The Funniest People in Music – Page 2

David Bruce: The Funniest People in Music, Volume 3 — Opera

Opera

• Early in her career, Ernestine Schumann-Heink studied the lead role of Carmen. At first, she learned the part by ear, then she studied various performances of Carmen, learning something from each performance. Unfortunately, after she sang the role professionally for the first time — in an emergency and without a rehearsal — the conductor, Gustav Mahler, laughed and said that she had memorized the mistakes of all the different Carmens she had seen and heard. (She was a hit, nevertheless.)

• Mezzo Mignon Dunn was five-foot-nine, and many of her fellow male opera singers were shorter than she, so on stage she often sang with her knees bent. However, one day director Tyrone Guthrie saw her doing that and asked, “You cow, what on earth are you doing?” Afterward, she sang with unbended knees.

• Tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi was proud of his sustained high notes. In Trovatore in Rome, he raised his sword and hit a sustained high-C note, but a curtain fell too quickly, in his opinion. Still singing the high-C note, he parted the curtain and brandished his sword, finishing the note when he felt like it.

• Each time soprano Birgit Nilsson returned to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, general manager Rudolf Bing got on his knees before her. After he had been knighted, he kneeled again at her return to the Met, and she told him, “You do that much better since you practiced it for the Queen.”

Politics

• Steve Earle’s life has been more interesting than most, although except for the music and the moments of happiness, that may not be a good thing. For example, in 1994 he kicked heroin — after spending four months in jail. Also, he had seven failed marriages before marrying fellow musician Allison Moorer. Mr. Earle says, “Trust me, when you’ve been married as many times as I have, you figure out that you’re at least part of the problem.” Giving up heroin and stopping being an alcoholic just might help marriage number eight to work. By the way, Mr. Earle is interested in politics, although some politicians are not interested in him. At a political event, a friend wanted a photograph of Mr. Earle with Al and Tipper Gore, but Mr. Earle says that the Gores “pretty much levitated [in] trying to avoid it.” During the 2008 Democratic Presidential primary contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Mr. Earle said, “It does make a difference to me if it’s Clinton or Obama, but I won’t publicly go on record to say which one I prefer. I’ve learned it probably doesn’t benefit the candidate for me to do that.”

• Mandy Patinkin is an excellent singer, although he is best known for his performance in Rob Reiner’s movie The Princess Bride, in which he said these famous lines: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” His singing has touched people. He says, “Generally, you have very little connection with the audience — to whoever is buying the CDs. But individuals have come up to me and said, ‘I can’t tell you how you got me through chemotherapy, or my father’s death, or the death of my child.’ You just don’t know how people are using the music.” During the 2008 United States Presidential campaign, he went door to door to urge people to vote for Barack Obama. Mr. Obama, who became President Obama, certainly had an enthusiastic organization. One irritated woman told him, “Will you tell your supervisors that four people have already come by today?” Mr. Patinkin remembers, “Then a minute later she came running over — I guess her neighbor had told her who I am — and she says, ‘Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. Will you come in and have some salmon?’ I said, ‘No, no. It’s OK. Just vote for Obama.’”

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Music, Volume 3 — Names

Names

• Who drummer Keith Moon did not think that the music of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham would be successful; in fact, he told them that their music would be as successful as a lead balloon. Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham decided to name their band after Mr. Moon’s comment. A zeppelin was the biggest balloon they could think of, and after removing the A from “lead” to facilitate accurate pronunciation, they called themselves Led Zeppelin. It was their music that led music reporter Lester Bangs to coin the term “heavy metal” music.

• Mikey Rocks and Chuck Inglish make up the Chicago rap duo known as the Cool Kids. Actually, “Mikey Rocks” is a pseudonym. His real name is Antoine Reed, but he chose his stage name because of his youthful hero-worship of NBA star Michael Jordan. When Mr. Reed had to choose a stage name, he regarded it as an opportunity: “As a little kid, I would try to change my name to Mike, like write it on papers and I would tell my mom to call me that but she wouldn’t do it, so I just saw this as my opportunity to have the best name that I could possibly have.”

