Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry – Details, episodes & analysis

On August 6, 1989, a chartered 757 nicknamed “The Magic Bus” took off bound for the USSR…on board were Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, The Scorpions, Skid Row, Ozzy Osbourne, Cinderella, and a few others… It was the dying days of the soviet union…but other than the communist hardliners, few people were sad about that…Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, had ushered in the era of glasnost and perestroika…reforms were being enacted and few freedoms were creeping into soviet society… This trip was part of that…a plane full of western rockers was headed to play a two-day festival in Moscow with attendance expected to top 200,000 people…it was the “Moscow Music Peace Festival”… it was hoped that the event would promote greater understanding between the west and the east during this time of great change at the end of the cold war… It was also set to raise money in conjunction with the “Make a Difference Foundation,” an organization dedicated to helping local Russian people who were addicted to drugs and alcohol…a lot of the money would go to messaging and rehab treatments… Wait—what?... Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne, and all these other acts were part of a highly sensitive, properly diplomatic, international anti-drugs-and-alcohol project inside the soviet union?... Oh, yes…and on the plane, Ozzy was drunk the whole time…his guitarist, Zakk Wylde, was tripping on LSD…you had to be careful where you stepped because there were syringes on the floor…at the back of the cabin, people rotated in and out of informal jam sessions fueled by booze and drugs… Now you’re probably wondering who came up with this idea and how it ever actually happened?...well, that’s a bit complicated…it involved the CIA, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, and 640 tons of marijuana smuggled into North Carolina—and the teenage mutant ninja turtles…and at the centre of all of it was a man named Doc McGhee—who just happened to be the manager of most of the bands on the plane… This is episode 22 of “Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry”…it’s how a drug-smuggling band manager helped end the Cold War…have I got a story for you. Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1960, after months of testimony and investigation, it was made illegal for anyone to bribe a radio station or any of its employees to play a record…payola was forbidden under punishment of jail time and a fine of up to $10,000… This, it was hoped, would keep the marketplace even and fair and no one—not a label, an artist, or anyone promoting that artist—would be able to jump the queue to get a record played on the radio…only songs with true merit would make it to the public…no more pay-for-play!... Yeah, nice try… If one thing was learned from the great American payola scandal, it was that radio airplay was essential to making money from a record…and if promoters could no longer walk into a radio station with a bag of cash, a case of booze, some drugs, a couple of hookers, or the promise of gifts (such as expensive watches), then they needed to get creative… There had to be less obvious ways of tipping the scales in their favour…and there were… After those initial hearings and the laws passed in their wake, payola never went away…instead, it went underground, toughened up, and became even more sleazy… As the music industry got bigger and became more corporatized through the 1960s and 70s, the competition got more intense…the amount of money to be made from music involved got exponentially larger…and it got a lot rougher. Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Manson family murders are among the most famous crimes in American history…their actions have been documented over and over and over…this program will not be a recitation of what happened…instead, we’re going to look specifically at how music figures into this story, before, during, and after these horrific events…music had a much bigger part in the murders than most people realize… This is a story that involves The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Neil Young, The Mamas and Papas, a couple of famous record producers, a large discography of Manson-made records, and a long list of artists who have at least some relationship to Manson and his people… I'm Alan Cross and this is episode 14 of “Uncharted: Music and Mayhem in the Music Industry” This time, it’s the musical nightmare of Charles Manson Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since homo sapiens gained consciousness and self-awareness, we’ve been asking some big questions…what does it all mean?... What’s the purpose of existence?... Is there something more to life and the universe than what I can see?... This has led us down all kinds of spiritual journeys and rabbit holes…for billions, this means turning to religion…but what if traditional spirituality and beliefs don’t cut it?...if you’re not careful, you might find yourself in a cult… Maybe you’re seduced by a charismatic leader who claims to have all the answers when it comes to religion, philosophy, spirituality, and maybe even politics…it's non-mainstream stuff, which is part of the appeal…maybe this leader and his followers really do have all the answers to everything you’ve been searching for… Here’s where things get weird…you’re introduced to unorthodox teachings, strange rituals, odd practices, and wild belief systems…maybe you’re given a task or caught up in the group’s goals and objectives… Then we get into mind control, brainwashing, shaming, suppression of individual identities, totalitarian enforcement of behaviour, separation from family and friends, and even terrorism, violence, and death… There are thousands of groups around the world…many are generally benign hare Krishnas, for example…others are sketchy and warrant skepticism…I’d put the wacky Raelians in that group…and a few are downright dangerous…think the Heaven’s Gate UFO group and suicide