Hugh Hefner
Anne Frank
Jim Jones
Marshall Applewhite
Johnny Cash
Charles Manson
Elvis Presley
John Lennon
Jimi Hendrix
Freddy Mercury
Steve Jobs
Michael Jackson
David Koresh
Satoshi Nakamoto
Dr. Joe Ova
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Hugh Hefner (1926-2017)
Hugh Hefner was an American businessman, magazine publisher and playboy. He was the founder of Playboy and editor-in-chief of the magazine, which he founded in 1953. He was also the chief creative officer of Playboy Enterprises, which is the publishing group that operates the magazine. An advocate of sexual liberation and freedom of expression, Hefner was a political activist and philanthropist in several other causes and public issues. He was a man who bought and sold women to other men. Part of Hefner's business acumen was to make the selling of female flesh respectable and hip, to make soft porn acceptable. He caused immeasurable damage by turning porn, and therefore the buying and selling of women’s bodies, into a legitimate business. He encouraged competition, and body image issues, between his multiple live-in girlfriends. His legacy is full of evidence of the exploitation of women for professional gain.
Hefner was born during the Prohibition era in Chicago, Illinois. His father was an accountant and his mother was a teacher. He served from 1944-1946 as a U.S. Army writer for a military newspaper. Hefner graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a double minor in Creative Writing and Art, having earned his degree in two and a half years.
In 1949, Hefner married and the couple had 2 children, a daughter and a son. Before the wedding, she confessed that she had an affair while he was away in the army. Hefner called the admission "the most devastating moment of my life." She allowed him to have sex with other women, out of guilt for her own infidelity and in the hope that it would preserve their marriage. The 2 were divorced 10 years later.
In 1952, Hefner left his job as a copywriter for Esquire after he was denied a $5 raise. In 1953, he took out a mortgage, generating a bank loan of $600, and raised $8,000 from 45 investors, including $1,000 from his mother, not because she believed in the venture but because she believed in her son.to launch Playboy, which was initially going to be called "Stag Party". The first issue, published in 1953 featured Marilyn Monroe from her 1949 nude calendar shoot and sold over 50,000 copies.
After a science fiction short story was rejected by Esquire magazine in 1955, Hefner agreed to publish the story in Playboy. The story highlighted straight men being persecuted in a world where homosexuality was the norm. After the magazine received angry letters, Hefner wrote a response to criticism where he said, "If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too."
Hefner remade himself as a bon vivant and man about town, a lifestyle he promoted in his magazine and 2 TV shows he hosted, "Playboy's Penthouse" and "Playboy After Dark". He admitted to being "'involved' with maybe 11 out of 12 months' worth of Playmates" during some of these years.
In 1963, Hefner was arrested for promoting obscene literature after he published an issue of Playboy that featured nude shots of Jayne Mansfield in bed with a man present. The case went to trial and resulted in a hung jury.
During the civil rights movement in 1966, Hefner sent Haley to interview Rockwell, much to Rockwell's surprise because Haley was black. Rockwell had founded the American Nazi Party and would be later described by some as the "American Hitler". Rockwell agreed to meet with Haley only after gaining assurance from the Playboy writer that he was not Jewish.. Haley had also interviewed Malcolm X in 1963 and Martin Luther King in 1966. All 3 interviewees were assassinated.
In 1971, Hefner acknowledged that he experimented in bisexuality. In 1985, Hefner had a minor stroke at age 59. After re-evaluating his lifestyle, he made several changes. The wild, all-night parties were toned down significantly and in 1988, daughter Christie took over the operation of the Playboy empire. The following year, he married the 36 years younger Playmate of the Year. The couple had 2 sons. 8 years later she moved out and moved into a house next door to the mansion.
Hefner became known for moving an ever-changing circle of young women into the Playboy Mansion. He dated as many as 7 women concurrently. In 2010, he became engaged to have a third wife. She broke off their engagement 5 days before their planned wedding. In anticipation of the wedding, the July issue of Playboy, which reached store shelves and customer's homes within days of the wedding date, featured her on the cover and in a photo spread as well. The headline on the cover read "Introducing America's Princess, Mrs. Hefner". They subsequently reconciled and married in 2012.
Hefner supported legalizing same-sex marriage, and he stated that: “a fight for gay marriage was a fight for all our rights. Without it, we will turn back the sexual revolution and return to an earlier, puritanical time."
Hefner died at the age of 91.
Anne Frank was a German-born diarist. One of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the publication of "The Diary of a Young Girl" in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942-1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in WWII. It is one of the world's most widely known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.