• Late in his life, blues musician Howlin’ Wolf is said to have not liked his name; however, it was preferable to other names he had acquired earlier. Born Chester Arthur Burnett, Howlin’ Wolf wore size-16 shoes. That led to him being called first “Foots” and later “Big Foot Chester.” Another blues musician named John T. Smith, who in 1930 had recorded a song called “The Howling Wolf” and had thereafter taken that name, was no longer famous when Big Foot was looking for a new name, so Mr. Burnett borrowed the name and kept it for himself.

• Scottish singer Amy Macdonald regarded Pete Doherty as an early idol, and she wrote the song “Poison Prince” about his drug problems. Mr. Doherty has heard about the song, although he may have misheard its title. On television, an interviewer asked him, “So you’ve met Amy; she’s a big fan. And you’ve heard the song?” Mr. Doherty asked, “What song?” The interviewer replied, “The song she wrote about you, ‘Poison Prince.’” Mr. Doherty was not amused, saying, “Why would I want to listen to a song about me that is called ‘Poison Prick?’”

• Stanley Kirk Burrell is better known as rapper M.C. Hammer. “M.C.” is a slang way of saying “Rapper,” and “Hammer” is a nickname he was given when he became the Oakland Athletics batboy after Charley Finley, the owner of the Athletics, saw young Stanley singing and dancing in the Athletics parking lot. Stanley resembled home-run hitter Hammerin’ Hank Aaron, and so he was called Little Hammer.

• One story about how “break” dancing got its name concerns Afrika Mambaataa, an African-American man in the Bronx in New York City who led a gang called the Zulu Kings that was more interested in dancing than in fighting. Another gang challenged the Zulu Kings to a fight, but Mr. Mambaataa suggested that they take a break from beating people up and instead compete in dancing.

• At one time, people with foreign or Jewish names would sometimes change their names because they thought that it would help them fit in better or more comfortably in the United States. Composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein was advised to do this early in his career, but he replied, “I’ll do it as Bernstein, or not at all.”

• The Yugoslav conductor Berislav Klobucar once substituted for Herbert von Karajan at the Metropolitan Opera. Members of the orchestra showed their affection for Mr. Klobucar by calling him “Clubcar” and by calling his wife “Loungecar.”

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Music, Volume 3 — Money, Mothers, Names

Money

• Music critic and scholar Chadwick Jenkins remembers being required to take his choice of music classes when he was in high school. He signed up for chorus, but quickly the teacher wanted him to drop the class — and offered him $50 to do just that. According to Mr. Jenkins, the teacher “said that the sum was a substantial portion of his yearly income but that it was worth it just so he could sleep at night.”

• The Raconteurs have a reputation for producing rock ’n’ roll alchemy. Although they were selling records in 2008, they also made money in other ways than playing music. During their tours, they both played live music and sold their own homemade elixirs. What kind of elixirs? One elixir is intended to put hair on your chest; another elixir is intended to remove the hair on your chest.

Mothers

• Vince Clarke, a former member of the bands Depeche Mode and Erasure, occasionally gets together with Alison Moyet to tour as the duo Yas, aka Yazoo. He is very popular with gays although he is straight with a wife and a son. In fact, he is so popular with gays that the gay magazine The Advocate asked him whether he had to “frequently come out of the closet as straight.” Mr. Clarke replied, “My Mum was surprised, actually. When I phoned her to tell her I’d just gotten married, she didn’t believe me. It was a good half-hour conversation of ‘No, Mum, I really did just get married.’”

• The New Kids on the Block have their fans. Writer David Wild once stayed in a hotel on the same floor that the boy band was staying on. Each time he turned on his light, teenaged female fans outside the hotel screamed. But what really impressed him about the fame of the New Kids on the Block was that lots of hot mothers offered him sexual favors for his All-Access Backstage Pass. He blogged, “For the record — and for my wife who might be reading this — I adamantly refused these propositions for reasons that are not entirely clear to me today.”