cult in San Diego… Now: what happens when you mix cults with music?...a lot of very, very bad things…I'm Alan Cross and this is Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, episode 13…have i got some stories for you…this is what can happen when music and cults intersect… Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When something bad happens, we want to know why…the weirder and badder the event, the more we need to know… It can’t possibly be random…someone needs to be responsible and held accountable…someone needs to be blamed…and there had better not be any loose ends… Certain segments of the population have always been suspicious of the official story…forget the simplest of most logical explanation…these awful events or phenomenon’s are the work of some kind of secret cabal or organization pulling the strings of life on earth…it was a conspiracy… For example, the most famous murder of modern times was the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963…more than sixty years later, it seems like no one believes that lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman… To be fair, they might be right…there’s been a lot of investigation into the JFK case over the decades…i’m one of those nuts who reads, watches, and listens to everything involved with the assassination…and I gotta tell you that i’m convinced this was the result of a loose need-to-know operation involving the CIA, the deep stage, Cuban exiles, and American mobsters… There’s also something called “Occam’s razor” which dates back to the 14th century…this Monk—William of Occam—was annoyed at how people blamed supernatural forces when even the simplest thing went wrong…his answer to that was “look, the simplest and most obvious explanation is usually the correct one”… But try that approach with people who believe the earth is flat and that we never went to the moon…Covid-19 was engineered by the media…and the Illuminati live beneath the Denver airport… The world of conspiracy theories is a bottomless pit of weirdness…and when it comes to music, one of the deepest and strangest of these theories has to do with what happened above a greenhouse in Seattle on April 5, 1994… Boy, have I got stories—multiple stories, in fact—about this one…in fact, it might be the most compressive study you’ve ever heard on the subject…this is uncharted: music and mayhem in the music industry, episode 12: it’s the ever-popular Kurt-Cobain-was-murdered theory… Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the summer of 2006, a young Calgary woman was on top of the world. She had a supportive family, amazing friends and a great job. But life as she knew it came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the night on August 6, 2006. In this episode, Global News senior crime reporter Nancy Hixt shares details of a violent attack- a story that’s every woman’s worst fear. www.calgarycrimestoppers.org - reference case # 06274598 https://newsroom.calgary.ca/sexual-assault-case-from-2006-has-new-lead/ Contact: Instagram: @nancy.hixt Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NancyHixtCrimeBeat/ Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By 1965, change was in the air…a new generation of young people were coming of age and they did not want what their parents did…theirs was the counter-culture, a rebellion and repudiation of the status quo…and for a while it was all peace and love—or at least it pretended to… Yes, we had the “summer of love” in 1967…the Beatles sang “all you need is love”…John Lennon asked everyone to “give peace a chance”…and there were demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and the military-industrial complex… Hippies, pacifists, and proponents of civil rights and women’s rights were sure they could make a difference…and some of them definitely did… But there was a dark side to the 60s…parts of society weren’t keen on granting certain parts of the population equal rights…some groups believed that society needed to be reformed by any means necessary, including the use of violence and domestic terrorism… Martin Luther King Jr. Was assassinated…Bobby Kennedy was assassinated…there was violence at political conventions… But many people kept the faith…and the thing that faith ran on was music…music was at the centre of all this promise of cultural change, social change, justice, civil rights, progress, and more.. In August 1969, somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 people converged on Woodstock, a festival billed as three days of peace and music… A noble idea, this concept that music could bring everything together to make the world a better place…the legend of Woodstock continues today, decades later… Some loved what Woodstock symbolized… “we need more of that,” they thought…so they came up with a plan to end the year and the 1960s with a similar event in California…it would be the culmination of the good embodied by the counter-culture and send the world into the 1970s… It did not turn out that way…instead, the stones got something that has gone down in history as an event that symbolized the dark side of the decade…this is the truth about Altamont…and wow, do I have a story for you… Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Metal is one of the most extreme forms of music ever invented…once you’re inside this tent, you quickly realize that the deeper you go, the more intense the music becomes as people compete to see who can make the heaviest music in the universe… There are genres with names like power metal, speed metal, thrash, pirate metal, gothic metal, industrial metal, and metal core… Soon you encounter death metal, an American invention of the mid-80s that features distorted guitars tuned down low and drums that sound like machine guns…vocalists growl, time signatures abruptly change, and if you can make out the lyrics, you’ll hear themes of religion, philosophy, sci-fi and more… There are offshoots, too, each with their own spin on things…there’s blackened death- doom…deathgrind…goregrind…pornogrind…even “melodic back death