Born in Frankfurt, Germany, she lived most of her life in Amsterdam, having moved there with her family at the age of four and a half when the Nazis gained control over Germany. Born a German national, Anne lost her citizenship in 1941 and thus became stateless. By 1940, the Franks were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in 1942, the family went into hiding in some concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Anne's father worked. From then until the family's arrest by the Gestapo in 1944, Anne kept a diary she had received as a birthday present, and wrote in it regularly. Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps where they died a few months later.
Anne's father, the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved by one of the helpers, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as "The Diary of a Young Girl", and has since been translated into over 60 languages.
Anne was born to a Jewish family who did not observe all of the customs and traditions of Judaism. They lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions. Her mother was the more devout parent, while her father was interested in scholarly pursuits and had an extensive library. Both parents encouraged the children to read.
In 1933, after Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party won the federal election, Anne's father received an offer to start a company that sold the fruit extract pectin in Amsterdam. He moved there to organize the business and to arrange accommodations for his family. By 1934, his wife and the children had joined him in Amsterdam. The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled Germany between 1933-1939.
After moving to Amsterdam, Anne and Margot were enrolled in school, Margot in public school and Anne in a Montessori school. Anne showed aptitude for reading and writing. In 1938, her father started a second company, Pectacon, which was a wholesaler of herbs, pickling salts, and mixed spices, used in the production of sausages. In 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and the occupation government began to persecute Jews by the implementation of restrictive and discriminatory laws. Mandatory registration and segregation soon followed.
The family tried to emigrate to the United States, but was denied because the U.S. government was concerned that people with close relatives still in Germany could be blackmailed into becoming Nazi spies. For her 13th birthday in 1942, Anne received a book she had shown her father in a shop window a few days earlier. Although it was an autograph book, bound with red-and-white checkered cloth and with a small lock on the front, Anne decided she would use it as a diary, and she began writing in it almost immediately. In her first entry, she lists many of the restrictions placed upon the lives of the Dutch Jewish population.
When Margot received a call-up notice from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration ordering her to report for relocation to a work camp, they went into hiding. Their hiding place was a 3-story space entered from a landing above his father's offices. Only 6 people knew that the Franks were hiding and 2 others offered to be "helpers" for the duration of their confinement.
The only connection the Franks had to the outside world were the occupants of the house who kept the Franks informed of war news and political developments. They catered to all of their needs, ensured their safety, and supplied them with food, a task that grew more difficult with the passage of time. Anne wrote of their dedication and of their efforts to boost morale within the household during the most dangerous of times. All were aware that, if caught, they could face the death penalty for sheltering Jews.
In her writing, Anne examined her relationships with the members of her family, and the strong differences in each of their personalities. She considered herself to be closest emotionally to her father, who got on better with Anne than with Margot, who was more attached to her mother. The reason for that may have been that Margot rarely showed her feelings and didn't need as much support because she didn't suffer from mood swings as much as Anne did. The Frank sisters formed a closer relationship than had existed before they went into hiding, although Anne sometimes expressed jealousy towards Margot, particularly when members of the household criticized Anne for lacking Margot's gentle and placid nature. As Anne began to mature, the sisters were able to confide in each other.
Anne frequently wrote of her difficult relationship with her mother, and of her ambivalence towards her. She described "her contempt for her mother and her carelessness, her sarcasm and her hardheartedness," Later, she felt ashamed of her harsh attitude, writing: "Anne, is it really you who mentioned hate, oh Anne, how could you?" She came to understand that their differences resulted from misunderstandings that were as much her fault as her mother's, and saw that she had added unnecessarily to her mother's suffering.
The Frank sisters each hoped to return to school as soon as they were able, and continued with their studies while in hiding. Margot took a shorthand course by correspondence and received high marks. Most of Anne's time was spent reading and studying, and she regularly wrote and edited her diary entries. In addition to providing a narrative of events as they occurred, she wrote about her feelings, beliefs, and ambitions, subjects she felt she could not discuss with anyone. As her confidence in her writing grew, and as she began to mature, she wrote of more abstract subjects such as her belief in God, and how she defined human nature.
Anne aspired to become a journalist. “I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that's what I want! I know I can write, but it remains to be seen whether I really have talent. And if I don't have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can't imagine living like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me! When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that's a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?"
She continued writing regularly until her arrest in 1944.
Their hiding place was stormed by a group of German uniformed police and all were taken to be interrogated and then transferred to an overcrowded prison. Having been arrested in hiding, they were considered criminals and sent to the Punishment Barracks for hard labor. The people who helped the Franks returned to the hiding place and found Anne's papers strewn on the floor. They collected them, as well as several family photograph albums, and resolved to return them to Anne after the war. The Franks were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and arrived after a 3-day journey.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, the SS forcibly separated the men from the women and children, and her father was wrenched from his family. Those deemed able to work were admitted into the camp, and those deemed unfit for labor were immediately killed. Of the 1,019 passengers, 549, including all children younger than 15, were sent directly to the gas chambers. Anne, who had turned 15 three months earlier, was one of the youngest people spared. She was soon made aware that most people were gassed upon arrival. She never knew the fate of her father.
