Famous Musicians You Can Hear Having Sex On Their Songs — And Others Who Did Equally Ridiculous Things On Record
1.Guns N' Roses lead singer Axl Rose can be heard having sex with Adriana Smith — the girlfriend of the band's drummer Steven Adler — on the song "Rocket Queen."
In 1997, Axl Rose was in the studio mixing the song "Rocket Queen" for Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction when he got an idea: What if they put the sound of a woman having sex over the bridge of the song?
The woman who ended up on the recording, Smith, was dating Adler at the time, but he'd just told her he didn't consider her his girlfriend. Angry, she went to the studio to hang with two of the band's other members, Axl Rose and Slash, in hopes of making Adler jealous. That's when Rose approached her with his idea.
Smith told VH1, "Axl came and he laid his head in my lap and became all serious. And he looked at me and said, 'Adriana, I want to talk to you about something that’s very serious and very special and important to me, and nobody else will do this.'" Smith said she replied, "For the band, sure, no problem, for the band! And a bottle of Jack Daniels.”
At that point, they ran into a problem: The sound engineer didn't want to be involved mic'ing and recording these shenanigans, so his assistant Vic Deyglio had to set everything up. Deyglio later told Rolling Stone, "It was like a Ron Jeremy set in there," and ended up being credited in the album's liner notes as "Victor 'the fucking engineer' Deyglio."
Once microphones were laid on the floor of the vocal booth, the lights were dimmed and Rose and Smith commenced having sex...the sounds of which were recorded and inserted into the track's audio.
The song became notorious in the wake of the album's massive success, and Smith later regretted taking part in it.
Smith said that Adler "fucking freaked out" after learning what happened and that the whole experience left her lost: “I ended up drinking and using drugs over this for a really long time, because I had this extreme shame and guilt and stuff.”
You can listen to "Rocket Queen" below:
2.You can hear the Notorious B.I.G. receiving oral sex in a skit at the end of "Respect" on his debut album, Ready to Die.
As you read above, many of the people involved with "Rocket Queen" have talked about what happened over the years, but that's not so much the case with this track. Sure, there was speculation — with some saying the slurping sounds were too loud and clear to be real, while others said they had to be real for the same reason — but there was no official confirmation until Sean "Diddy" Combs, the producer of Ready to Die and Biggie's close collaborator, was asked about it during a HuffPost interview.
The interviewer, Barry Michael Cooper, asked, "In the interlude, is Big actually getting some head?"
Diddy replied, "Yeah," then laughed and said, "These are questions that nobody’s ever asked, and I think Big would be alright with it.”
Diddy went on to describe it as “just some young, reckless rock star–type stuff. It was almost like M?tley Crüe — they probably had people around like that!”
You can listen to "Respect" (and the skit at the end) below:
3.The Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson can be heard having sex with a woman (possibly one of Charles Manson's followers) over the fade-out of their 1969 song "All I Want to Do."
If you only know the Beach Boys from their squeaky-clean early-'60s hits like "Fun, Fun, Fun," you're probably surprised by this one. But the Beach Boys' history is loaded with some bizarre/shocking antics, and Wilson was often leading them. Famously, he befriended a pre–murder spree Manson (and even had the Beach Boys record a reworked version of one of Manson's songs), and years later, he married and had a child with a teenager who claimed to be the daughter of his first cousin and Beach Boys bandmate Mike Love.
Wilson had just finished producing the recording session for "All I Want to Do" when he decided to bring a woman into the studio and record the two of them having sex. The result — a bevy of moans and cries of "Oh boy!" — was placed in the fadeout of the song.
The album notes for the resulting 20/20 album included "Production Note: Turn up the volume on the fade for a brief X-rated surprise."
Incidentally, the reworked Manson song ("Never Learn Not to Love") was from this same album, so Wilson managed to get a song with recorded sex on side A and a Charles Manson song on side B.
You can hear "All I Want to Do" below:
4.Susanna Hoffs didn't have sex on record, but she did record almost all of her vocals for the Bangles' Everything album — including the No. 1 hit "Eternal Flame" — totally naked.
Hoffs decided to record this way after the album's producer, Davitt Sigerson, told her that, when he worked with Olivia Newton-John, she laid down all of her best vocals while totally naked.
The singer wrote in the Guardian, "I imagined it would feel like skinny-dipping — vulnerable yet freeing — and I decided to try it. Nobody could see me; there was a baffle [a sound screen] in front of me and it was dark. After the first song went so well, I became superstitious about it, like in sports where you have to have your rabbit’s foot, and ended up compelled to skinny-dip my way through most of the album, including 'Eternal Flame.'"
Only, here's the thing: Newton-John never recorded her vocals naked. Sigerson, it turns out, told Hoffs that she did as a prank. If you ask me, lying to someone in order to coerce them into taking their clothes off isn't a funny prank.
You can hear "Eternal Flame" below:
5.The Barenaked Ladies have also recorded songs, well, bare naked — and did it on six different albums.
