Maybe it’s because in some ways they’re stuck in their adolescence. Or perhaps that musicians need to find creative ways to distract themselves from the long-term boredom that comes with a life on the road or in the studio – but pop stars seem to have a special talent for confusing people.
In honor of April Fool’s Day, here’s a look at 20 memorable pranks, hoaxes, and/or hoaxes involving famous musicians over the last fifty years.
Some of them are harmless, some are bizarre, and some are downright evil, but they’re all a lot more sophisticated than the usual whoopee pillow or joy buzzer gags.
Michael Jackson repeatedly plays pranks on Russell Crowe over the phone
Michael Jackson, the archetypal pop star who never grew up, loved to play pranks, especially ones that involved pouring water on unsuspecting victims. But he also loved prank calls – especially with movie star Russell Crowe for some reason. According to the irascible actor, Jackson stalked him on the phone for years and played pranks on him both at home and on the road.
“I never met him, never shook his hand, but he found out what name I used to stay in hotels, so it didn’t matter where I was,” Crowe said last year the newspaper “The Guardian“He’d call and do things like you do when you’re 10, you know. ‘Is Mr. Wall there? Is Mrs. Wall there? Are any Walls there? Then what’s holding the roof up? Ha ha.'” Although the humor was grade-school level, Jackson’s dogged persistence (and the unexpected choice of his victim) elevated the recurring prank to virtual performance art.
Adele plays a prank on her impersonators
Adele’s powerful voice and playful personality were featured in the TV special “Adele at the BBC” came to light, particularly in the part where the singer wore a fake nose and chin to sneak into an Adele impersonator audition.
After chatting with the unsuspecting contestants backstage, Adele – under the pseudonym “Jenny the Nanny” – took the stage and let out her distinctive voice, prompting tears and laughter from the other singers as they realized their idol had been among them the whole time.
Elton John loves Iggy Pop
In October 1973, during a Stooges performance At a small club in Atlanta, Elton John – then one of the biggest pop stars in the world – decided to demonstrate his love and admiration for the then much-maligned forerunners of punk by storming the stage in a gorilla costume. Unfortunately, Iggy Pop was beside himself with excitement at this point and therefore more than a little startled by the sudden appearance of a gorilla in their midst.
Elton (who is supported by several employees of the Creammagazine) quickly realized his faux pas and revealed his true identity by removing the head of his costume, narrowly avoiding an onstage beating from Iggy and guitarist James Williamson.
Mike Patton “boosts” Axl Rose’s orange juice
Faith No More apparently got up to all sorts of mischief as the opening act on the ill-fated Metallica/Guns N’ Roses tour in 1992, including an incidentin which frontman Mike Patton pooped in a carton of orange juice, carefully resealed the container and placed it in the fridge of Axl Rose’s tour bus.
While there is no documented record of what happened next, it’s fun to imagine Patton’s poop jumping out of the box like Mr. Hankey to cheerfully announce to a horrified Axl, “Do you know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby!”
ROLLING STONE reviews the Masked Marauders
Bootleg albums and supergroups were hot topics in 1969, so Greil Marcus, reviews editor at, parodied them Rolling Stonesboth developments with a satirical review of a new bootleg entitled The Masked Marauderswhich was supposedly recorded by a supergroup produced by Al Kooper that included Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
The record didn’t exist, but demand for it was so great that Warner Bros. actually paid a $15,000 advance to have musicians (Berkeley’s Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band) record an album based on Marcus’ review. The record was released in late 1969 and, despite its sheer awfulness, sold over 100,000 copies. “It was just an attempt to say, ‘This is stupid, let’s make it even stupider,'” Marcus explained recently.
Johnny Cash chickens out
Despite his dark “Man in Black” image, country music legend Johnny Cash was quite the rebel in the early years of his career, especially when he was on amphetamines. Cash and his Tennessee Three bandmates Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins loved flushing lit firecrackers down hotel toilets and throwing televisions out of hotel windows, but during a visit to Omaha, Nebraska,
In the late 1950s, they got even more creative: After purchasing 500 chicks from a local hatchery, the three men returned to their hotel and released a hundred chicks on each of their hotel’s five floors.
Tony Carey escapes
Keyboardist and composer Tony Carey got his big break in 1976 when Ritchie Blackmore heard him playing in a neighboring rehearsal room and asked him to join Rainbow. Unfortunately, Carey’s time in the band was short-lived as Blackmore liked to make him the victim of numerous pranks.
The final straw came in early 1977 when Carey left Rainbow after Blackmore and drummer Cozy Powell tried to break the entrance to Carey’s room in the French chateau where the band was staying Long Live Rock ‘n’ Roll took up, bricked up – and that while Carey was still inside.
Alien Ant Farm and the Spiders from Arse
Several members of Alien Ant Farm, the Southern California alternative metal band that scored a major hit in 2001 with their cover of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal,” had fun playing a criminally disgusting game called “Spider in Waiting” on their tour bus.
When someone left their bunk in the middle of the night to use the bus’s bathroom, another would quietly crawl to the upper bunks, drop their pants, and spread their legs across the dark aisle, standing with one knee on each bunk and their rear end facing the toilet.
When the half-asleep toilet user tried to return to his bed, he would run face first into the spread cheeks of the waiting “spider”. Luckily, no one was playing this game at the time of the horrific AAF bus accident in May 2002 – because the consequences would have been not only tragic but also quite embarrassing.
Joe Walsh’s Chainsaw Massacre
Joe Walsh not only brought additional rock ‘n’ roll energy to the Eagles when he joined the multi-platinum band in late 1975, but he also brought a chainsaw. Taught in the art of hotel room demolition by The Who’s Keith Moon, Walsh used the power tool to enlarge rooms that were too small for him into “grand suites.”
At one point, Walsh also used the chainsaw to cut all the legs of the furniture in Eagles manager Irving Azoff’s (center) hotel room, bringing them to a height that was “more manageable” for the 5-foot-10 manager. Azoff retaliated by having all the furniture in Walsh’s room nailed to the ceiling.
Sabbath Silly Sabbath
In 1973, Black Sabbath holed up in Clearwell Castle in Wales to record material for their album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath to write. The 18th-century building was spooky enough as it was – guitarist Tony Iommi believes he actually encountered a ghost in one of the corridors – but the band quickly added to the spooky atmosphere by playing a series of macabre pranks on each other.
Ozzy Osbourne woke Iommi up in the middle of the night with strange noises coming from an eight-track tape recorder hidden under his bed; Iommi threw a dressed-up tailor’s dummy out of a third-floor window while Geezer Butler and Bill Ward walked back to the castle from a local pub; and Butler, Iommi and Ozzy placed a full-length mirror just inches from Ward’s sleeping face and then pushed him until he woke up in shock at his own distorted reflection.
The pranks continued in a similar fashion until everyone was too scared to stay in the castle overnight. “We scared each other to death,” Iommi later recalled. “We always went home and came back the next day. It was really silly.”