Anne was forced to strip naked to be disinfected, had her head shaved, and was tattooed with an identifying number on her arm. By day, the women were used as slave labor and she was forced to haul rocks and dig rolls of sod. By night, they were crammed into overcrowded barracks. She became withdrawn and tearful when she saw children being led to the gas chambers. Her gregarious and confident nature allowed her to obtain extra bread rations for her mother, sister, and herself. Disease was rampant.
Anne's skin became badly infected by scabies. The Frank sisters were moved into an infirmary, which was in a state of constant darkness and infested with rats and mice. Anne`s mother stopped eating, saving every morsel of food for her daughters and passing her rations to them through a hole she made at the bottom of the infirmary wall.
In early 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp, killing 17,000 prisoners. Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock. Anne died a few days after Margot. Their deaths occurred only a few weeks before British soldiers liberated the camp.
After the war, it was estimated that only 5,000 of the 107,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands between 1942-1944 survived. An estimated 30,000 Jews remained in the Netherlands, with many aided by the Dutch underground.
Anne's father survived his internment in Auschwitz. After the war ended, he returned to Amsterdam, where he attempted to locate his family. He learned of the death of his wife in Auschwitz, but remained hopeful that his daughters had survived. After several weeks, he discovered Margot and Anne had also died. He attempted to determine the fates of his daughters' friends and learned many had been murdered. Several of the Frank sisters' school friends had survived, as had the extended families of the Franks as they had fled Germany during the mid-1930s, with individual family members settling in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Jim Jones was an American religious leader, who initiated and was responsible for a mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. He believed communism was the correct social order in compliance with God's will. Jones was ordained as a Disciples of Christ pastor, and he achieved notoriety as the founder and leader of the People`s Temple, which was often described as having cult-like qualities. Jones started the People's Temple in Indiana during the 1950s. He moved the Temple to California in the mid-1960s and gained notoriety with its activities in San Francisco in the early 1970s. He then relocated to Jonestown, Guyana, a socialist country in South America.
In 1978, media reports surfaced that human rights abuses were taking place in Peoples Temple's in Jonestown. United States Congressman Leo Ryan led a delegation into the commune to investigate what was going on; Ryan and others were murdered by gunfire while boarding a return flight with defectors. Jones subsequently committed a mass murder-suicide of 918 of his followers. Nearly 300 children were murdered, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning via a Kool-Aid mix.
Jones was born in a rural area of Indiana where he grew up in a shack without plumbing. He came from a dysfunctional family background. As a child, Jones was a voracious reader who studied Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler carefully noting the strengths and weaknesses of each. Jones also developed an intense interest in religion, primarily because he found making friends difficult. Childhood acquaintances later recalled Jones as being a really weird kid obsessed with religion and with death.
Jones's father was an alcoholic and associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Jones came to sympathize with the country's repressed African-American community due to his own experiences as a social outcast. In 1951, when Jones was 20 years old, he began attending gatherings of the Communist Party. Around this time, he witnessed a faith-healing service at a Seventh Day Baptist Church. He observed that it attracted people and their money and concluded that with financial resources from such healings he could help accomplish his social goals so he launch his own church called The People's Temple.
Jones told his congregation that the world would be engulfed by nuclear war in 1967 that would create a new socialist Eden on Earth. He began revealing the details of his "Apostolic Socialism" concept in his sermons. He taught that those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment - to socialism.
By the early 1970s, Jones began deriding traditional Christianity as "fly away religion", rejecting the Bible as being a tool to oppress women and non-whites, and denouncing a "Sky God" who was no God at all. He began preaching that he was the reincarnation of Jesus, Buddha, Lenin and Gandhi. Jones preached to his church members that they need to believe in what they can see saying: “If you see me as your friend, I'll be your friend. As you see me as your father, I'll be your father, for those of you that don't have a father... If you see me as your savior, I'll be your savior. If you see me as your God, I'll be your God."
In 1977 after an article was published with allegations by former Temple members that they were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. Jones and several hundred Temple members abruptly decided to move to the Temple's compound in Guyana. Jones named the settlement "Jonestown" after himself.
Jonestown was promoted as a means to create both a socialist paradise and a sanctuary from the media criticisms. Jones established Jonestown as a benevolent model communist community following policies of the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea and other communist states of not permitting members to leave.
He started propagating his belief in what he called "Translation", where he and his followers would all die together and move to another planet and live blissfully. Temple defectors with relatives in Jonestown formed a "Concerned Relatives" group and aroused the curiosity of California Congressman Leo Ryan.
