DISGRACELAND

Because great podcasts need to be heard. Disgos, thought you'd like to know about the new, white-knuckle season of Up And Vanished from Tenderfoot TV. Check the trailer and get ready to bang that subscribe button and see you on 8/28 for the Brian Jones episode of Disgraceland.

Lots of country music stars wear the black hat but none of them wore it with more authenticity than Johnny Paycheck. Johnny Cash may have bragged about shooting a man “just to watch him die” but Johnny Paycheck actually pulled the trigger. He was a true outlaw and totally hardcore. Hardcore honky tonk.

Frank Sinatra had it all. Then lost it all. Then got it all back tenfold. He was a man of extreme talent, confidence and insecurity. And he had powerful and dangerous friends. He orchestrated some of the greatest music ever made. And he also orchestrated an alliance between two friends—mob boss Sam Giancana and John F. Kennedy—that would help the latter win the White House and, in the end, prove disastrous for Frank and the country.

Mötley Crüe frontman, Vince Neil totaled his Ford Pantera on a beer run and, in the process, took the life of his friend Razzle Dingley, drummer for Hanoi Rocks. Bassist, Nikki Sixx survived multiple heroin overdoses. Guitarist Mick Mars walked away from a blackout drunk drowning and drummer, Tommy Lee lived through his own Caligula-like Sunset Strip sexcapades. Mötley Crüe, a degenerate band of death cheating rock gods has us asking, “how are these dudes still alive?” Maybe they’re the undead.

John Lennon was a walking contradiction: a violent pacifist and a creative genius marred by creative inconsistency. Just as he was getting his groove back he was gunned down by Mark David Chapman, a self-loathing narcissist obsessed with his contradictory hero, as well as Lennon’s musical rival, Todd Rundgren and J.D. Salinger’s angsty Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In The Rye. Hear how all of these factors and more contributed to the musical icon’s senseless murder in this second of a two part Disgraceland episode.

John Lennon was a walking contradiction: a violent pacifist and a creative genius marred by creative inconsistency. Just as he was getting his groove back, he was gunned down by Mark David Chapman, a self-loathing narcissist who was obsessed with his contradictory hero, as well as with Lennon’s musical rival, Todd Rundgren and J.D. Salinger’s angsty, Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In The Rye. Hear how all of these factors and more contributed to the musical icon’s senseless murder in this first of a two part Disgraceland episode.

What happens when the hardest working man in show business takes a break? Idle hands are indeed the devil’s workshop. This episode will detail James Brown’s scorching career as well as the scorching high speed chase he led cops on that led to his arrest and jail sentencing for drugs and firearms.

In March 1996, “King of the Club Kids”, promoter Michael Alig, after appearing on TV’s Geraldo and on the cover of New York magazine, bashed his friend and DJ Angel Melendez in the head with a hammer. The body was then dismembered and stuffed into a duct-taped cardboard box. Alig proceeded to tell anyone who would listen—including his friends from the raging '90s NYC club scene—what he had done. The problem was, Alig’s well-known, over the top, and depraved behavior was such that no one believed him. “Has anyone seen Angel?” “He’s dead. I cut him up and put him in that box over in the corner.”

Who killed Tupac? Who killed Biggie? The answer has been right there out in the open for years. This episode looks at the lives and deaths of both rap superstars, the east coast/west coast beef and the media’s culpability in driving a highly sensationalized narrative that ultimately led to the murder of both men.

Bob Marley is known as the peace and love reggae superstar, but the truth of who he really was is a bit more complicated. After gunmen raided his home, putting bullets into him, his wife, his manager and his guitar player, Bob survived. But the lives of his assassins—all of them—were eventually brought to violent, horrific ends. And their killers were never found. Many think the perpetrator was an angry young man from the Trenchtown ghetto, who was called, by those who feared him, “Screwface." Was it Bob Marley, Rasta Vigilante?

The Arlington, Texas rapper, born Taymor Travon McIntyre, was involved in two killings by the time he was 17. Arrested on murder charges and placed under house arrest until hearings were to take place, Tay-K sawed off his ankle bracelet and announced to the world via Twitter that he was going on the run. He made it from Texas all the way to New Jersey, where he recorded his most infamous song, “The Race,” detailing his time on the lam. The song’s lyrics and video blurred real life and art and quickly went viral, garnering more than 100 million downloads. It also worked as a set of clues for authorities to use to piece together the young fugitive’s whereabouts. The viral nature of the song and video, the ensuing Twitter phenomenon, and infamy surrounding the young fugitive also caused tipsters to come out in droves and eventually led to Tay-K’s arrest.

In the 1970s, the world regarded the Rolling Stones as an insular band of hedonistic and glamorous pansexual junkies. But all of the trouble they’d stirred up during the ’60s and early ’70s would be dwarfed by the mess they would cause in Canada in 1977. Up until that point, the band’s money and collective luck had been enough to fend off destruction. But the scandal they embroiled themselves in touched the highest levels of government, and threatened to destroy the band and their as-yet indestructible guitar player, Keith Richards.

TLC’s Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes was known as “the crazy one.” She did, after all, burn down the mansion of her NFL boyfriend, Andre Rison. But given the fact that it was done after one of many domestic assaults, Disgraceland sees Left Eye as a badass—and not “the crazy one.” This episode digs into what really happened that night, who Lisa Lopes really was as a person, and the details surrounding her own premature death.

In 1968, Van Morrison was hiding out from the New York City Mafia in Boston, Massachusetts. Recently the victim of a physical attack from a Genovese crime family member, Morrison was desperately trying to piece together a band to complete what would become his landmark creative statement, Astral Weeks. One of the musicians who would help him achieve this goal—a young, handsome guitar player from Emerson College named Rick Philp—would mysteriously go missing and eventually wind up dead. Disgraceland pieces together this story using, as one of many sources, the critically acclaimed book Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan Walsh.

Never has there been a more extreme form of musical rebellion than Norwegian Black Metal. The genre’s founding band, Mayhem, its sister act, Burzum and supporting cast of musicians with names like, Necrobutcher, Hellhammer and Dead horrified Norway in the early nineties with supreme acts of terror, satanic ritualism, murder, arson and cannibalism. By the time the ashes settled and the corpse paint chipped away, numerous band members would be dead or in jail, convicted of arson and or murder… and a new generation of young metalheads would find their way to satanism through blast beats and dead notes.