Music's Sliding Doors moments

[Stumpy Pepys]

1. AC/DC asking Noddy Holder to join after the death of Bon Scott.

2. Phil Collins had an audition to be drummer in Yes, but didn't turn up.

[beak]

Kurt Cobain fluffed an audition to become bass player for Melvins, having to settle with starting some band or other of his own.

[Sunderporinostesta]

1. AC/DC asking Noddy Holder to join after the death of Bon Scott.

2. Phil Collins had an audition to be drummer in Yes, but didn't turn up.

Didn’t Noddy recommend Brian Johnson? Shortly before he was announced I saw Geordie support Slade at a less than half full Sunderland Empire. Maybe that’s around the time the offer-recommendation occurred?

[gjw100]

The death of jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan in February 1972 at the hands of his common-law-wife Helen Moore arose not so much through a sliding doors moment as a combination of unfortunate events. That night Moore had driven Morgan to the New York club where he and his band were in the middle of a residency, but en route the treacherous driving conditions resulting from a particularly heavy snowfall made her crash the car. This caused some friction between the two and matters were not improved when Moore found that Morgan’s current ‘girlfriend’ had also turned up unexpectedly. Moore confronted the pair in the break between sets, things got fractious and Morgan ended up throwing her out of the club. As he did so the small handgun that she carried for protection in her handbag fell out onto the pavement. Angry and humiliated, Moore picked up the gun, stormed back into the club and shot Morgan at close range. The wound was not an immediately fatal one and he could have survived with prompt medical attention, but the atrocious weather severely delayed the ambulance that had been called and by the time it arrived he had bled to death.

[Jah Womble]

2/2/59 - guitarist Tommy Allsup loses a coin-toss with Ritchie Valens, awarding the latter a seat on Buddy Holly’s private aircraft. (Waylon Jennings, meanwhile, gives up his to the sickening Big Bopper…)

9/11/61 - young Brian Epstein and his assistant Alistair Taylor decide to go and take a look at some tinpot band or other. (Taylor, who’d almost gone to see them on his own, thought they were sh*te.)

[ale]

Glasgow mid 1970s-Bernie Rhodes & Malcolm McClaren travel from London to offer Midge Ure the Sex Pistols lead singer job. He buys a knock-off amp from them but turns the job down.

And another McClaren related moment-in 1980 he poached Adam Ant backing group to form Bow Wow Wow. Adam went onto form a new band.

[Satchmo Distel]

Otis Redding got his break at Stax after he chauffeured another singer to a session and persuaded them to let him have an audition.

Sam Cooke didn't need to go chasing after the sex worker who stole his wallet and trousers. He forgot he was a black male in a motel run by whites.

[WOM]

Q did a great list one time of Poorly Timed Flounces; drummers and whatnot quitting just days or weeks before some massive bout of fame. Usually they joined some wet fart of a band with great prospects who were never heard from again.

[Patrick Thistle]

One of the biggest sliding doors moments in rock would be if David Lee Roth and the rest of Van Halen had reconciled their differences before Roth quit the band in the 80s.

[gjw100]

Stevie Wonder’s chance 1971 meeting in New York with bassist Ronnie Blanco led to an introduction to musicians and studio technicians Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, developers of TONTO (The Original New Timbre Orchestra) a wired/soldered-together collection of synthesizers, circuits and sequencers that looked like something out of a NASA control room and allowed for a previously unthinkable range of sounds to be produced in the studio. Stevie realised that this massive device would give him the creative freedom that he had been looking for and brought Cecil and Margouleff on board for the recording sessions that were to become ‘Music Of My Mind’. They remained as enablers/collaborators for his next three releases - ‘Talking Book’, ‘Innervisions’ and ‘Fulfillingness First Finale’ - a sequence of albums arguably unmatched by any artist before or since.

[Eggchaser]

One of the biggest sliding doors moments in rock would be if David Lee Roth and the rest of Van Halen had reconciled their differences before Roth quit the band in the 80s.

Although it's likely that it would have denied us the frankly brilliant Can't Get This Stuff No More.

[Walter Knight]

One I wonder about is if Courtney Love had been successful in her audition for the part of Nancy Spungen in Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy - instead of a chaotic couple of decades of music, drugs, acting and rehab, would she have become one of those Hollywood folk who does lots of film work but has a sideline in music (Juliette Lewis, Jared Leto, etc)?

[Amor de Cosmos]

2/2/59 - guitarist Tommy Allsup loses a coin-toss with Ritchie Valens, awarding the latter a seat on Buddy Holly’s private aircraft. (Waylon Jennings, meanwhile, gives up his to the sickening Big Bopper…)

Dion DiMucci also passed on the flight.

