A sultry voice, heartwarming lyrics, and enigmatic stage presence are some of the reasons musicians gain the respect and adoration of millions of fans. It's hard not to be enamored by talented musicians because their music can communicate a lot of varying emotions to people.
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00:00Some musicians just have a freakish amount of talent.
00:04Most of us learn at a young age that we are not those people.
00:07For those who do have that talent to go on to be the singer-songwriters, there's something
00:11almost magical about listening to them perform.
00:14But it's easy to forget that behind all of the music is a very ordinary person, and sometimes
00:19that ordinary person is a terrible human being.
00:23Johnny Cash's women troubles
00:25There's a lot of dark stuff in Johnny Cash's life, but let's talk about just how horrible
00:29he was to women.
00:30Vivian Cash's book, I Walked the Line, My Life with Johnny, was a heartbreaking tell-all,
00:35detailing how she continued loving her husband, even through the drugs and the affair with
00:39his more famous second partner, June Carter Cash.
00:42It was Vivian who gave him four daughters, raised them, and who stuck with him through
00:47the worst, but June gets all the credit.
00:49Behind closed doors, June Carter didn't actually have it any easier, in spite of the storybook
00:54romance performed for the public eye.
00:56According to biographer Robert Hilburn, Cash had cheated on her when she was pregnant with
01:00her son, John Carter.
01:02They were more than a few women, but the one that had to hurt the most was June's own sister,
01:06Anita.
01:07John Carter has also gone on record talking about his parents' less-than-perfect marriage,
01:12and has said his mother's drug addictions and descent into paranoia came from a near-constant
01:17fear he was cheating yet again.
01:19That fear spread to their son, who grew up well aware his family could fall apart at
01:23any time because his father couldn't stay faithful.
01:26Elvis' underage flings
01:28Elvis was only 21 when he became ridiculously famous with the success of Heartbreak Hotel,
01:34and after that, all bets were off when it came to how far he would go.
01:37Along with the fame and fortune came the admiration of countless women, but according to biographer
01:42Joel Williamson, there was a particular type of woman Elvis liked — the really, really
01:48young ones.
01:49When the newly-made megastar went on those early tours, he took along a group of 14-year-old
01:54girls, and Williamson says he was a huge fan of tickling and pillow fights.
01:59Future wife Priscilla was 14 when they met, and just what went on behind closed doors
02:04is debated.
02:06What's not debated is that he lost interest in her after Lisa Marie was born, and went
02:10on to court another 14-year-old.
02:12There was the potential for violence in Elvis, too.
02:15Years later, he was engaged to 21-year-old Ginger Alden, who claimed he once pulled out
02:20a gun and put a bullet in the headboard of the bed she was sleeping in.
02:23He called it an attention-getter.
02:25Johnny Paycheck's attempted murder
02:28Johnny Paycheck was one of the grand old opry's most respected members, and was known as something
02:33of a country music outlaw, too, as his entire career was colored by drug and alcohol use.
02:39His difficulty staying out of trouble started way before he was a star, though, and when
02:43When he was still a teenager, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, punched a superior officer,
02:48and spent a few years in prison.
02:49The record deal came after that, and so did the check forgery and the attempted murder.
02:54Johnny Paycheck, one of the outlaws of country music, is now singing the blues behind bars.
02:59Paycheck was on his way home for the holidays in December 1985, when he stopped off at a
03:04Hillsborough, Ohio bar for a drink.
03:07He was recognized by a local named Larry Wise.
03:10They got to chatting, and… no one's entirely sure what happened next.
03:14Whatever offenses were caused, it ended with Paycheck grazing Wise's head with a bullet,
03:19and he'd later testify the music legend had, quote, "...blowed my hat off."
03:23The case dragged on, and Paycheck was sentenced again.
03:27Chuck Berry's icky past
03:29Chuck Berry was a legend who helped shape rock and roll.
03:33He also once punched Keith Richards in the mouth, and what could Richards have done to
03:36deserve that?
03:37His guitar was laid out in his case, and I went, oh come on Keith, you know, just a touch."
03:44Berry's attitude got him into all kinds of trouble, and he even had a name for those
03:48incidents, his Naughties.
03:50It started when, as a teenager, he did three years in a reform school for stealing cars
03:55and a bit of armed robbery.
03:57Fast forward to 1962, when Berry was 36 years old.
04:01He was tossed in the clink for violating the Mann Act, a law that prohibits taking a woman
04:05across state lines with immoral intentions.
04:08Oh, and she was 14.
04:09"...Berry, you are under arrest for transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose
04:14of prostitution."