In 1978, Leo Ryan led a fact-finding mission to Jonestown to investigate allegations of human rights abuses. Jones hosted a reception for the Ryan delegation in Jonestown. The delegation left hurriedly after a Temple member attacked Ryan with a knife. Ryan and his delegation managed to take along 15 Temple members who had expressed a wish to leave. As members of the delegation boarded the planes, Jones' armed guards, called the "Red Brigade," arrived on a tractor and trailer and began shooting killing Ryan and 4 others.
Later that same day, 909 inhabitants of Jonestown, 304 of them children, died of cyanide poisoning, mostly in and around the settlement's main pavilion. This resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until the 2001 9/11 attacks in New York. The FBI later recovered a 45-minute audio recording of the suicide in progress. On that tape, Jones told Temple members to commit "revolutionary suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced grape-flavored Flavor Aid. When members apparently cried, Jones counseled:
"Stop these hysterics. This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die. We must die with some dignity by voluntary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world."
According to escaping Temple members, children were given the drink first and families were told to lie down together. Jones was found dead on a deck chair with a gunshot wound to his head.
Marshall Applewhite was an American cult leader who founded what became known as the Heaven's Gate religious group and organized their mass suicide in 1997, claiming the lives of 39 people.
Heaven’s Gate made the headlines in 1997 when 39 members of the cult killed themselves, in hopes of reaching a spaceship which was following in the wake the newly-discovered Hale-Bopp Comet. Applewhite had a near-death experience in the early 1970s and claimed to have had a vision. Bonnie Nettles was his nurse at the time. They became convinced they were “the two” mentioned in The Book of Revelation 11:3. "And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.”
They began to attract followers. The entire group committed suicide by taking cyanide and arsenic, phenobarbital mixed with pineapple juice, and finally vodka. All were dressed in similar black attire and tennis shoes, with the armband patches that said “Heaven’s Gate Away Team”.
A native of Texas, Applewhite attended several universities and, as a young man, served in the United States Army. After finishing school he taught music at the University of Alabama. He later returned to Texas, where he led choruses and served as the chair of the music department at the University in Houston, Texas. He left the school in 1970, citing emotional turmoil. His father's death a year later brought on severe depression. In 1972, he developed a close friendship with Bonnie Nettles, a nurse and together, they discussed mysticism at length and concluded that they were called as divine messengers. They operated a bookstore and teaching center for a short while, and then began to travel around the U.S. in 1973 to spread their views. They only gained one convert. In 1975, he was arrested for failing to return a rental car and was jailed for 6 months where he further developed his theology.
After his release, he traveled to California and Oregon with Nettles, eventually gaining a group of committed followers. he and Nettles told their followers that they would be visited by extraterrestrials who would provide them with new bodies. He initially stated that he and his followers would physically ascend to a spaceship, where their bodies would be transformed, but later, he came to believe that their bodies were the mere containers of their souls, which would later be placed into new bodies.
The group received an influx of funds in the late 1970s, which it used to pay housing and other expenses. In 1985, Nettles died, leaving Applewhite distraught and challenging his views on physical ascension. In the early 1990s the group took more steps to publicize their theology. In 1996, they learned of the approach of Comet Hale–Bopp and rumors of an accompanying spaceship. They concluded that this spaceship was the vessel that would take their spirits on board for a journey to another planet. Believing that their souls would ascend to the spaceship and be given new bodies, the group members committed mass suicide in their mansion. A media circus followed the discovery of their bodies. In the aftermath, commentators and academics discussed how Applewhite persuaded people to follow his commands, including suicide. His followers' willingness to commit suicide were attributed to his skill as a manipulator and their willingness was due to their faith in the narrative that he constructed.
Marshall Applewhite was born in Texas. His father was a Presbyterian minister. He became very religious as a child. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1952 and subsequently enrolled at Union Presbyterian Seminary to study theology, hoping to become a minister. He married Anne around that time, and they later had 2 children.
Early in his seminary studies, he decided to leave the school to pursue a career in music, becoming the music director of a Presbyterian church in North Carolina. In 1954, he was drafted by the United States Army and served in Austria and New Mexico as a member of the Army Signal Corps. He left the military in 1956 and enrolled at the University of Colorado, where he earned a master's degree in music and focused on musical theater. He moved to New York City in an unsuccessful attempt to launch a professional singing career upon finishing his education. He then taught at the University of Alabama.
He lost his position there after pursuing a sexual relationship with a male student. His religious education was likely not supportive of same-sex relationships and he was subsequently frustrated by his sexual desires. He separated from his wife when she learned of the affair in 1965, and they divorced 3 years later.