Back in 1991, the Canadian rockers were recording their debut album, Gordon, and having trouble nailing a proper take of "The King of Bedside Manor." So the band decided, in order to mix things up, that they and their producer would take off all their clothes and record the song naked. They kept this up even while doing overdubs and mixing the song. And you know what? They were happy with the result!
They did another naked song on their next album, and another on the one after that. Soon it was a tradition, but one that would end after their sixth album.
Singer Ed Robertson told Newsweek they used to do it "when we needed some sort of weird energy for a song — some sort of excitement or silliness, or if the song was feeling flat and we needed to take it to another place. But 30 years into playing in a band together, the sight of our naked bodies does not change the mood in the room at all."
You can hear "Alcohol" (one of their naked songs) below:
6.Here's something totally different but nevertheless very unusual: Billie Eilish recorded herself at the dentist getting her Invisalign attachments drilled off, then made the unsettling sound a key component of her hit “Bury a Friend.”
Eilish told the New York Times, "I was in the dentist’s chair and they were shaving off my Invisalign attachments, and it was this loud RRRRRRR sound and I thought it was so dope. I pulled out my phone immediately and pressed record."
Eilish's brother, Phineas — who was cowriter and producer on the track — added, "I found it very horrible to listen to, but it worked great in the song."
You can listen to "Bury a Friend" below:
7.Trent Reznor recorded Nine Inch Nails' signature album The Downward Spiral at 10050 Cielo Drive — the home where Charles Manson's followers murdered a pregnant Sharon Tate and four other people.
Reznor has claimed that he didn't know what happened at the home until after he'd signed the rental agreement, but that's a little hard to believe — no one mentioned to this brooding rock 'n' roll star known for his dark music that the home was the location of the Manson murders? Really?
Whatever the truth is, the home was perhaps an apropos location for Reznor to record The Downward Spiral, a dark concept album about a troubled man and his descent to suicide.
Reznor named the recording studio he set up there Le Pig (a nod to how the Manson murderers scrawled "Pig" on the home's front door using Tate's blood), and over the next 18 months he recorded classics like "Hurt" and "Closer."
While the home, it seems, offered Reznor inspiration, he later saw it in a different light when he ran into Tate's sister by chance. As he told Rolling Stone:
"She said, 'Are you exploiting my sister's death by living in her house?' For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, 'No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred.' I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, 'What if it was my sister?' I thought, Fuck Charlie Manson. I went home and cried that night. It made me see there's another side to things, you know?"
8.H.R. — the lead singer of the hardcore band Bad Brains — recorded his vocals for the song "Sacred Love" over the phone while serving time in jail for marijuana possession.
The band was initially unsure how they would be able to finish their album I Against I with their singer in jail, but then their manager, Anthony Countey, came up with the idea of H.R. literally phoning his vocals in.
H.R. used his call to ring up the studio, and once the other end picked up, he could tell they were ready for him. He told Vice, "He [the song's producer] immediately began to do the level balance, and then I heard the music, and I just sang."
You can hear "Sacred Love" below:
9.This is definitely the least scandalous one on the list, but still super interesting/unusual: Brittany Howard, the big-voiced lead singer of the band Alabama Shakes, recorded some of her vocals after putting anesthetic on her lips and tongue.
Howard — who is big on experimenting in the studio with how she gets her vocal sounds — did this to "dampen" her vocals and create a different sound. At other times, she's recorded vocals with her mouth stuffed with cotton.
More recently, she mixed things up by using her cellphone to record her vocals on "Run to Me," off her debut solo album, Jaime.
You can hear "Run to Me" below:
10.Lastly, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys started a fire in a bucket so that the studio smelled of smoke — and made his musicians wear firefighter helmets — while recording an instrumental track about the Great Chicago Fire.
A couple of years before his brother Dennis set out to record the unmistakable sounds of a sexual encounter, Brian Wilson was trying to record an instrumental song that would unmistakably evoke the sounds of a great fire, in this case the one that ravaged Chicago in 1871.
"Fire" was meant to be a key part of Smile, Wilson's planned follow-up to the band's crowning achievement, Pet Sounds, but Wilson — a musical genius responsible for the band's classic hits — was, sadly, struggling more and more with his mental health. Those involved with the sessions were impressed by the brilliance of the music but also worried about Wilson, especially when he did things like make them wear fire helmets and record as the studio filled with smoke. Wilson later said about the track, "I was feeling unhappy, so I thought that 'fire' tape would express the crazy, weird thoughts I was going through."
When a building burned down near the studio a few days after they recorded the song, Wilson feared his composition was somehow responsible. He told Rolling Stone, "We thought maybe it was witchcraft or something; we didn’t know what we were into." As a result, Wilson shelved the song and the entire Smile album. In the decades that followed, Smile became the most famous unreleased album in rock 'n' roll history.
Thirty-seven years later, a healthier Brian Wilson released a rerecorded version of the Smile album — including a new version of "Fire," now entitled "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow."
"Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" earned Wilson the first Grammy of his career; he won in the Best Rock Instrumental Performance category.
You can hear "Fire" as recorded in 1967 below:
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