“Don’t blame Yoko!”
In an hour long interview set to air on Al Jazeera English this month, Paul McCartney has finally cleared up something that has been pestering Beatles fans for decades; did Yoko Ono cause the fab four to break up? “She certainly didn’t break the group up, the group was breaking up,” says McCartney, who took the opportunity to offer some praise for Ono’s influence on former bandmate John Lennon. The former Beatle claimed that if it wasn’t for the avant garde outlook she introduced him to, Lennon might never have penned such classic songs as his 1971 hit “Imagine.” “I don’t think he would have done that without Yoko, so I don’t think you can blame her for anything. When Yoko came along, part of her attraction was her avant garde side, her view of things, so she showed him another way to be, which was very attractive to him. So it was time for John to leave, he was definitely going to leave [one way or another].” Though he did admit that he found Ono’s presence during recording vexing, he says the real wedge driver for the group was Allan Klein, the businessman who tried to take over after their manager Brian Epstein died in 1967.
Couldn’t find an actual fan, I guess
In a new interview with Men’s Health Magazine, Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger related a cringe-inducing story from his band’s early tour days. The anecdote involves a tour stop in Germany, boredom, roughly $375 in cash, genitalia and metal fan blades—the exact combination of which you’d best read straight from the source. “In a back room in the venue where we were playing, there was an old fan with a metal blade. I don’t remember the last time I saw a fan with a metal blade. And we paid the drum tech…. Oh god, I forget the exact amount. I think we got the pot up to about 600 deutschmarks.” That pot, Kroeger goes on to intimate, went towards convincing their unfortunate drum tech to “stick his johnson in the fan,” to the delight of band and crewmembers, who reportedly filmed the incident. “I can still hear the ‘bleh-bleh-blehhhhhhh’ of the blade slowly sputtering to a stop, and this blood-curdling scream. It was fantastic.”
For sale: one bass, slightly destroyed
Are you a fan of Nirvana? Bass guitars? How about stuff broken by famous people? If you answered yes to all three questions, Christie’s London auction house has the perfect item of music memorabilia for you; Kris Novoselic’s smashed up bass guitar, as seen in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video. The bass, a Zen-On which was purchased by Novoselic from a pawn shop with the express intent of smashing it on screen, is estimated to sell for between $25,000 and $40,000 at auction in Christie’s entertainment memorabilia sale on Nov. 29. Also up for auction is a personally inscribed copy of Bob Dylan’s High school yearbook and the original whip used in the Indiana Jones movies.