The organisers of the gig the ill-fated flight was heading toward drafted in a hastily thrown together high school band called The Shadows (no, not those Shadows) as a replacement. They featured a 15 year-old-singer called Robert Velline. Who shortly afterwards changed his name to Bobby Vee

[gjw100]

During a 1968 trip to the US with The Hollies, Graham Nash attended a party at Peter Tork’s house in LA, where he hooked up with David Crosby (the two had met briefly the previous year) and was introduced to Stephen Stills. After an impromptu session with the pair at another party a few days later, Nash decided that a life of weed, California sunshine and three-part vocal harmonies was preferable to artistic frustration and Manchester drizzle.

[Jah Womble]

Dion DiMucci also passed on the flight.

The organisers of the gig the ill-fated flight was heading toward drafted in a hastily thrown together high school band called The Shadows (no, not those Shadows) as a replacement. They featured a 15 year-old-singer called Robert Velline. Who shortly afterwards changed his name to Bobby Vee

Indeed. Perversely, it worked out well for Bobby Vee.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

During a 1968 trip to the US with The Hollies, Graham Nash attended a party at Peter Tork’s house in LA, where he hooked up with David Crosby (the two had met briefly the previous year) and was introduced to Stephen Stills. After an impromptu session with the pair at another party a few days later, Nash decided that a life of weed, California sunshine and three-part vocal harmonies was preferable to artistic frustration and Manchester drizzle.

Similarly, and in the spirit of the parallel scenarios of the film in question, Neil Young and Bruce Palmer going to Los Angeles to try to meet Stills, failing, and deciding to head for San Francisco, only for Stills and Richie Furay to spot them stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard and pull them over, and five days later Buffalo Springfield made their live debut. In the alternative scenario, Young could have made it to San Francisco and stayed there, with knock-on consequences for both cities' music scenes.

[Sam]

Bobby Byrd, on a trip to a Georgia juvenile detention centre in 1952, meets a young man called James Brown. Byrd decides he likes Brown enough to support his parole and give him a tryout to play the drums in Byrd's band, the Flames.

[Jah Womble]

1/12/76 - the Sex Pistols are a last-minute replacement for Queen on Bill Grundy’s Today programme, thereby prompting the degradation and corruption of an entire nation.

[gjw100]

In July 1971, keyboard-player Rick Wakeman, who had already played on 'Space Oddity' and several tracks on 'Hunky Dory', was all set to accept David Bowie's invitation to join his new backing band, The Spiders From Mars, but a few hours after Bowie had spoken to him he received a call from Yes bassist Chris Squire, who explained that the band had axed organ-player Tony Kaye and wanted him as Kaye's replacement.

[Stumpy Pepys]

I was thinking today, if the Osmonds had used the template laid down by Crazy Horses, they might be now remembered as a half-decent rock band.

[gjw100]

I believe it’s fairly well established now that Columbia Records exec/producer Terry Melcher wasn’t Charles Manson’s intended target and Manson was well aware that Melcher had moved out of the house in Cielo Drive several months previously, but there’s a definite sequence of events that led to the murder of Sharon Tate and others that were set in motion on the Spring 1968 day that Beach Boy Dennis Wilson picked up two attractive young female hitchhikers, then allowed them to stay at his house for, ahem, purely altruistic reasons. The girls were followers of Manson and swiftly brought Wilson into the orbit of their ‘guru’, leading to Wilson bankrolling a Manson recording session and several visits by the pair to Melcher’s then house in an attempt to secure a record deal and backing for a film about The Family. It’s no co-incidence that this was the location Manson selected to kickstart Helter Skelter.

[Jah Womble]

I was thinking today, if the Osmonds had used the template laid down by Crazy Horses, they might be now remembered as a half-decent rock band.

Perhaps less-so by the NME, who memorably described the song as 'Led Zeppelin for the under-fives'.

(Which I guess could be construed as a compliment, depending upon one's standpoint.)

[Stumpy Pepys]

Perhaps less-so by the NME, who memorably described the song as 'Led Zeppelin for the under-fives'.

(Which I guess could be construed as a compliment, depending upon one's standpoint.)

Seeing as the majority of the music press didn't like Led Zeppelin at the time, it's all a bit academic.

[Jah Womble]

I'm not sure that fact especially dilutes the comment, tbh.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Maybe. Crazy Horses is apparently one of Ozzy Osbourne's favourite records.