After leaving the University of Alabama, Applewhite moved to Houston, Texas, in 1965 to teach. His students regarded him as an engaging speaker and a stylish dresser. He served as chair of the music department; he also became a locally popular singer, serving as the choral director of an Episcopal church and performing with the Houston Grand Opera. In Texas, he was briefly openly gay but also pursued a relationship with a young woman, who left him under pressure from her family, greatly upsetting him. He resigned from the University in 1970, citing depression and other emotional problems. This departure was prompted by another affair between Applewhite and a student. He was often mentally jumbled and disorganized near the end of his employment.
In 1971, Applewhite briefly moved to New Mexico, where he operated a delicatessen. He was popular with customers but decided to return to Texas later that year. His father died around that time. The loss took a significant emotional toll on him, causing severe depression. His debts mounted, forcing him to borrow money from friends. In 1972, Applewhite met Bonnie Nettles, a nurse with an interest in theosophy – the collection of mystical and occulist philosophies, and in Biblical prophecy. The 2 quickly became close friends. He felt like he had known her for a long time and concluded that they had met in a past life. She told him their meeting had been foretold to her by extraterrestrials, persuading him that he had a divine assignment. By that time, he had begun to investigate alternatives to traditional Christian doctrine, including astrology. He had a schizophrenic episode around this time. He had several visions, including one in which he was told that he was chosen for a role like that of Jesus.
Applewhite soon began to live with Nettles. Although they cohabited, their relationship was not a sexual one, fulfilling his longtime wish to have a deep and loving, yet platonic, relationship. She was married with 2 children, but after she became close with him, her husband divorced her, and she lost custody of her children. Applewhite permanently broke off contact with his family. He saw Nettles as his soulmate and she had a strong influence on him.
Applewhite and Nettles opened a bookstore known as the Christian Arts Center, which carried books from a variety of spiritual backgrounds. They launched a venture to teach classes on mysticism and theosophy. They closed these businesses a short time later. In 1973, they resolved to travel to teach others about their beliefs and drove throughout the Southwest and Western U.S. While traveling, they had little money and occasionally resorted to selling their blood or working odd jobs for much-needed funds. They subsisted solely on bread rolls at times, often camped out, and sometimes did not pay their lodging bills. One of their friends from Houston corresponded with them and agreed to accept their teachings and in 1974 she became their first convert.
While traveling, Applewhite and Nettles pondered the life of St. Francis of Assisi and read works by authors including Helena Blavatsky, R. D. Laing, and Richard Bach. They kept a King James Version of the Bible with them and studied several passages from the New Testament, focusing on teachings about Christology, asceticism- the abstinence from sensual pleasures, and eschatology.- the study of the “end times“. Applewhite also read science fiction, including works by Robert A.Heinlein and Arthur C.Clarke.
By 1974, Applewhite and Nettles' beliefs had solidified into a basic outline. They concluded that they had been chosen to fulfill biblical prophecies, and that they had been given higher-level minds than other people. They wrote a pamphlet that described Jesus' reincarnation as a Texan, a thinly veiled reference to Applewhite. Furthermore, they concluded that they were the 2 witnesses described in the Book of Revelation and occasionally visited churches or other spiritual groups to speak of their identities, often referring to themselves as "The Two", or "The UFO Two". They believed that they would be killed and then restored to life and, in view of others, transported onto a spaceship. This event, which they referred to as "the Demonstration", was to prove their claims. To their dismay, these ideas were poorly received.
In 1974, Applewhite was arrested for failing to return a car that he had rented. He was jailed for 6 months. At the time, he maintained that he had been "divinely authorized" to keep the car. While jailed, he pondered theology and subsequently abandoned discussion of occult topics, in favor of extraterrestrials and evolution. After his release, he and Nettles resolved to contact extraterrestrials and they sought like-minded followers. They published advertisements for meetings, where they recruited disciples, whom they called "crew". At the events, they purported to represent beings from another planet, the "Next Level", who sought participants for an experiment. They claimed that those who agreed to take part in the experiment would be brought to a higher evolutionary level. He and Nettles referred to themselves as "Guinea" and "Pig". Applewhite described his role as a "lab instructor" and served as the primary speaker, while Nettles occasionally interjected clarifying remarks or corrections. The 2 seldom personally spoke with attendees, only taking phone numbers with which they could contact them. They initially named their organization the Anonymous Sexaholics Celibate Church, but it soon became known as the Human Individual Metamorphosis.
Applewhite believed in the ancient astronaut hypothesis, which claimed that extraterrestrials had visited humanity in the past and placed humans on Earth and would return to collect a select few. He often discussed extraterrestrials using phrases from Star Trek and stated that aliens communicated with him through the show.