• Sam Endicott, the frontman/bass player of the Bravery, an indie-rock band, learned about ethics from his mother when he was very young. He took a grape out of a grocery store without paying for it and ate it. His mother found out, and, Mr. Endicott remembers, “My mom made me go back and tell the cashier lady what I’d done. It was the most humiliating experience of my life. I’ve never stolen since.”

Names

• When the Replacements performed at their first concert, they were supposed to be known as the Impediments. However, their first concert was in the basement of a Presbyterian church, and the promoter thought that the name the Impediments was not very Presbyterian and that it sounded anti-people with handicaps. Forced to pick a replacement name very quickly, they very quickly named themselves the Replacements. Of course, the band had nicknames as well. At times, members of the band were so drunk that they could barely perform. At those times, they called themselves the Placemats, or more simply, the ’Mats. Once, in Portland, the ’Mats wore their own clothing on stage — and over their own clothing, they wore the clothing of the opening act.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Music, Volume 3 — Money, Mothers, Names

Money

• Screenwriter/critic Frank Cottrell Boyce met Nico at Eric’s, a punk nightclub in 1970s Liverpool, but maybe that wasn’t a good thing. He told her that he loved her, and she replied, “Really? Do you have any money? I seem to be a little short.” He had two 50-pence pieces, and he gave her one of them, but he could tell that she wanted the other one, too, so he gave her that one as well. That night, he walked 11 miles home, due to lack of train fare.

Mothers

Names

• When the Replacements performed at their first concert, they were supposed to be known as the Impediments. However, their first concert was in the basement of a Presbyterian church, and the promoter thought that the name the Impediments was not very Presbyterian and that it sounded anti-people with handicaps. Forced to pick a replacement name very quickly, they very quickly named themselves the Replacements. Of course, they had nicknames as well. At times, members of the band were so drunk that they could barely perform. At those times, they called themselves the Placemats, or more simply, the ’Mats. Once, in Portland, the ’Mats wore their own clothing on stage — and over their own clothing, they wore the clothing of the opening act.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Music, Volume 3 — Money

Money

• It seems very unlikely to me that being a drug addict has any advantages whatsoever; however, Ron Asheton, guitarist for Iggy and the Stooges, once received a telephone call from an IRS agent who told him that the band owed a lot of money in back taxes. The story — which is most likely untrue — goes that Mr. Asheton told the IRS agent the unfortunately true statement, “Hey, look, man. We’re all drug addicts. We don’t know where the money is.” The IRS agent supposedly said, “Oh,” hung up the telephone, and did not press them for payment of back taxes. (The truth is probably that Iggy and the Stooges didn’t owe any back taxes; they were far from being a very commercially successful band.)

• When blues music lessened in popularity in the United States, blues musicians such as Howlin’ Wolf started touring in Europe, including communist countries. During one tour, Howlin’ Wolf was paid half in American money and half in the local currency, and he was warned to be sure to spend the foreign money as he would not be able to exchange it for American money. Also, Howlin’ Wolf once said that he didn’t want to buy anything and therefore he wanted to donate his foreign currency to the local YMCA. Unfortunately, the German promoter who had put together the tour was forced to explain that communist countries, due to government suppression of religion, didn’t have any YMCAs.

• T-Bone Burnett has made music over 40 years, and he has found much success, including a 2002 Grammy win for Album of the Year for O Brother, Where Art Thou? Of course, his life wasn’t always easy. In 1970, he became a starving artist in Los Angeles. T-Bone says, “My roommate was a wedding musician, and he’d bring home wedding cake and we’d eat cake for three or four days.” Even though O Brother, Where Art Thou? sold 7 million copies, he is not a commercial artist, and he does not make a ton of money. He says, “Making money isn’t an appropriate goal for making music. If you want to print money, buy a printing press, not a guitar. The guitar is the wrong tool for that.”

