MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Joe Walsh sneaked hidden messages via Morse Code into a couple of his songs.

Joe Walsh is certainly one of the more interesting figures in rock ‘n’ roll.

In fact, he’s often referred to as the Clown Prince Of Rock.

One of his lesser known interests, though, is amateur radio. Walsh is involved with fostering amateur radio enthusiasm in schools, and helps out with the American Radio Relay League with charity auctions and such.

On two of his albums, Walsh actually used Morse code (a staple of the amateur radio set) to put hidden messages into two songs.

The first time came on his 1972 album, Barnstorm.

It was on the song “Register and Vote,” and that’s what the message was.

In 1980, Walsh had a joke campaign for the U.S. President (even though he was not yet 35 years of age) where one of his promises was that he’d make “Life’s Been Good to Me” the national anthem.

He continued the joke in 1992 (this time for the Vice-Presidency) and included a new song on his 1992 album Songs for a Dying Planet…

titled “Register and Vote For Me.”

Once again, he added a hidden message through Morse code – the same “Register and vote for me.”

The legend is..

STATUS: True

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

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Elton John wrote a song for a sports team that was gone before the song was even released.

In 1974, the World Team Tennis league was formed.

Team Tennis was played on a four colored tennis court with teams comprising of at least 2 men and 2 women.

The franchise Philadelphia Freedoms had Billie Jean King on their inaugural squad.

King’s close friend, Elton John, wrote the theme song for the team.

The song, “Philadelphia Freedom,” was released the next year as a single (not as a track on John’s 1975 album, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. That would be foolish!)

There was just one little snag.

By the time the song had come out, the team was finished!

You see, after the first season of World Team Tennis, the Philadelphia Freedom merged into the Boston Lobsters!

The song was a big hit, though! It hit #1 on the charts!

Almost thirty years later, the Philadelphia Freedom returned to World Team Tennis!

The current team’s most famous player is James Blake, but a number of other famous players have served on the team, including Venus Williams, Jimmy Connors and Andre Agassi (seen here with a teammate)…

The legend is..

STATUS: True

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

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MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Salman Rushdie secretly lived in Bono’s guest house in Ireland for four years.

Salman Rushdie first came to international attention in 1981 with his Booker Prize winning novel, Midnight’s Children.

However, it was his fourth novel, released in 1988, The Satanic Verses, that really made Rushdie a household name.

This time around, though, it wasn’t for his literary skills, but rather for the fact The Satanic Verses was deemed highly offensive to believers of Islam. So offensive that there was a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. Rushdie went underground for many years.

In 1991, a friend of his took him to a concert U2 was giving to promote the album Achtung Baby.

Rushdie met with Bono, lead singer of the band and the two talked for awhile.

Two years later, when the band was on tour promoting their latest album, Zooropa…

the band performed at Wembley Stadium in England and asked Rushdie to come out on stage with them in a show of solidarity.

Amusingly enough, they brought him out when Bono was dressed as his devil character “MacPhisto.”

In any event, a few years later, an Irish newspaper “broke” a story that Rushdie had been secretly living in Bono’s guest house for four years during the 1990s. Was it true?

U2 and Rushdie denied the story, U2 a little more vehemently than Rushdie, as in their case, you could understand why such a story would not be good for them, security-wise.

Here’s the Edge on the issue…

It’s not really accurate. In fact we’re a bit pissed off about it because it implies that Salman was staying for long periods of time in Bono’s house, which wasn’t the case. He did stay for the weekend on maybe two occasions. But it wasn’t like he was living with Bono for months on end, which was sort of what the story claimed.

He’s been on stage with us. We don’t have a problem with standing beside him. But the focus of that story seemed to be on Bono’s house, which we could have done without, from a security point of view.

Since they both deny it and their responses seem reasonable enough, I’m willing to buy their take on the story and give this one a…

STATUS: False

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

TV URBAN LEGEND: MTV canceled the TV series Fear because a contestant was killed during filming of an episode.

In 2000, MTV debuted a new “reality” series called Fear, where six young adults would be taken to various “haunted” places at night and forced to perform “dares.” If they perform all the dares given to them, they each receive a sum of money (the first episode it was $3,000 but by the time it was picked up for a series, it was $5,000).

The dares often involved some pretty scary stuff, especially for the era, which was pre-Fear Factor and shows of that ilk.

For instance, in an episode set in a penitentiary, a “dare” was to go into this dark room where many prisoners were raped and murdered and stay there in radio silence for 15 minutes.

Naturally, some folks had a hard time with this situation…

The show, visually, was very well put together (look at this scene from a Season 1 episode…

)

and it soon became a hit for MTV. Two seasons were produced. However, six episodes into the second season the show was canceled, even though it was MTV’s second highest-rated program at the time.

Rumors started up right away that it had been canceled because a contestant had died in one of the episodes (even dumber rumors involved a cast member being possessed by a spirit). What is the truth?

The truth of the matter was that the show was not making enough money for MTV to continue it.

