Boy George Scandal

The story of how Boy George went from being unequivocally the smash hit of 1983 to the tabloid stooge of 1986 to the sad cabaret artist of 1988 is, if nothing else, a cautionary tale in media manipulation.

George Alan O'Dowd trod the usual path of the true rock 'n' roll rebel/victim. Expelled from school for insubordination, he drifted into an underground London society of drag artist. He was by no means the most outrageous of them, but he was easily the most talented. His voice was assured and soulful, and he made the transition from merely going to clubs to actually appearing at them when he was snapped up by Malcolm McLaren as co-singer for the band Bow Wow Wow. This was not just a safety measure against the band's teenage singer Annabella quitting, but also a testament to George's striking looks and voice. While he was in Bow Wow Wow he called himself 'Lieutenant Lush'.

Worries over McLaren's influence led to his departure from the band. Besides he had ideas of his own, and soon, with the addition of Jon Moss, Roy Hay and Mikey Craig, an interesting multi-coloured funk-toting four-piece. Culture Club was conceived. The end result was probably nowhere near as cynical as it looked. But the happy mix of colours and images, to say nothing about the rumours concerning exactly who if any in the band was gay, got the world around. After a couple of minor hits they had a huge number one success in 1982 with the song ' Do you really want to hurt me'

The music press had been courting him for years, since his arrival on the club scene, but when the daily tabloids were faced for the first time with the unashamedly and rogynous George, the results were predictable. Is it a Her? A Him Or Is It Neither? ..... "Mister (Or Is It Miss?) Weirdo'. . . He even won the nauseating Nina Myskow Wally of the Week Award.

When they found out that he was nor a freak and indeed had not only a mind of his own but the vocabulary to express it, their claws retracted a good idea. The tabloids even began to interview George, drawing supposedly outrageous quotes from him about how he preferred a cup of tea to sex. He was hardly ever out of the pop gossip columns. The greatest tribute a singer can receive - the Daily Mirror Personality of the Year Award - adorned his masterpiece for two years in a row.

And all the while hordes of lookalikes- mostly girls, for some reason - followed him in every conceivable fashion style. The records he made with culture Club - 'Time (Clock of the Heart)','Church of the Poison Mind','Karma Chameleon'- outdid each other on the dance floors and in the charts, and his got-it-flaunt it style even provoked comments from Princess Margaret ('Who's that over made-up tart?")

The problem only started when the hits stopped, when George ceased to be the charming vamp in flagrante delicto and began to look vulnerable. By 1986 Culture Club were finished. A string of mediocre records and a blatant lack of number one singles convinced the fickle teenage armies that more exciting thrills lay elsewhere, and George went the way of the Bay City Rollers and Adam Ant before him. Forced to rely exclusively on musical content, he was found wanting. The tabloids hissed a little and sat back waiting for the first mistake.

George had made anti-drug statements in the past and had persuaded most people that he was much too happy in the high life to mess with narcotics. So it was a genuine shock when the story of his heroin addiction broke in the pages of the Daily Mirror in June 1986. The George-as-junkie headlines were given more lurid life by the fact that the information came from his brother. George had also given an interview to John Blake, writer of the Mirror's pop column, in which he let slip a few indiscretions. Now there was not only a George-on-heroin scandal, there was an O'Dowd-family-at-war scoop as well.

Sam Cooke's Horrible Death

Sam Cooke's death in 1964 was one of the most violent ever suffered by a musician or singer, and was completely and tragically at odds with the gentle soulful strains of his music.

He sang melodic gospel-tinged songs for black audiences and for them he was a hero just as daunting and just as real as Elvis was for the whites. His hit songs - "You Send Me", "Wonderful World", "Cupid" to name just three - perfected the style of commercial soul music. The fact that it worked spectacularly must have been a decisive factor in Berry Gordy crank- starting the Motown operation. Later singers, including Otis Redding, testified to Cooke's influence and his singles still send a lucrative shiver down the public's spine even today.

The sheer enormity of this influence suggested that his death might not have been an accident. The bizarre circumstances which led to it would seem to lend support to this argument. There are so many unanswered questions regarding the Cooke shooting that a conspiracy theory is almost inevitable.

Cooke had married his childhood sweetheart and was known as a clean-living family man. So it was almost incredible to hear of his being shot while trying to rape a girl he had picked up at a party. Evidently he had persuaded this girl, Elisa Boyer, to get into his car, saying that he would give her a lift home. Instead he drove to a Los Angeles motel and, although she says she was forced into going, she seems to have stood silently by his side while he signed the register, 'Mr. and Mrs. Cooke'. She says that she then demanded to be taken home but, after Cooke assured her that he merely wanted to talk for a while, she followed him to the room. There he tried to undress her and she resisted. Fears that he would try to rape her made her snatch up her clothes as well as Cooke's and dash across to the motel office. Once inside she found a phone and called the police.

Cooke followed her to the office and began pounding on the door, demanding to talk to her. The motel manageress, a certain Mrs. Franklin, told him that Elisa Boyer was not there. Cooke appeared to believe her and got in his car to drive away. But then he returned and resumed pounding Mrs. Franklin testified that Cooke then broke down the office door in a state of rage and proceeded to attack her. She managed to fight him off and get hold of a pistol, with which she shot him three times in the chest and abdomen. He did not die at once. Instead he leapt at her in a even greater rage whereupon she struck him with a stick. The stick broke but she kept hitting until he lay still.When the police eventually arrived he was dead.

Hearing this evidence, the inquest court ruled that the killing was justifiable homicide. Nevertheless the questions will not answer themselves. In an effort to find out what really happened that might Cooke's Manager later hired a private detective to work it all out. He never came up with any satisfactory conclusions.