• Blues singer Bessie Smith could be earthy, something that occasionally cost her. She once interrupted one of her songs during an audition for Black Swan Records by saying, “Hold on! Let me spit!” Horrified, the president of Black Swan Records told her that she had failed the audition. Of course, being earthy does not mean you can’t sing the blues; if anything, it probably makes you a better blues singer. Musician Bix Beiderbecke, who was white but did not let that stop him from being an artist in jazz music, once threw his salary for an entire week up on stage so Bessie would sing a few more songs.

• Singer Sarah Brightman was happily married for a while to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, but they divorced, and now they have a good relationship as a divorced couple. In the divorce settlement, Ms. Brightman was awarded £6 million. Of course, Ms. Brightman has done rather well as an actress in Cats and Phantom of the Opera and as a recording artist, so one day she asked her ex-husband about the £6 million, “Look, I’m doing all right. Would you like it back?” He replied, “No, you went through all of that — you keep it.”

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Music, Volume 3 — Money

Money

• Memphis garage-punk musician Jay Reatard, née Jay Lindsey, once made a single with another musician in Austria. The agreement was that together they would issue the single for a European tour, and that later Mr. Lindsey would be able to use the single for another project. Without authorization, the guy in Austria made copies of the single. According to Mr. Lindsey, he “pressed it on a clear, six-inch square that plays from the inside out,” then sold the single on eBay for $280 per copy. He did send Mr. Lindsey a few copies of the specially pressed single. Of course, Mr. Lindsey wasn’t happy that an unauthorized use was being made of his work, so he told the guy in Austria, “Since you gave me nine copies, I’ll sell them on eBay and have enough money for a ticket to Austria to kick your *ss. He chilled out after that.” Actually, Mr. Lindsey kept one copy for himself, but unfortunately lost it when moving. He gave the other copies away to friends who he knew would keep and not sell them.

• Tom Mathers, the founder of the Mathers Fund, learned the hard way the truth of these words: “If you find a great growth company, don’t sell it just because it gets a little pricey — you may never get back in again.” Back in the 1960s, he and his wife wanted to buy a piano. He owned shares of stock in Disney, and since he thought that the Disney stock was pricey, he decided to sell his Disney stock and use the money to buy the piano. Over the years, of course, the price of Disney stock rose higher and higher and higher, and because he had sold his Disney stock, he lost out on all that growth in the price of Disney stock. As you would expect, he sometimes looks at the piano in his living room and complains, “That’s the most expensive d*mn piano on the face of the planet!”

• In 1967, Frank Sinatra and his daughter Nancy recorded “Somethin’ Stupid,” which was a monster hit for them, spending a month at No. 1. Nancy remembers, “The whole thing took about 20 minutes. We recorded it in two takes, and the only reason it took two was that Dad kept singing it ‘shumshing shtupid’ to make me laugh on the first one, and we couldn’t finish it.” After recording the song, Frank said, “That’s a No. 1 record.” Mo Austin, a honcho at Reprise Records, disagreed, and said, “No, it’s a bomb.” In Nancy’s office today is a photograph of Frank and herself from that recording session. Nancy describes the photo in this way: “Coming out of a balloon in my dad’s mouth are the words, ‘Silly b*stard bet me $2 it would be a bomb.’ And attached [to the photograph] is a $2 bill.”

• Dolly Parton is a smart artist, and she is a smart businesswoman. In 1974, Elvis Presley wanted to sing her song “I Will Always Love You.” But in order for that to happen, Mr. Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, required that Ms. Parton sign over half the rights to the song. Ms. Parton declined to do that. Way to go, Dolly! The song has made millions of dollars. Ms. Parton explains why she declined to sign over half the rights to the song: “I knew it was one of my best songs, but it wouldn’t have mattered what song Parker wanted the publishing on. That’s money I’m earning for my family. I couldn’t give it up. It was already a hit for me, but then after Whitney Houston recorded it and I did it two more times, once with Vince Gill, well … I’ve made gobs of money off it.”