Applewhite and Nettles sent advertisements to groups in California and were invited to speak to New Age devotees there in 1975. At one meeting, they persuaded about half of the 50 attendees to follow them. They also focused on college campuses. 30 people left their homes to follow the pair, prompting interest from media outlets. The coverage was negative. Some former members mocked the group and leveled accusations of brainwashing against Applewhite and Nettles. He and Nettles denied connection with the New Age movement, viewing it as a human creation. Their recruitment success was attributed to their cherry-picked mix of beliefs and the way that they deviate from typical New Age teachings. They discussed literal spaceships while retaining familiar language. Most of their disciples were young and interested in occultism or otherwise lived outside of mainstream society. They came from a variety of religious backgrounds, including Eastern religions and Scientology. Most were well versed in New Age teachings, allowing Applewhite and Nettles to convert them easily.
He thought that his followers would reach a higher level of being, changing like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, an example used in almost all of their early literature. Applewhite contended that this would be a biological change into a different species, casting his teachings as scientific truth in line with secular naturalism. He emphasized to his early followers that he was not speaking metaphorically, often using the words "biology" and "chemistry" in his statements. By the mid-1970s, he attempted to avoid the use of the term "religion", seeing it as inferior to science. Although he dismissed religion as unscientific, he sometimes emphasized the need for faith in the aliens' abilities to transform them.
By 1975, Applewhite and Nettles had taken the names "Bo" and "Peep". They had about 70 followers and saw themselves as shepherds tending a flock. He believed that complete separation from Earthly desires was a prerequisite of ascension to the Next Level and emphasized passages in the New Testament in which Jesus spoke about forsaking worldly attachments. Members were consequently instructed to renounce friends, family, media, drugs, alcohol, jewelry, facial hair, and sexuality. Furthermore, they were required to adopt biblical names. Applewhite and Nettles soon told them to adopt two-syllable names that ended in "ody" and had three consonants in the first syllable. He stated that these names emphasized that his followers were spiritual children. Applewhite, Nettles, and their followers lived a "quasi-nomadic lifestyle". They usually stayed at remote campgrounds and did not speak about their beliefs. Applewhite and Nettles ceased having public meetings in 1975 and spent little time teaching doctrine to their converts. The leaders also had little contact with their dispersed followers, many of whom renounced their allegiance.
Applewhite and Nettles feared that they would be assassinated, and taught their followers that their deaths would be similar to those of the 2 witnesses of the Book of Revelation. They later explained to their followers that the former's treatment by the press was a form of assassination and had fulfilled their prophecy. He took a materialistic view of the Bible, seeing it as a record of extraterrestrial contact with humanity. He drew heavily from the Book of Revelation, although he avoided traditional theological terminology and took a somewhat negative tone towards Christianity. He only lectured about a small number of verses and never tried to develop a system of theology. By early 1976, they had settled on the names "Do" and "Ti". He stated that these were meaningless names.
They promised their followers a UFO visit. Nettles later announced that the visit had been canceled. They then split their followers into small groups, which they referred to as "Star Clusters".
From 1976-1979, the group lived in campgrounds, usually in the Rocky Mountains or Texas. They began to place greater demands on their followers' loosely structured lives, which improved membership retention. They typically communicated with their disciples in writing or through assistants. Increasingly, they emphasized that they were the only source of truth, the idea that members could receive individual revelations was rejected in an attempt to prevent schisms. He also sought to prevent close friendships among his followers, fearing that this could lead to insubordination.
They insisted that their followers practice what they referred to as "flexibility": strict obedience to their often shifting requests. The 2 leaders limited the group's contacts with those outside the movement, even some who may have been interested in joining, ostensibly to prevent infiltration from hostile parties. He instructed his disciples to be like children or pets in their submission - their sole responsibility was to obey their leaders. Members were encouraged to constantly seek his advice and often ask themselves what their leaders would do when making a decision.
To his followers, he did not seem dictatorial. Many of them found him laid back and fatherly. He mastered the fine art of religious entertainment, noting that many of his disciples seemed to enjoy their service. He organized seemingly arbitrary rituals that were intended to instill a sense of discipline in his followers. He referred to these tasks as "games". He also watched science-fiction television programs with the rest of the group. Rather than issue direct commands, he attempted to express his preferences and offer his disciples a choice. He emphasized that students were free to disobey if they chose. It was in effect an illusion of choice. In practice, this made their followers completely dependent upon them.
In the late 1970s, the group received a large sum of money, possibly an inheritance of a member or donations of followers' income. This capital was used to rent houses, initially in Denver and later in Dallas. They had about 40 followers then and lived in 3 houses. The leaders usually had their own house. The group was secretive about their lifestyle, covering their windows. They arranged their followers' lifestyles as a boot camp that would prepare them for the "Next Level".
Referring to their house as a "craft", they regimented the lives of their disciples to the minute. Students who were not committed to this lifestyle were encouraged to leave. Departing members were given financial assistance. He wanted "quality over quantity" in his followers, although he occasionally spoke about gaining many converts. They sometimes made sudden, drastic changes to the group.
On one occasion in Texas, they told their followers of a forthcoming visitation from extraterrestrials and instructed them to wait outside all night, at which point they informed them that this had been merely a test. Members became desperate for his approval, which he used to control them. In 1980, they had about 80 followers, many of whom held jobs, often working with computers or as car mechanics. In 1982, They allowed their disciples to call their families. They further relaxed their control in 1983, permitting their followers to visit relatives on Mother's Day. They were only allowed short stays and were instructed to tell their families that they were studying computers at a monastery. These vacations were intended to placate families by demonstrating that the disciples remained with the group of their own accord.
In 1983, Nettles had an eye surgically removed as a result of cancer diagnosed several years earlier. She lived for 2 more years, dying in 1985. He told their followers that she had "traveled to the Next Level" because she had "too much energy to remain on Earth", abandoning her body to make the journey. His attempt to explain her death in the terms of the group's doctrine was successful, preventing the departure of all but one member.
Applewhite became very depressed. He claimed that Nettles still communicated with him, but he suffered from a crisis of faith. His students supported him during this time, greatly encouraging him. He then organized a ceremony in which he symbolically married his followers in an attempt to ensure unity. He told his followers that he had been left behind by Nettles because he still had more to learn - he felt that she occupied "a higher spiritual role" than he did. He began identifying her as "the Father" and often referred to her with male pronouns.
Applewhite began to emphasize a strict hierarchy, teaching that his students needed his guidance, as he needed the guidance of the "Next Level". His followers believed that a relationship with him was the only way to salvation. He encouraged his followers to see him as Christ. The group's previous focus on individual choice was replaced with an emphasis on his role as a mediator. He maintained some aspects of their scientific teachings, but, in the 1980s, the group became more like a religion in its focus on faith and submission to authority.
After Nettles' death, He also altered his view of ascension. Previously, he had taught that the group would physically ascend from the Earth and that death caused reincarnation. But the death of Nettles which left behind an unchanged, corporeal body forced him to say that the ascension could be spiritual. He then concluded that her spirit had traveled to a spaceship and received a new body and that he and his followers would do the same. In his view, the Biblical heaven was actually a planet on which highly evolved beings dwelt, and physical bodies were required to ascend there. He believed that once they reached the "Next Level", they would facilitate evolution on other planets. He emphasized that Jesus, whom he believed was an extraterrestrial, came to Earth, was killed, and bodily rose from the dead before being transported onto a spaceship.
According to his doctrine, Jesus was a gateway to heaven but had found humanity unready to ascend when he first came to the Earth. He then claimed that there was an opportunity for humans to reach the "Next Level" every 2 millennia, and the early 1990s would therefore provide the first opportunity to reach the Kingdom of Heaven since the time of Jesus. His beliefs were based on the Christian Bible but were interpreted through the lens of belief in alien contact with humanity.
Applewhite taught that he was a walk-in, a concept that had gained popularity in the New Age movement during the late 1970s. Walk-ins were said to be higher beings who took control of adult bodies to teach humanity. This concept informed his view of resurrection. He believed that his group's souls were to be transported to a spaceship, where they would enter other bodies. He abandoned the metaphor of a butterfly in favor of describing the body as a mere container, a vehicle that souls could enter and exit. This dualism may have been the product of the Christology that he learned as a young man. The group's teachings had Christian elements that were basically grafted on to a New Age matrix.
In the wake of Nettles' death, he became increasingly paranoid, fearing a conspiracy against his group. In the mid-1980s, He avoided new converts, worrying that they were infiltrators. He feared a government raid on their home and spoke highly of the Jewish defenders of Masada in ancient Israel who showed total resistance to the Roman Empire. Increasingly, he began to discuss the Apocalypse, comparing the Earth to an overgrown garden and humanity to a failed experiment. In accordance with the garden metaphor, he stated that the Earth would be "spaded under". His teaching about the Earth's recycling is similar to the cyclical perspective of time found in Buddhism.
He also utilized New Age concepts, but he differed from that movement by predicting that apocalyptic, rather than Utopian, changes would soon occur on Earth. He contended that most humans had been brainwashed by Lucifer, but that his followers could break free of this control. He specifically cited sexual urges as the work of Lucifer. He stated that there were evil extraterrestrials, whom he referred to as "Luciferians", who sought to thwart his mission. He argued that many prominent moral teachers and advocates of political correctness were actually Luciferians. This theme emerged in 1988, possibly in response to the lurid alien abduction stories that were proliferating at the time.