Sam Cooke's funeral was a tempestuous affair, with almost 200,000 people turning up to pay their respects. Many of them were hysterical, most were crying. Hundreds were crushed in the desperate attempt to take a look at his body for the last time and the local Chicago press ran stories on the pandemonium.

A week later another 5,000 people attended a funeral service for the dead singer in Los Angeles.

Janis Joplin and her Blues

"I wanted to smoke dope, take dope. lick dope, suck dope, fuck dope anything i could lay my hands on i wanted to do it... Hey, man, what is it? i"ll try it. How do you do it? Do you suck it? No? You swallow it? I'll swallow it" - Janis Joplin, 1970 a few months before her death.

Janis Joplin had the blues, and didn't she let the world know about it. If pain had a singing voice, it would sound a lot like the Joplin howl. Straight from the gut she sang, via her tortured soul and her broken heart. Even a line like, 'Oh lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz' scorched in tones of raw hurt, symbolic of all the fine things in life Janis could not have - simple things like a pretty face, a loving husband, and maybe a couple of kids to make tomorrow something to look forward to.

In the 27 years of her life, tragically curtailed when she became yet another victim of heroin, she proved beyond any doubt that Sophie Tucker was in no way the last of the red hot mammas.

As she grew up, her fate was gradually sealed. Completely lacking the demure, cleavage-clenching prettiness of your average Southern belle ( and possessing a terrible complexion), she became the focus for horrible abuse at her school. That and a tendency to hang out with the boys, would shape her life. It would be a major heartbreak for her that men were perfectly content, willing even to be seduced from the safe distance of a stage when she sang, but once the show was over, she went home alone while they retreated into the arms of girls designed with more conventional ideas of beauty in mind.

Displaying a serious alcohol problem as early as the age of 17, she was admitted to the local hospital and subsequently saw a psychiatrist. It was clear that flight was necessary.

So off to Loas Angeles she went, then to Venice Beach, and on her return to port Arthur it was noticed by everyone that Janis was now a fully-fledged wildcat, combining a manic, head-on hard drinking charm with a Californian inspired beatnik lifestyle.

The Phonomenon Groupies Band of 60's and 70's

The groupies scene was a phenomenon of the late Sixties and early Seventies, and various threatening social diseases have effectively put the mockers on groupiedom in the eighties, much to the chagrin of some straggling leftover rock 'n' rollers who remember the good times.

It was at its height in the late Sixties havens of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. In 1969 the groupies knew they had arrived when the influential magazine Rolling Stone dedicated an entire issues to groupies their philosophy, their quirks, their motivation and - in a few cases - their regrets.

What is/was a groupie? A groupie is a girl who hangs out with rock 'n' roll groups simple as that. Except that gradually the behavior of certain of the groupie sorority got the more socially-minded ones a bad name, and groupies became a by-word for sex objects.

The whole question of following a rock musician to a hotel room and then inquiring about the possibilities of having sex with him and/or any of his friend and/or the road crew and/or anyone else who may be involved, however tenuously, with the rich and reckless world of rock 'n' roll seems like an amazingly ephemeral, not to say thankless, way to go about one's life. But there were those who had it down to a fine art. and for them the rewards were just as meaningful as, say, an auditorium full of screaming fans would be for the rock stars they pursued.

Not that a groupie existed as a mere sexual gift. There was the matter of entertainment, of company, of fun, of help around the house, of -well, what the hell- of love. As Jimmy page of Led Zeppelin put it. The sex angle is important. But no more important than girls who are also good friends and make you feel like family.

Prince

Nothing can be said with any degree of finality about prince Rogers Nelson. His legend is as tricky as one of his guitar solos, his image as carefully applied as his make-up. Only two things are sure: he is small, and he is strange.

Prince has been recording since 1977, when his first album, for you, was the subject of mild amusement by virtue of its lyrical content. A credit to God on the sleeve seemed pretty out of place among some fairly blatant tributes to the sexual acts. However paradoxically, sex and religion appear to have no problem co-existing on a Prince record. Between them they have constituted nearly all of his inspiration and a peek at his stage show will confirm that he draws equal pleasure from both.

His present superstar status -the only two non-political black Americans as famous as him are like Mike Tyson and Michael Jackson - is not the transient affair that most rock stars enjoy. There seems no question of Prince ever becoming obsolete. There is probably no way he'll even be out of date. And one look at his prolific output since 1983, when the double album 1999 opened the commercial floodgates, suggested that he isn't even close to running out of ideas. What seems much more likely, if he is to fade from limelight, is that internal traumas and massive self-doubts will be the causes. For, at the moment, prince-quite simply- seems to believe that he is God.

Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin. Jimmy page once said "is a stag party that never ends. If ever a band a band was born to party until one or all of its participants keeled over it was Zeppelin - a rocking, rolling, careering orgy spiced with stories of black magic rituals, shotgun weddings and wakes.

Page was the frail former child prodigy guitarist who put Led Zeppelin together after his band, the Yardbirds, fell apart in 1968. Linking up with sessions bassist John Paul Jones and a brace of midland neanderthals, Robert Plant on vocals and drummer John "Bonzo" Bonham, he set about re-interpreting the delta blues in a hard rocking context. Zeppelin played at deafening volumes to record breaking audiences. For a while in the seventies they were outselling the Rolling Stones at the radio of three albums to one.

Through all this success they made merry, causing all sorts of astonishing rumors of backstage perversions to reverberate round Europe and America. Tales of massive orgies with willing female participants abounded.

The two stories that began to circulate like dogs on acid during their first American tour in 1969 (the Brits had rejected them as blues pilferers without talent of finesse) were sordid and thrilling, respectively.

The first was that never in the history of human conflict had so much semen been implanted in so many by few.