Yes, it very well could have been the second highest-rated show on MTV at the time, but that was not saying much, as most of MTV’s programs at the time were roughly in the same vicinity of each other (this was pre-Osbournes, pre-Punk’d, pre-Laguna Beach), so if you’re getting a 1.7 rating when everything else is 1.5, then that’s not saying a lot. If you check out the Top 15 Cable Ratings for the time, once you get past the Top 2 shows (which were wrestling programs at a time when wrestling was doing extremely well on television), #3 and #15 are separated by less than 600,000 viewers!! And only one MTV program was making the Top 15 at the time Fear was on, Real World, which was barely cracking a 2.0 rating. So if it WERE true that Fear was MTV’s second-highest rated show (and I do believe that), it was not doing so well that it was even cracking Cable’s Top 15.

Meanwhile, the show’s costs were high for the time. It was a bit of the trouble with being at the forefront of this genre – it was expensive because no one else was doing shows like this. At the same time, Jackass was getting good ratings for MTV (by 2001, Jackass was cracking 2.0) with extremely LOW production costs.

So I believe MTV’s explanation at the time that Fear was canceled because of the high costs not being outweighed by the ratings, not because of any contestant dying. Plus, you know, no contestant from the show died, so there’s also that.

The legend is…

STATUS: False

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

TV URBAN LEGEND: Were Dr. McCoy’s medical instruments on Star Trek really just fancy salt shakers?

Predicting what products and clothes will look like in the future is always an ardurous task, as all we ever have to really go on is our own personal information in the present, and who knows how predictive that is? Like our recent legend about the 1988 ad predicting the future of VCRs in the year 2012. That did not go so well. Heck, if you were to ask almost anyone in 2003 what a typical cell phone would look like ten years later, hardly anyone would guess that they’d actually be bigger than the typical 2003 cell phone! This was the day-to-day challenge that presented itself to Irving A. Feinberg, the property master on the original Star Trek television series.

Read on to learn how Feinberg’s attempts to come up with what salt shakers would look like three hundred years in the future instead resulted in Dr. Leonard McCoy’s surgical tools on the TV series!

The first episode of Star Trek to actually air (but not the first filmed) was “The Man Trap,” which dealt with an alien shapeshifter who was obsessed with salt (it actually drains the salt out of people, killing them in the process). In one scene, the alien (who has impersonated a crew member and has made its way on to the Enterprise) sees Yeoman Janice Rand taking a food tray to a crew member. The alien is supposed to act creepy and obsessed when it sees the salt shaker on the tray. So, obviously, Gene Roddenberry needed the prop master Feinberg to come up with what kind of salt shaker that the Enterprise would use. Years later, in The Making of Star Trek, Roddenberry recalled the strange turn of events that happened next:

[Feinberg] went out and bought a selection of very exotic-looking salt shakers. It was not until after he brought them in and showed them to me that I realized they were so beautifully shaped and futuristic that the audience would never recognize them as salt shakers. I would either have to use 20th Century salt shakers or I would have to have a character say ‘See, this is a salt shaker.’ So I told Irving to go down to the studio commissary and bring me several of their salt shakers, and as he turned to go, I said ‘However, those eight devices you have there will become Dr. McCoy’s operating instruments.’ For two years now, the majority of McCoy’s instruments in Sick Bay have been a selection of exotic salt shakers, and we know they work, because we’ve seen them work. Not only has he saved many a life with them but it’s helped keep our prop budget costs low

Roddenberry is slightly off in his recollection, in the sense that there were nine such devices, not eight and Feinberg only actually bought two shakers (in the Danish Eames style). He then just used the two original salt shakers (one had a base painted green and one had a base painted reddish-orange) as the inspiration for the other six devices, which the prop department just made themselves.

For the first two seasons, every time that Dr. McCoy had to perform surgeries, these devices would be used. Some of the devices would also occasionally be used by the engineering staff. Essentially, any time someone needed a little device to act like they were doing something (whether it be performing surgery or trying to bypass a computer), they could just grab one of these little cone pieces and use them.

There is an especially good shot of the pieces in the episode “Mirror, Mirror.”

They’re also in this publicity shot…

By the way, here is what they ended up going with for the salt shakers in “The Man Trap”…

Thanks to Greg Schnitzer, Co-Executive Producer of Star Trek Phase II, for the excellent research done on this topic.

The legend is…

STATUS: True (although, as noted, only two of the nine devices were actually salt shakers)

Here is a link to a wonderful Schnitzer piece with even more images of the “shakers” in action!

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

TV URBAN LEGEND: Harrison Page was nominated for a Best Lead Actor Emmy Award for…Quantum Leap??!

If you look at the opening credits for Quantum Leap, the science fiction series that was about (heck, let me just give you their patented description of the series that appeared before every episode):

Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished…He woke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap…will be the leap home.

you would see the following actors credited…

And Bakula and Stockwell were both nominated for Emmy Awards (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively) for four of the five seasons Quantum Leap aired.

However, in 1992, Bakula was nominated for Best Actor for Quantum Leap along with…Harrison Page?!?

Yep, Harrison Page was nominated for a Best Lead Actor Emmy Award in 1992.

You see, in 1992, the Emmy Awards decided, for whatever reason, to not have a Best Guest Actor award, so Guest Actors were allowed to enter into the Best Lead Actor category.

