More Musical Pulp
  • Little Mozart



    Goethe at fourteen-years-old once heard Wolfgang Mozart (aged six) play the harpsichord: “The little man, with powdered wig and sword,” Goethe described him as.

    Luciano Pavarotti could not read music.

    David Bowie has a tattoo of a lizard on his ankle.

    Haydn and Beethoven each nominated Handel as the greatest of composers.

    Whereas Berlioz called Handel a tub of pork and beer.

    “Give me a laundry list and I will set it to music.” Said Rossini

    Gene Simmons speaks in tongues

    The oldest artist ever to top the UK singles chart was Louis Armstrong. He was sixty-six-years old at the time, and his song was “What A Wonderful World.”

    Gene Simmons — of KISS fame — speaks Hungarian.

    “Not a composer. A kleptomaniac.” Stravinsky referred to Benjamin Britten as.

    Rudolph Kreutzer never performed the Kreutzer sonata.

    Verdi himself requested that his own funeral be conducted without music.

    Bono’s real name is Paul David Hewson.

    “He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly, and paces up and down like a madman.” Said a pupil of Chopin.

    Little Saul Hudson

    Slash’s real name is Saul Hudson.

    When Joseph Haydn was seventy-six-years-old, Beethoven acknowledged his teacher by kneeling before him and kissing his hand.

    Gut strings for acoustic Spanish guitars were originally made from the small intestines of slaughtered sheep. The production material only changed to nylon during World War II, when all available gut was used in the production of surgical thread for wounded soldiers.

    Leo Fender, who invented the first mass-produced electric guitar, couldn’t play guitar.

    John Lennon’s first name for the Beatles was the Black Jacks. Then the Quarry Men. Then Johnny and the Moondogs.

    John Lennon was legally blind without his glasses.

    “Every morning the author of Faust and Werther kisses me. In the afternoon I play for him for about two hours.” Said Felix Mendelssohn, aged twelve.

    Pauline Viardot, who sang the first performance of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, may have had an illegitimate child by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev.

    Leonard Cohen is an ordained Rinzai Buddhist monk.

    Leonard Cohen: Buddahist Monk

    Casals practiced Bach’s six suites for solo cello for twelve years before performing one in public.

    Harry Crosby shot himself in the head — after first shooting the young married woman with whom he was having an affair.

    “Maidservant gallantries,” Constanza Mozart accused Wolfgang of.

    On average, Beethoven changed addresses twice a year — and was more than once successfully sued for having scribbled musical notations all over his walls.

    Diamond Dave Brubeck

    Dave Brubeck studied with Darius Milhaud and with Arnold Schoenberg.

    Duke Ellington and Miles Davis are buried in the same Bronx cemetery.

    Berlioz read every Fenimore Cooper novel as quickly as it appeared — and openly admitted that four hours after finishing The Prairie he was still weeping over the death of Natty Bumppo.

    One of Schubert’s last requests, while burning up with the typhoid fever that would kill him less than a week later, was for a copy of the latest Fenimore Cooper.





About The Author

Ray Harvey

I was born and raised in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. I've worked as a short-order cook, construction laborer, crab fisherman, janitor, bartender, pedi-cab driver, copyeditor, and more. I've written and ghostwritten several published books and articles, but no matter where I've gone or what I've done to earn my living, there's always been literature and learning at the core of my life.

5 Responses and Counting...

  • Averil Dean 03.19.2012

    It’s hard to imagine that Gene Simmons is a grown man, dressed like that. A grown man. Is the tongue supposed to be sexy? Scary? Rock-n-roll?

    Here’s a real man:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKjSr1zOTq0

  • I love that song — and I mean that song in particular. It holds more memories for me than I sometimes care to think about.

  • Gene Simmons: a grown-up man with a grown-up tongue. (The better to lick it up, I guess.)

  • That Kiss song + picture of Gene Simmons = One seriously disturbed chick.

  • One Seriously Disturbed Chick

    by Misty Raven

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