war metal… Death metal has a Scandinavian cousin…black metal…it’s also played fast and often doesn’t follow conventional song structure…vocalists shriek…recordings may be lo-fi…members tend to adopt pseudonyms and used make-up onstage… And again, if you can make out the lyrics, you’ll hear tales of paganism, Satanist praise, references to the occult, and anti-Christian rage…and unlike other metal genres, followers of black metal have been known to engage in acts of violence, most infamously the burning of churches… At the heart of the black metal legend is a true tale of suicide, murder and possibly even cannibalism…what you’re about to hear may be impossible to believe, but it happened… I’m Alan Cross and man, have I got a story for you… this is uncharted: crime and mayhem in the music industry…I call this episode black metal/death metal… Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s hard to disappear…with all the surveillance tools out there and digital smog we leave behind, it’s almost impossible to vanish without a trace…yet it happens… We still haven’t found Amelia Earhart who has been missing since 1937 when she tried to fly around the world…we don’t know what became of DB Cooper, the hijacker who in 1971 bailed out of a plane somewhere in the pacific northwest with $200,000 in ransom money…no one has ever found teamster president jimmy Hoffa after that last lunch in 1975… And you’ve probably heard about maddy McCann the English child who is still missing since 2007 after disappearing from the bedroom of an apartment at a resort in Portugal… Those are the most notorious cases….but have you heard these stories? Edward and Stephanie Andrews left a cocktail party in may 1970…they were last seen turning the wrong way on a one-way street and were never heard from again…the case is still open… Then we have the case of Peter Winston, a chess prodigy who went missing after bombing out of a tournament in 1977…his body has never been found… Anyone remember the story of Bison Dele?...he was a retired NBA player who went sailing in the South Pacific and was never seen again…cops think his brother, who was on the boat with him, killed everyone on board, dumped the bodies at sea and then committed suicide…but we’ll never know… There are mysterious disappearances throughout the history of music, too…one of the most baffling is the fate of Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers…one day he was at a hotel in London getting ready for a trip to North America…the next—who knows?...he was just—gone…vanished without a trace… So many questions…what happened?...what do we know?...with all the CCTV coverage in the UK, is there no record of his movements?...what was done to find him?...where’s the body?...or could he still be alive?...did he just figure out how to disappear completely…have I got a story for you… This is the mysterious disappearance of Richey Edwards from “uncharted: crime and mayhem in the music industry”… Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How many times have you or heard someone say “i’m obsessed with [whatever]”…you’re trying to say that there’s something of which you can’t get enough…it could be anything from a flavour of ice cream to a reality TV show…it’s usually just hyperbole and exaggeration… But if we get clinical, obsession can be a form of mental illness…we open up the psychology textbooks, we learn that a true obsession is a recurring thought about something or someone…it’s always on a person’s mind, maybe even 24/7…we’re talking thoughts, dreams, urges, and fantasies… These obsessions, this rabid focus, may be intrusive, unwelcome, all-consuming, and dangerous…a person may end up surrendering themselves to these thoughts, driven to focus on the object of the obsession full-time… Take the case of John Hinckley, jr…he was from a wealthy Texas family who owned an oil company…but john didn’t fit in…he tried going to university but eventually dropped out…he moved to California with dreams of being a songwriter…that didn’t work…when he returned to Texas, he had to confess that the girlfriend he said he had out west didn’t exist… Hinckley disappeared into himself with severe emotional issues…antidepressants and tranquilizers were prescribed…but he also started buying guns and target shooting…and he spent a lot of time watching the 1976 Martin Scorsese film, “Taxi Driver”…if you know the film, you’ll know that Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a disturbed loner who plots to kill a presidential candidate…he runs across a 12-year-old prostitute named Iris steesmas, played by Jody Foster… Hinckley became obsessed with Foster…when she enrolled at Yale, Hinckley moved to Connecticut to stalk her…he left her poems and love letters, and called whenever he could find her number…Hinckley became determined to attract her attention…how?...he thought about hijacking a plane…maybe he’d just show up one day and shoot himself in front of her… Finally, he determined the best way was to assassinate a president, just like Travis Bickle…he trailed Jimmy Carter for a while but was arrested…more psychiatric treatment followed…and then Ronald Reagan was elected… On March 30, 1981, Hinckley pulled out a 22-calibre pistol and fired it six times as Reagan left the Hilton Hotel in Washington after addressing a conference…Reagan survived, but it was touch-and-go…others were hurt, too… After a trial, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity….he was finally released from custody in 2022… The world of music has many obsessives, although few as extreme as Hinckley…there is one standout, though: a young loner in Florida who, like Hinckley, was determined to attract the attention of his love…in the process, he turned into a murderous hater… I’m Alan Cross, and have I got a story for you…this is uncharted: crime and mayhem in the music industry episode 8…the tale of the Bjork acid bomber… Show contact info: X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross Website: curiouscast.ca Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices