Heathrow. And his two anthems are not his: "Great Balls of Fire" is credited to Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer, and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" was recorded first by Big Maybelle in 1955.

Gary Moore

A German court took his blues away

On 3 December 2008 a Munich court ruled that the solo in "Still Got the Blues" was too close to "Nordrach", a 1974 track by the German group Jud's Gallery. The 1990 album had been his rebirth: no. 13 in the United Kingdom, no. 83 on the Billboard 200 and the only single of his entire career on the Hot 100. Before that he had joined and left Thin Lizzy three times and walked off the tour in Oakland, on 4 July 1979.

Keith Richards

The sentence was to play for the blind

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police found 22 grams of heroin in his Toronto suite on 27 February 1977, on a trafficking charge that carried exposure to a life sentence. On 24 October 1978 Judge Lloyd Graburn kept him out of prison with an extraordinary condition: a benefit concert for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. He complied on 22 April 1979 in Oshawa, with two shows that some 1,400 blind people got into free.

ZZ Top

The razor they never used

Gillette offered them a million dollars each to shave their beards for a commercial, and they said no. Half a century with the same line-up, a red 1933 hot rod, and the Hendrix anecdote everyone repeats that never happened.

Santana

They played before they had a record

Santana played Woodstock on 16 August 1969, two weeks before their first album came out. The band was named that way for paperwork reasons: the musicians union required a registered name and a designated leader. And on "Black Magic Woman" and "Oye Como Va" the singer is not Carlos but organist Gregg Rolie, who left in 1972 to found Journey.

Dire Straits

The teacher without a pick

A quiet man who played with bare fingers and told stories about ordinary people. And who, with a single album, pushed the whole world towards the compact disc.

B.B. King

One single note

He taught the world that one note, well played, says more than a speech. And he ran back into a burning hall for his guitar, with an ending almost nobody tells.

The Rolling Stones

Sixty years, and the heart that stopped beating

Behind the wildest band in the world sat the calmest man: a drummer who loved jazz, hated touring and did it anyway for half a century. When he died, in 2021, the ones left behind made a record with his drumming inside it.

Janis Joplin

The hole where her voice should have gone

When they finished Pearl there was a song with the backing track recorded, waiting for her vocal the next day. Nobody sang it. The album came out with those three minutes as an instrumental: a band playing around a silence. It is the best portrait of what was lost, and she left it recorded by accident.

Bruce Springsteen

The president mentioned my name

Reagan never used "Born in the U.S.A.": his campaign sounded out Springsteen's people and was turned down. He only name-checked him. The answer came two nights later, as a song about a jailed worker.

Little Richard

The man who never collected on the scream

"Tutti Frutti" changed music and left him almost nothing. A white cover outsold it, in 1959 he signed away his royalties, and half the lyric was written by a woman almost nobody names.

The Animals

One name on the label

"The House of the Rising Sun" belongs to nobody: it is traditional and in the public domain. But whoever signs the arrangement collects, and the label carries one name out of five.

Creedence Clearwater Revival

Second place five times over

They never had a number one. Five times they reached number two and five times they stayed there, and what blocked them were songs with their own entries in this very collection.

Rod Stewart

Ordinary, everyday joy

On 7 March 1989 he opened with «Hot Legs» at the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, before seventy thousand people, and almost certainly had no idea where he was standing. Handing out ordinary joy was his trade, and it turned out to be exactly what that place needed.

Eric Clapton

The only way he had of saying it

Eric Clapton fell in love with his best friend's wife and could tell nobody, so he wrote «Layla». Thirty years later he lost his four-year-old son and wrote «Tears in Heaven». The guitar was not his trade: it was the only place he could say what he could not say any other way.

Chuck Berry

The song that went to space

He put the pieces of rock and roll together and gave it a language. And of the whole genre, humanity chose one song of his to send to the stars.

The Day the Blues Went Electric

Chicago in the fifties: Muddy Waters plugs in his guitar to be heard over the bar, and everything follows from there. The story of rock's real big bang, and of the debt to Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe that was never settled.