Like Harrison Page…

In the fourth season episode, Sam leaps into a teenage girl member of a girl group in 1963, and Page plays the Reverend father of the lead singer of the group, who opposes his daughter’s career in music (Sam, naturally, is there to change that).

As a result of not having any Guest Actor category, the Best Actor category was expanded to seven nominees.

Besides regular actor nominees such as Law & Order’s Michael Moriarty, I’ll Fly Away’s Sam Waterson, Northern Exposure’s Rob Morrow and, naturally, Quantum Leap’s Scott Bakula, there were three nominees who did just one episode of their respective series.

The aforementioned Page, plus

Kirk Douglas in an episode of Tales From the Crypt…

and Christopher Lloyd in an episode of Road to Avonlea…

Lloyd ended up winning the award.

Starting the next year, the awards were back to normal, and now, they specifically note that Best Lead Actor has to be someone who is in a continuing role.

Still, for a year, at least, we got some really odd nominees!!

The legend is…

STATUS: True

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

TV URBAN LEGEND: Kirstie Alley once had a publicist provide mother’s milk for Alley’s pet opossum.

This is one of those stories where the real story is odd enough, but, naturally, people have to make the story sound a lot weirder than it actually was.

The story that gets told frequently is that Kirstie Alley is walking her pet opossum at some event and the the opossum looks sad/gets upset/something or other, so Alley asks a publicist who had recently given birth and had her give the possum some milk from her breast, and the publicist complied.

What ACTUALLY happened?

What actually happened is that Kirstie Alley was at a press event for her 1990 film, Sibling Rivalry, which she did during the break between seasons on Cheers.

Alley is a big animal lover and she routinely saves abandoned critters (her house at the time had over 40 animals living there!). At the time, she had a baby opossum whose mother had rejected it. If a baby opossum is rejected by his/her mother, it’s basically screwed as it has no other way of feeding. The only way you can feed it is by substituting another animal’s mother’s milk in place of the opossum’s mother’s milk.

At a press event, a Castle Rock publicist named Anne Reilly had just gone back to work after giving birth six months earlier. Reilly was still breast feeding and was routinely pumping mother’s milk for her child. So Alley asked if she could lend some of her milk to feed the baby opossum. Reilly agreed, and that was that (Alley sent her a floral arrangement in thanks).

In a People magazine article around the same time (actually, literally the day after the article about the press event came out – October 28 and 29, 1990), Alley was being interviewed while a friend of hers was extracting mother’s milk from Alley’s pet German Shepherd (who had just given birth to puppies) to feed the very same opossum.

So is it weird?

Yeah, it’s weird.

But it’s not THAT weird and it’s certainly not like how it has been presented over the years as some vapid celebrity demanding that a publicist deliver her mother’s milk to calm Alley’s pet down.

The legend is…

STATUS: True

Thanks to Pat H. Broeske for the L.A. Times article with info from Reilly describing what happened and thanks to J.D. Reed for the People magazine article confirming that Alley was nursing a baby opossum at the time.

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

Click here for an archive of the previous four hundred and twenty-one.

Click here to read this week’s legends.

SCULPTURE URBAN LEGEND: Michelangelo had an interesting response to people doubting his creation of the Pietà.

La Pietà is one of Michelangelo’s most famous works.

He was commissioned to do the work in 1497 when he was 22 years old. It was completed and displayed in 1499. The marble statue is distinctive for both its striking beauty AND for the manner in which Michelangelo depicts Mary as being much younger than most artists have drawn her.

Before its final (and current) resting place in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, it was first placed at the nearby Chapel of Santa Petronilla.

Now, according to Giorgio Vasari, when the work was installed, Michelangelo would hear people suggest that the work (which was quite popular right from the get-go) was done by various artists (Vasari specifically mentions Cristoforo “il Gobbo” Solari, but I’ve heard a variety of artists mentioned in the story – it’s likely that different people mentioned different artists).

Like Rodin (who ran into a similar problem with his first major sculpture, as detailed in this legend here), Michelangelo was a fairly unknown artist (he was still a couple of years removed from the work that would make him immensely famous, the statue of David), so it is reasonable enough that people would attribute the work to more famous artist.

Well, Michelangelo was quite irked by this, so he went and did something slightly drastic…

He actually added his name to the piece, carving it into the sash worn by Mary…

Translated, that says “Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made it.”

Michelangelo was embarrassed at his prideful reaction, and vowed to never sign one of his works again (and he did not).

Now, Vasari is an interesting fellow, in the sense that he is the greatest historian we have for Renaissance artists, but he’s also more or less the ONLY notable historian we have for Renaissance artists, so we’re often dependent upon his histories, which tend to be a lot more accurate the closer the events are to his era (I discussed an example of a mix-up by Vasari in this installment of Painting Legends Revealed).

However, Vasari and Michelangelo WERE contemporaries (Michelangelo lived from 1475-1564 and Vasari lived from 1511-1574), so I think we can trust his histories of Michelangelo pretty well. When you add in the fact that the story is extremely reasonable, I think it’s fair to give this one a “True.”

The legend is…

STATUS: True

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