Disgraceland

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 Keith’s constitution, 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, threatened to destroy the band and their so-far indestructible guitar player, Keith Richards.

TLC’s Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes was known as “the crazy one”. She did, after all, burn down her NFL playing boyfriend, Andre Rison’s mansion. But given the fact that it was done after what was then one of many domestic assaults, Disgraceland chooses to view Left Eye as a bad ass… 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 recently released, 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.

Sam Cooke was a lot of things: soul superstar, civil rights champion, whip smart entrepreneur but he was also a serial womanizer with an unbridled libido. On December 11, 1964, Sam Cooke, was shot to death by Bertha Lee Franklin, manager of the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles, CA. Franklin killed Cooke in what was ruled by the courts to be a justifiable homicide due to Cooke’s unruly, drunken behavior that involved him holding another women captive in his hotel room and allegedly raping her earlier in the evening. With full appreciation of the MeToo moment we are currently all living through as a culture, Disgraceland, with fresh eyes, looks into this crime and the successful effort by Sam Cooke’s family and powerful music industry colleagues to salvage his legacy and reputation by personally discrediting his victim.

It’s long been believed that punk rock icon, Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose. However, new evidence suggests that his overly affectionate and increasingly dependent mum gave him a fatal hotshot in a final, maternal act of mercy. Listen to find out why.

Welcome to Disgraceland, the world’s first and only rock and roll true-crime, bi-weekly, adult storytelling podcast. Season 1 is a limited eight episode arc running from September 12 - November 14th, 2017 that features the exploits of Jerry Lee Lewis, Beck, Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, those legendary heathens-- The Rolling Stones and other disgraceful doers of dirty deeds.