On Monday, our "Week to Remember" post took a look at famous literary pranks and hoaxes. Today, we continue the theme with a look at bands, composers, and musicians who weren't exactly what they claimed to be.
We start with Milli Vanilli. In 1988 and 1989, the team of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus was a mainstay on MTV and the radio. Milli Vanilli had three #1 hits in less than a year and won the 1990 Grammy for Best New Artist. But questions quickly arose. Their performance in live interviews on MTV suggested that English was not their first language, and some technical glitches at concerts made it obvious that they were lip-synching to previous recordings. Another singer, Charles Shaw, claimed that he was actually the voice behind Milli Vanilli, and eventually, the group's producer was forced to admit to the deception. The group's Best New Artist Grammy was rescinded. All of the principal players recorded new albums, Shaw as "The Real Milli Vanilli" and Morvan and Pilatus as "Fab and Rob," but neither attempt generated much interest.
Also taking credit for music he didn't create was Japanese composer Mamoru Samuragochi. Samuragochi came to prominence in the late 1990s as a composer of movie and video game scores, and he had a compelling personal story to tell. His parents, said Samuragochi, were survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima; he had begun suffering from migraines as a teenager and had completely lost his hearing by his mid-30s.
A pair of Japanese reporters reported their doubts about Samuragochi's story in 2013. One noted that when she went to his apartment to interview him, Samuragochi frequently began to answer her questions before the sign-language interpreter had finished translating them. And at one point during the interview, he stood up as if to answer the doorbell. A music critic noticed that much of Samuragochi's first symphony, subtitled "Hiroshima," seemed to have been borrowed from the more obscure works of Gustav Mahler.
In 2014, Samuragochi was about to reach his largest international audience when a Japanese figure skater performed to one of his compositions at the Winter Olympics. That's when composer Takashi Niigaki stepped forward and declared that he was the real composer of all of Samuragochi's music. Samuragochi confessed to the fraud. He also acknowledged that while he had some hearing impairment, he was not deaf, as he had claimed to be.
Our next fraud centers on a band that never really was. In 1969, Rolling Stone editor Greil Marcus wrote a "review" of an album by The Masked Marauders. At that moment in rock history, a lot of rock stars were teaming up to form supergroups, and Marcus poked fun at the trend by imagining the ultimate supergroup. For contractual reasons, he explained, none of the Masked Marauders could put their real names on the album, but the group included John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Bob Dylan.
Not everyone got the joke, and Rolling Stone began getting questions about where fans could buy the album. That, of course, led to a band of impersonators being assembled to actually record it, and The Masked Marauders crept into the lower rungs of the album charts for a few weeks.
Occasionally, established bands have taken on new identities for various reasons. In the mid-1980s, two albums were released by The Dukes of Stratosphear (they're collected here). They were presented as lost recordings from a 60s psychedelic band that never made it big; they were actually a side project of the British band XTC, who recorded as the Dukes using vintage recording equipment and allowing themselves no more than two takes in order to get the proper garage rock sound.
When the Welsh band The Alarm released the single "45 RPM" in 2004, billed as "The Poppy Fields," their motives were more serious. The Alarm had had their biggest hits in the early 1980s, and the band thought they weren't taken seriously by the British music industry because they were too old. They hired a teenage band to "perform" the song in a music video. When "45 RPM" entered the British charts at #24, The Alarm revealed the hoax.
Some fake histories are more playful. For more than 50 years, Peter Schickele has composed comical music under the name "P.D.Q. Bach," poking fun at the conventions of classical music. P.D.Q., Schickele explains, is the 21st of the 20 children of Johann Sebastian Bach, and his music, which includes pieces like the cantata "Iphigenia in Brooklyn," the "Unbegun Symphony," and the "Octoot" for wind instruments, is a series of musical jokes for the classical music fan.
The band Platinum Weird began in 2004, when songwriters Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics) and Kara DioGuardi were hired to write songs for The Pussycat Dolls. None of the songs they wrote were suitable for that group—everyone kept saying they all sounded like old Fleetwood Mac B-sides—but the record company encouraged Stewart and DioGuardi to continue with the project, which eventually turned into an album and a VH1 mockumentary about the fictional 70s band.
Surely the goofiest imaginary backstory is that of Big Daddy, the novelty band that covered 80s and 90s pop hits as if they were early rock and roll songs. Big Daddy claimed, tongue firmly in cheek, to have been taken prisoner in 1959 while on a USO tour in southeast Asia. When they were released after 25 years in captivity, they went back to playing the day's big hits, but because of their years in cultural isolation, everything still sounded like it came from the late 1950s.
It was, in essence, an early form of mashup. In Big Daddy's hands, Madonna's "Like a Virgin" was crooned in the virginal style of Frankie Avalon; the Talking Heads "Once in a Lifetime" sounded a lot like Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song," and in one of the band's shining moments, Jackie Wilson met Wilson Phillips for "Hold On" in the style of "Higher and Higher."