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Music, Volume 3 — Mishaps, Money

Mishaps

• Jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie played a trumpet with the bell pointed upward. The story is that someone once accidentally sat on his horn, bending its bell. At first, Mr. Gillespie was angry, but then he discovered that he preferred the trumpet that way. Afterwards, he ordered all of his trumpets to be made with an upwards-pointing bell.

• World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma is a busy man — so busy that in October of 1999 he left his $2.5 million Montagnana cello in the trunk of a New York taxicab. Fortunately, he had a taxicab receipt, so police located the taxicab quickly. The cello was still in the trunk — the taxicab driver had not even realized that it was still there.

• While singing for the Metropolitan Opera during the 1950s, soprano Lucine Amara ran into a problem: New York can be a dirty city, and in the days before air conditioning dust settled everywhere in her apartment soon after dusting. She once cried, “I long for home! Even our dust is clean in San Francisco!”

• David Byrne, former front man for the Talking Heads, is a cyclist. In 2008, he crashed on West 14^th Street in New York City. Two police officers arrived and asked him two questions: 1) Were you drinking? and 2) Are you David Byrne? Both questions have the same answer: yes.

• Even very good musicians can have an off night. A team of musicians led by jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis once mightily messed up “April in Paris.” After they had “played” the song, Mr. Marsalis announced to the audience that they had just heard “April Embarrassed.”

• While acting in the stage play Brouhaha, Peter Sellers danced a waltz right off the stage and into the orchestra pit, bruising himself badly. Comedian Spike Milligan sent him a telegram, asking, “Are you a member of the Musicians’ Union?”

• Camille (Charles) Saint-Saëns once attempted to accompany a duet sung by two girls who were never together in their vocals. He stopped playing, then asked, “Now tell me, which of you two am I supposed to accompany?”

• Operas may have been more fun in the past than they are today. When George Frideric Handel’s opera Sersewas produced, it was enlivened by Caffarelli, the lead singer, who liked to goose the sopranos on stage.

Money

• Welsh singer Tom Jones is known both for his voice and for women throwing their underwear at him. The first time a woman gave him her underwear while he was performing was in 1968 at the Copacabana in New York. He was sweating, and since people had been eating at the supper club, a couple of people gave him their napkins to wipe his brow with. Then, Mr. Jones remembers, “This one woman stood up — up with the dress, down with the drawers. Took ’em off and handed them to me.” He wiped his brow with them and said, “Sweetheart, watch you don’t catch cold.” Mr. Jones married at age 16 and has stayed married. While he went to London to make it as a singer, his wife worked in a battery factory to support their young son. Mr. Jones vowed to make it big so that she didn’t have to work and so that he could support his family. One of the great achievements of his life was making enough money that his father could retire from working in the Welsh coal mines at age 50. Tom Jones himself could have ended up in the coal mines, but he contracted tuberculosis at age 13 and the doctor told Tom’s father, “Whatever you do, you can’t put this boy in a coal mine because he has weak lungs.” Mr. Jones says, “And the weird thing is, with weak lungs I’ve become a f**kin’ singer.”

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Music, Volume 3 — Mishaps

Mishaps

• In opera, singers must be heard in the back rows of the opera house. Occasionally, this striving after volume results in a spray of saliva that can drench an innocent co-star. The tenor Pasquale Brignoli was known for his spraying. While on stage co-starring with Brignoli in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, contralto Emily Lablache asked him loudly, “See here, my good friend, can’t you for once spit on Donna Elvira’s dress?”

• The Russian Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Modest Altschuler, was playing Beethoven’s “Leonore No. 3” at an outdoor park. Just as the first trumpeter, stationed away from the orchestra, raised his horn to his lips to play the offstage fanfare, a park policeman ran over to him and grabbed the trumpet away from him, saying, “You can’t do that here! Don’t you know there’s a concert going on?”

