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In 1969, Led Zeppelin had a gig in Seattle. The show went well so the band headed back to the Edgewater Inn to unwind. In the 60s and 70s post-gig debauchery was the norm, but this night something unusual happened. A red haired woman entered the room and told the band that she liked being tied down. Without hesitation, the woman stripped naked and someone tied her up. That wasn’t enough stimulation for the group, so one especially randy crew member grabbed a fish (it’s rumoured to be shark) and proceeded to use it as a sex toy. 

The accuracy of this story is up for debate - some say it’s true others call it rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest urban myth – but that’s not the point. Since Elvis Presley shook his hips on camera, Jimi Hendrix lit his guitar on fire and Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin, rock ‘n’ roll’s been the go to place for sex, drugs and debauchery.

There are hundreds of unbelievable stories associated with rock ‘n’ roll excess, like Who drummer Keith Moon driving a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool, but none has been repeated more often than the one about Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat at a show. That antic cost him two weeks of rabies shots and public scorn from animal rights activists. Of course, Osbourne didn’t stop there. He bit off the head of a dove during a meeting with CBS executives and he once put on his wife’s dress, walked over to a monument at The Alamo and took a piss.

No one will deny playing music is fun, but why all the extreme behaviour? “There’s a sense of what it means to act like a rock star,” says Rob Bowman, professor of music at York University. “You have audiences that expect rock stars to act outside the norms of social behaviour and people before they’re rock stars are audiences. Pete Doherty [ex-Libertines singer and now out of control drug addict] was once a kid who wanted to be a rock star and read about the behavior of other rock stars. Once he becomes one he assumes the traditions.”

For most of us, reading about rock stars doing stupid things is exciting, and the excess of the ‘60s and ‘70s is a big part of why rock ‘n’ roll has endured. Imagine how banal pop culture would be if Keith Richards never got busted for cocaine possession in a Toronto hotel, or John Lennon never said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. If none of this happened, not only would rock ‘n’ roll not be considered cool, but our own lives would be boring. “Rock stars live outside of society in a way that most of us can’t because we have a mortgage to pay or kids to take care of,” says Bowman, “but we can get a certain vicarious pleasure out of other people being able to do things that we might want to do.”

As much as we like hearing that Axl Rose allegedly bit a hotel security guard’s leg in Stockholm, sometimes the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle goes too far. Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain are just a few of the many stars who couldn’t handle the excessive partying and the public pressure, and wound up dead. Probably rock ‘n’ roll’s most infamous story of death and destruction involved Sid Vicious, bass player of British punk band the Sex Pistols, and Nancy Spungen, a former stripper and groupie.

Vicious and Spungen met in Britain, and it was love at first sight. The two shared everything, including a nasty heroin addiction that eventually provoked the downfall of the Sex Pistols. In 1978, a few months after the band broke up, Vicious and Spungen spent a drug fuelled night at the Hotel Chelsea in New York. The next morning Vicious woke up next to his bloody, and dead, girlfriend who had a stab wound in a her abdomen. Although he had no recollection of killer her, Vicious eventually confessed to the murder. The incident scarred the troubled bassist beyond repair and a few months later, while out of prison on bail, he took a lethal heroin injection and died.

While some young impressionable rock star wannabees might idealize these legendary stories, Bowman isn’t impressed. “Outrageous behaviour, is that ODing in a hotel room? That doesn’t sound outrageous to me, that just sounds stupid. But, in some ways, that’s the most outrageous because that cost someone their life. So what do you want? To give Janis Joplin credit for that?”

While it might be wrong to romanticize Joplin’s heroin overdose, it’s all part of rock music’s legend. But drugs, death and eccentricities aren’t limited to guys with electric guitars. Beethoven, one of classical music’s most celebrated performers, was notorious for hitting on married women, fighting with friends and family and battling depression. Robert Wagner, another famous composer, was a rabid anti-Semite. Jazz trumpeter Chet Baker was a cocaine and heroin addict, who, it’s rumoured, committed suicide by falling down a flight of stairs, and a drugged up Johnny Cash once lit a truck on fire and burned down part of a forest.

No matter what time period, it’s evident that a lot of music’s most out there stories involved drugs of some kind. “Playing live is a high that most people who’ve never done it have never experienced,” says Bowman. “It’s not surprising when you’re that wired, and you’ve had that level of intense experience, that many people will deal with that in ways that some others will find hard to comprehend including excess sexual behavior and substance abuse. People take things to bring them down, to continue the high, or just to get outside their head because it’s way too intense.”

These days artists still calm their nerves with drugs, but the appeal of the cracked out rocker is dead. Just look at Pete Doherty or Courtney Love. The two have legendary drug addictions and have gotten into heaps of trouble with the law. But do people admire them? “It’s like anything else,” says Bowman, “same old same old. People used to get shocked at murders in big cities, now we only get shocked by kids with guns.”

Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter if new artists aren’t as shocking as old ones. As long as there are stories about stars with sex tapes (Kid Rock, The Go-Gos), rockers doing relatives (Dennis Wilson), or drunken drummers running over, and killing, their drivers (Keith Moon), there will always be sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.