This is the twentieth in a series of examinations of music legends and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the previous nineteen.

Let’s begin!

MUSIC LEGEND: Delbert McClinton taught John Lennon how to play the harmonica.

STATUS: False

Reader Travis wrote in to ask:

One I hear a lot around here (in Texas) is that musician Delbert McClinton taught John Lennon how to play the harmonica. True or not.

While it’s not true, Travis, it’s amazing how much truth there IS to the story.

Delbert McClinton has had a remarkable career in the music industry, playing on hits in the 1960s and later having hit singles in the 1990s!

McClinton got his first big break in the business, though, when he played harmonica on a song by a fellow Texan, Bruce Channel.

The song was called “Hey Baby,” and it was a smash hit in the Spring of 1962.

McClinton’s harmonica performance on the song was remarkable, and really gave the song its unique flavor (it’s a really great song that you really ought to get if you’ve never heard it before).

In any event, the song was so popular that Channel and McClinton went on tour in England in the Summer of 1962, and on that tour, their supporting band was a young quartet known as the Beatles!

Here is John Lennon, McClinton and Channel…

So, remarkably enough, McClinton actually DID know Lennon before he was famous, and Lennon DID ask for McClinton’s advice on playing the harmonica.

However, Lennon was already an experienced harmonica player by this time (his favorite harmonica was one he had stolen from a store in Hamburg in 1960). This was not to say he was a GOOD harmonica player, but he definitely was an experienced harmonica player.

So, no, McClinton did not teach Lennon how to play the harmonica.

What’s interesting, though, is that while that part is false, for years people presumed that, at the very least, McClinton’s advice played a role in the recording of the Beatles’ first hit single, “Love Me Do,” which, like “Hey Baby,” is driven by the harmonica.

However, the first use of harmonica on “Love Me Do” happened in the initial recording session of “Love Me Do,” which was a week or two before Lennon and McClinton ever met.

This does not, of course, mean that McClinton’s harmonica play did not inspire Lennon’s performance on “Love Me Do,” as it almost certainly DID (Lennon had basically said as much in interviews), as by the time they recorded “Love Me Do,” “Hey Baby” had not only been a hit for a few months, but the Beatles actually had the song prepared to record as a cover for a possible album recording. So Lennon was very familiar with McClinton’s style, it’s just that some tellings of the story say that while McClinton did not teach him how to play the harmonica, he did personally teach Lennon some tricks which Lennon used on “Love Me Do,” which seems not particularly likely (but not impossible, as the Beatles DID re-record “Love Me Do” later in 1962, without drummer Pete Best).

I suppose he could have had some more direct influence on “Please Please Me,” which was recorded later in the year and which also had harmonica on it, but not to the same extent as “Love Me Do.”

Anyhow, Delbert McClinton still has a pretty awesome place in music industry - he gave John Lennon tips before Lennon became a famous star! That’s pretty darn cool. Not to mention “Hey Baby” was one of the songs on the famous “Lennon Jukebox,” the jukebox of about 40 singles that Lennon brought with him on the Beatles 1964 tour.

Thanks to Travis for the suggestion!

MUSIC LEGEND: The original recording of Jimi Hendrix on Happening With Lulu was saved by being hidden on an old tape by a BBC engineer.

STATUS: Basically True

Lulu (born Marie Lawrie) was a young Scottish singer (and I mean young, she’s only 60 now!) who had a hit with the title track of the film, To Sir With Love, where she played a student of Sidney Poitier’s “Sir” character.

In the late 60s, Lulu hosted her own live variety show on the BBC called (among a few different names over the seven plus years it was on the air) “Happening for Lulu,” which was a pretty standard variety show (besides being live, which was certainly a bit of a novelty).

However, Lulu was a pretty darn cool lady, so she tried to get acts that you wouldn’t normally expect to see on a variety show hosted by the lady who sang “To Sir With Love.”

The epitome of that attitude was when she had Jimi Hendrix on the show in early 1969.

Hendrix opened with “Voodoo Child”…

He was then scheduled to play “Hey Joe” and then perform a short duet with Lulu as the credits rolled.

However, Hendrix clearly did not want to do that, so first he performed an extended intro to “Hey Joe” and a few verses…

before abruptly halting the show to proclaim “We’d like to stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to the Cream regardless of what kind of group they might be. I’d like to dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce.”

and they then went into a feedback-fueled version of the Cream song “Sunshine of Your Love”…

By now, Hendrix had not only gone past the time for him and Lulu to do a duet, he was now actually past the allotted time for the program, and the live program was now cutting into the BBC’s 6 O’Clock News!!!

They were cut off and the show ended.

The next day, the basic report was about how “arrogant” Hendrix was and “insulting” to Lulu. She obviously didn’t care, as she had Hendrix over to her flat that night with her and her soon-to-be-husband, Maurice Gibb.

In any event, the legend is that although the rules were at the time that all video tapes were wiped for re-use, an engineer couldn’t help but save Hendrix’s performance and hid it on a tape containing a documentary about trains, which is where it stayed, forgotten until found years later.

That’s BASICALLY true, but it makes the whole thing sound a bit more interesting than it really was.

Yes, an engineer by the name of Bob Pratt did all rock and roll fans a great service when he did precisely that, save the Hendrix performance on to a tape. And while I do not know for a fact that it was on a tape with a documentary about trains, it seems likely, because what Pratt did was actually quite common at the time - it was practically standard for engineers to save on to “junk” tapes various performances that they liked. And yeah, the tapes were “forgotten,” but that’s only because there were a lot of them, and they were all basically stored in the same place, which was on the floor in the engineering room.

One of the problems was back then, you really were not allowed to re-run material more than twice, and that was twice just in a two-year period - you had NO rights beyond that to run aired material. When that changed during the mid-70s, then suddenly all of this saved footage became very valuable, and they were repackaged for various compilations.

And the Hendrix one was aired on the popular rock program, The Old Grey Whistle Test.

So was it a very cool thing that Pratt did?

Certainly.

It just wasn’t as outlandish as some tellings of the story make it out to be, because Pratt’s actions were fairly normal (if very cool) for the day.

MUSIC LEGEND: The Cure put a disclaimer sticker on their singles compilation album, Standing on a Beach, to make sure people did not misinterpret the meaning of one of their songs.

STATUS: True

“Killing an Arab” is an early single by the popular pop band, The Cure.

It appears on their classic early album, Boys Don’t Cry…

The song is pretty much exactly based on Albert Camus’ classic short novel, The Stranger, which is about a man who actually, you know, kills an Arab (naturally, that is not the extent of the novel).

Well, as you might imagine, a song with a title like “Killing an Arab” gained a slightly different group of fans than what the Cure’s Robert Smith (who wrote and sang the song) expected, and Smith quickly regretted the song title.

In 1986, the group released a compilation of their singles to that point. It was called Standing on a Beach.

And on the album cover, the Cure actually added a disclaimer sticker for “Killing an Arab”!!!

Here it is (it is not the best visual quality, I’m afraid)…

Years later, in 2004, when The Cure released a remastered edition of Three Imaginary Boys, along with a whole disc full of versions of singles from that era, “Killing an Arab” was left off of the collection.

It still remains on all editions of Boys Don’t Cry, though.

This must be a really awkward situation for Smith, who’s a pretty sensitive guy, to have his song becoming a favorite of anti-Muslim bigots.

It’s a shame.

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com