• One of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s friends visited a pub where he heard a band playing an expert version of Eddie and the Hot Rods’ “Anything You Wanna Do.” When the band took a break, he bought them all drinks and advised them to form an Eddie and the Hot Rods tribute band. The band’s singer replied, “Nice idea. The only problem with it is that I am Eddie. And these are my Hot Rods.”

• Chubby Wise played fiddle for country singer Hank Snow. During a concert, Mr. Wise’s bow caught Mr. Snow’s toupee and flung it out into the audience. Someone in the audience went home with a very unusual celebrity memento. (Once, Mr. Snow got too close to the edge of the stage and fell off. He said, “Godd*mn it, Chubby. Why don’t you watch where I’m going?”)

• Fanny Brice was persistent. Once she was singing her big number in a show when her voice cracked — something no one could believe. She made the orchestra begin the song again, and she sang again, and her voice cracked again. So she told the audience, “Just stay in your seats. We’ll get it this time.” And she did get it, and she received a huge ovation from the audience.

• Bobby Jax played in his junior high school marching band in Paragould, Arkansas, where his most memorable exploit was falling on his rear end during a halftime performance. Because of this exploit, his fellow band members implemented the annual “Bobby Jax I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up Award.” Bobby good-naturedly became the recipient of the first award.

• Ernestine Schumann-Heink was rehearsing Wagner’s Das Rheingold, in which she played a nymph. She and the other women playing nymphs were connected to wires that raised and lowered them to simulate diving and swimming. Unfortunately, she disliked the motion and screamed, “For Heaven’s sake, let me down! I’m the mother of eight children!”

• After retiring from opera and movies, Geraldine Farrar began giving musical concerts. Mishaps sometimes occurred at these concerts. At one concert, a storm knocked out the electric power. Therefore, Ms. Farrar gave the concert by the light of candles. She held one in front of her, while her pianist played by the light of two candles stuck in potatoes.

• Opera singers sometimes have very tight travel schedules. On her way to London to perform, soprano Eva Turner stopped at Las Palmas to sing the part of Leonora in Trovatore. Her ship sailed just a half-hour after the final curtain, so her fellow travelers were treated to the sight of Ms. Turner in full costume climbing up a ladder to get on board.

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Music, Volume 3 — Mishaps

Mishaps

• Linda Ronstadt has sung some operetta and opera. For example, she has sung the role of Mabel in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Doing this was hard work because she wasn’t used to acting while singing. For example, during rehearsals she sometimes did not understand where to walk. A few times, at the end of a song in rehearsal she found herself standing in the place marked off for the orchestra pit. And co-star Kevin Kline once pointed out to her during a rehearsal, “This is Gilbert and Sullivan, Linda — you can’t say, ‘Git!’” She also worked in La Bohème with some other people who were new to opera. One musician even was heard asking during an early rehearsal, “Isn’t there any dialogue in this show?”

• Chris Martin of Coldplay occasionally tries to cook, but maybe he shouldn’t. Once he tried to cook fish and peas, but he forgot to turn on the vent. His fire alarm went off, and since it is connected to the fire station, a fire engine quickly arrived. He was forced to tell the firefighters, “I’m sorry. There’s no fire.” A couple of months later, he again tried to cook, and again he forgot to turn on the vent. Again, the fire engine arrived, and again, Mr. Martin said, “I’m sorry. There’s no fire.” He was shaken and decided to get out of his home for a while. The fire engine happened to be going in his direction, so the firefighters asked, “Do you want a lift?” Mr. Martin says, “I got to have a ride in a fire engine. How cool is that?”

• When the German soprano Erna Sack prepared to perform Gilda in Rigoletto in Chicago, debuting there on November 16, 1935, she made herself unpopular. She was unable to converse in any language but German, and the American baritone John Charles Thomas asked tenor Joseph Barton, aka Giuseppe Bentonelli, loudly during the final rehearsal, “What in the … is she jabbering at me?” Despite the rehearsals, her performance was a disaster. During her first performance, she decided suddenly to sing her part an octave higher than was written and to sing all phrases fortissimo. No one had praise for her after her debut, and she left the windy city the next day and never sang there again.

• The Beastie Boys’ second album, Paul’s Boutique, contained a song titled “Egg Man.” The song came from a leisure activity they and their friends engaged in. The Beastie Boys would throw eggs at people from their 9^th-floor rooms at the Mondrian Hotel. Of course, people complained, and the hotel managers send them a very diplomatic note: “We’ve had some reports of things falling out of your window. If there’s a problem with your window, please let us know.” The Beastie Boys and their friends stopped throwing eggs at people from the windows of the Mondrian Hotel; instead, they drove around in cars and threw eggs at people.

• Before George Cehanovsky started singing with the Metropolitan Opera, he sang the title role in Eugene Onegin. During the scene where he was supposed to shoot and kill the poet Lensky in a duel, his gun would not fire. (Later, he discovered that he and the singer playing Lensky had picked up the wrong guns — the singer playing Lensky had the gun with the blank in it.) The singer playing Lensky decided to fall over “dead” anyway, and when he hit the floor, the blank in his gun went off. Mr. Cehanovsky asked Eugene’s second, “Is he killed?” The second replied, “He died of a heart attack.”

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David Bruce: The Funniest People in Music, Volume 3 — Mishaps

Mishaps

• Some of Adam Green’s music was featured in the 2007 hit movie Juno, bringing him fame and making him the subject of interviews in the media in which he tells some of his favorite anecdotes. For example, he broke a tooth while eating a bagel, necessitating a titanium replacement. His dentist used a substance that became a subject of conversation at a subsequent meeting in which his dentist told him, “Hey, remember when we pulled out your tooth? We put some replacement bone material up in there to promote healing.” The dentist said that the replacement bone material came from a human cadaver, then added, “The problem is that … have you been reading the news lately? Well, this guy stole all these bodies from this funeral home in New Jersey, and you are the recipient of this, like, stolen body part.” Mr. Green grins and says, “It turned out I got the bones of Alistair Cooke!”

• Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine have performed all over the world. In El Salvador, civil war wracked the country, and three bodyguards with Uzi submarine guns protected Ms. Estefan. While they were performing, some explosions rocked the air above the arena and so the members of the band hit the floor of the stage. Fortunately, the explosions were fireworks set off to welcome them. They got up and dusted themselves off, and the crowd applauded them. When they had an English-language hit in “Dr. Beat,” they performed in Spain, where the promoters provided them with translators because they did not know that Ms. Estefan and the other members of the Miami Sound Machine were fluent in Spanish. Indeed, for most members, including Ms. Estefan, Spanish is their first language.

• Sir Peter Ustinov once saw four very interesting windmills at a production of Jules Massenet’s Don Quixote at the Paris Opera. The first windmill, which was propelled by a small man, turned at the proper speed. The second windmill, which was propelled by a very heavy man, turned much slower. The third windmill was turned by two men who disliked and would not cooperate with each other, so its speed varied. The fourth windmill was powered by a malfunctioning electric motor that went into reverse so that the fourth windmill was turning in a direction that was different from the other windmills.

• In Vienna, operatic tenor Leo Slezak knew a cabbie with one horse — a blind one. Although it wasn’t fashionable to go about the streets of Vienna in a one-horse cab — two horses were the fashion — Mr. Slezak so liked the cabman, Johann, that he patronized him. One day Johann prepared a special treat for Mr. Slezak — he brought a musical clock that played the Radetzky March. Mr. Slezak was appreciative of the gesture, but after the clock had played the Radetzky March a dozen times, he asked Johann to stop the clock. Unfortunately, Johann replied that when the clock had been wound up, it would play for two and a half hours, and there was no way to stop it. Mr. Slezak was forced to get out of the cab and walk.

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