04:15"...I did not touch, first of all, I didn't transport anyone, I didn't solicit anything."
04:19That's not all.
04:20In December 1989, Berry was accused of videotaping women in the not-so-private privacy of the
04:26bathroom of one of Berry's restaurants.
04:28The following June, his property was raided, with law enforcement finding weapons, pot,
04:33and the videotapes in question, placing him at the center of a class-action lawsuit.
04:38Berry's camp eventually settled, but that seriously tarnished his legacy.
04:42Brian Jones, anti-establishment and abusive
04:45Brian Jones passed away when he was 27, not long after the Rolling Stones had made the
04:50decision to move on without him.
04:52It wasn't a surprising choice — Jones made Keith Richards look like the one you'd choose
04:56to bring home to meet your parents.
04:58There were, of course, the drugs and the pills, but his troubles started long before that.
05:03How long?
05:04He was kicked out of his grammar school for inciting rebellion, and it sort of spiraled
05:08from there.
05:09In public, he got in the face of anyone who didn't understand their music, and behind
05:13closed doors he had a violent streak a mile wide.
05:16Anita Pallenberg was one of the original muses for the Stones, and she'd eventually go on
05:20to have a long-term relationship with Richards.
05:23But she started out with Jones, and Rolling Stone magazine says it was an abusive relationship
05:28that ended when he hit her so hard he broke his hand on her face.
05:32It ended up very badly, because by then Brian had become very abusive and very kind of envious,
05:40and Keith couldn't bear the way Brian treated me."
05:43Sympathy for the devil, indeed.
05:46Steven Tyler's child girlfriend
05:48There are two sides to every story, and really, both sides to this one are uncomfortable.
05:53When Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler wrote his 2011 memoir, Does the Noise in My Head
05:58Bother You?, he talked a bit about early girlfriend Julia Holcomb.
06:02Tyler wrote he had nicknamed her Little Bo Peep, said they liked to get it on in public,
06:06and left out a lot of other details.
06:08Holcomb wanted to clear the air about what she says really happened, so she took to LifeSite
06:13to tell her side of the story.
06:15According to her, she was a 16-year-old from a broken family when she met Tyler and kicked
06:19off a relationship with him that really started when her troubled mother signed documents
06:23making Tyler her legal guardian.
06:25Holcomb says she was already pregnant by the time he asked her to marry him, and plans
06:29for a family started to fall apart when his grandmother refused to pass on her ring.
06:33Five months into the pregnancy, Holcomb was trapped in a house fire and sent to the hospital,
06:38where she says Tyler convinced her to have an abortion.
06:40Holcomb left him and returned to her parents.
06:43Tyler returned to the rock star life, but has since spoken openly about regretting the
06:47decisions he's made in the past.
06:49Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism
06:51Even people completely unfamiliar with classical music know the work of Wagner.
07:04Wagner died in 1883, decades before the rise of Hitler and his Nazis.
07:08That means he wasn't around to see his music heralded as the soundtrack of the rise of
07:12anti-Semitism, but he probably wouldn't have hated the association.
07:16Wagner wrote a ton of jaw-dropping hate, including the idea Jews could only mimic art
07:22they'd seen and heard.
07:23When he struggled as an up-and-coming composer, he even blamed Jewish critics for keeping
07:27him from success.
07:29Frank Sinatra's destructive temper
07:31Frank Sinatra was iconic onstage, but there was a lot of shady stuff that happened offstage.
07:37According to The Telegraph, his temper was so bad that one of his wives once described
07:41him as a sort of Jekyll and Hyde character, and there's a whole list of physical altercations
07:46he was involved in.
07:47First, the ones where someone got seriously hurt.
07:50According to legends about the man who did things his way, he punched a reporter in 1948,
07:55but eventually settled the assault and battery charges filed against him.
07:59In an unrelated incident, he threw a phone at a random businessman who was staying at
08:03the Beverly Hills Hotel and cracked the man's skull.
08:06Keeping with the theme of throwing things, he nearly killed then-wife Ava Gardner by
08:10throwing a champagne bottle at her so hard it cracked the bathroom sink.
08:15Sinatra destroyed an insane amount of stuff, too, usually in fits of rage.
08:19Further legends say that he took a knife to a friend's Norman Rockwell painting, threw
08:23a malfunctioning TV out of a window at the Sands Hotel, and smashed a car radio when
08:28the door's light-my-fire came on.
08:30So he must have really loved it when his daughter Nancy covered the song on her 1969 album.
08:36Not a gentleman, to say the least.