The new biopic Elvis comes out this weekend. That's been making us think a lot about Elvis, whose real life (and death) was very weird and included stuff you'll never see. We've also been looking at plenty of other artists from the era—The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, The Beach Boys. And of course there are hidden sides to some famous events from music history like Woodstock, the day the music died, or the time a storm smashed a singer's spine.
Here's a look back at the facts we learned this week. The links all lead to full articles with much more info, so click every one that interests you, or we will force you to listen to Pat Boone.
"Colonel" Tom Parker was in the U.S. illegally, so he feared the country wouldn't let him back in if he and Elvis ever traveled abroad.
The initial funding for the research into the tech (which on to win a Nobel prize), came because record label EMI was so flush with Beatles money.
He opened for the band in 1981, but the audience booed him offstage, yelling slurs and throwing garbage at him.
That's because Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed from the neck down and found he was only able to sing while flat on his back, with gravity helping him exhale.
They took over his home, he hosted nude dinners with them, and he let the family grab most of his money.
A concert promoter held Vickie Jones against her will and booked shows, falsely claiming she was Aretha Franklin. When the truth came out, Jones went on touring, now under her own name.
He was supposed to travel by bus, but he ran out of clean clothes, so he chartered a flight to quicken things up.
An artist calling herself Cynthia Plaster Caster took such casts of various other famous personalities too.
He famously did some karate moves during concerts, but when a 2002 documentary planned to include unseen footage of him training, his estate quashed the idea.
The roads were so packed, some musicians couldn’t get close and needed the military to take them via helicopter from a nearby base.
Yeah, that title isn't held by The Beatles or Elvis or godfather of rock Justin Bieber. Pat Boone charted continuously for 220 weeks, a record still unbroken.
So the character instead sings Velvet Underground songs ... or, rather, songs that sound like Velvet Underground songs, because they didn't have the rights to Velvet Underground music either.
They bought the business in 2006 for nearly a billion dollars.
That included his own wife Pricilla, after she gave birth to their child.