In the late 1980s, the group kept a low profile; few people knew it still existed. In 1988, they mailed a document that detailed their beliefs to a variety of New Age organizations. The mailing contained information about their history and advised people to read several books, which primarily focused on Christian history and UFOs. With the exception of the 1988 document, Applewhite's group remained inconspicuous until 1992 when they recorded a 12-part video series which was broadcast via satellite. This series echoed many of the teachings of the 1988 update, although it introduced a "universal mind" of which its hearers could partake. Over the course of the group's existence, several hundred people joined and left. In the early 1990s, their membership dwindled, numbering as few as 26; these defections gave him a sense of urgency.
In 1993, the group took the name "Total Overcomers Anonymous". They then spent $30,000 to publish a full-page advertisement that warned of catastrophic judgment to befall the Earth. Its publication led about 20 former members to rejoin the group. This, along with a series of public lectures in 1994, caused membership to double from its nadir at the beginning of the decade. By this time, Applewhite did not regiment his disciples' lives as strictly as he had and spent less time with them.
In the early 1990s, Applewhite posted some of his teachings on the Internet, but he was stung by the resulting criticism. That year, he first spoke of the possibility of suicide as a way to reach the "Next Level". He explained that everything "human" had to be forsaken, including the human body, before one could ascend. The organization was then renamed "Heaven's Gate". In 1995, the group lived in a rural part of New Mexico. They purchased 16 hectares (100m x 1600m) and built a compound, which they referred to as the "Earth ship", using tires and lumber. He hoped to establish a monastery. This proved to be a difficult endeavor, particularly for the aging Applewhite. He was in poor health and, at one point, feared that he had cancer. His active leadership of the group probably led to severe fatigue in his last years. The winter was very cold, and they abandoned the plan. Afterwards, they lived in several houses in the San Diego area.
The group increasingly focused on the suppression of sexual desire. Applewhite and 7 others opted for surgical castration. They initially had difficulty finding a willing surgeon, but eventually found one in Mexico. In his view, sexuality was one of the most powerful forces that bound humans to their bodies and thus hindered their efforts to evolve to the "Next Level". He taught that Next Level beings had no reproductive organs but that Luciferian beings had genders. He also cited a verse in the New Testament that said there would not be marriage in heaven. In addition, he required members to adopt similar clothing and haircuts, possibly to reinforce that they were a non-sexual family.
In 1996, they recorded 2 video messages in which they offered their viewers a "last chance to evacuate Earth". Around the same time, they learned of the approach of Comet Hale–Bopp. He now believed that Nettles was aboard a spaceship trailing the comet, and that she planned to rendezvous with them. He told his followers that the vessel would transport them to an heavenly destination, and that there was a government conspiracy to suppress word of the craft. In addition, he stated that his deceased followers would be taken by the vessel as well, a belief that resembled the Christian “end time“ event doctrine.
A year later, the group isolated themselves and recorded farewell statements. Many members praised him in their final messages. He recorded a video shortly before his death, in which he termed the suicides the "final exit" of the group and remarked, "We do in all honesty hate this world".
Most members took barbiturates and alcohol and then placed bags over their heads. A bag that contained a few dollars and a form of identification was placed beside most bodies. The deaths occurred over 3 days. He was one of the last 4 to die. 3 assistants helped him commit suicide, then killed themselves. An anonymous tip led the sheriff's department to search the mansion. They found 39 bodies. It was the largest group suicide involving U.S. citizens since the 1978 mass suicide of 920 Americans in Jonestown, Guyana. Applewhite's body was found seated on the bed of the mansion's master bedroom. The deaths provoked a media circus. His final message was widely broadcast. They were willing to follow Applewhite in suicide because they had become totally dependent upon him, and hence were poorly suited for life in his absence. His students had made a long-term commitment to him. Most of the dead had been members for about 20 years.
Members of the group killed themselves because they believed the narrative that he had constructed. They were motivated to commit suicide because they saw it as a way to demonstrate that they had conquered the fear of death and truly believed him.
Applewhite was compared to Shoko Asahara, the founder of Aum Shinrikyo. He was equally controlling, his paranoia and megalomania were gentler yet ever present. Shoko Asahara was the founder of the Japanese doomsday cult group Aum Shinrikyo. Asahara was convicted for being the mastermind behind the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway and several other crimes, for which he was sentenced to death in 2004. In 2012, his execution was postponed due to further arrests of Aum Shinrikyo members.
Asahara was born into a large, poor family. Afflicted at birth with infantile glaucoma, he lost all sight in his left eye and went partially blind in his right eye at a young age, and was thus enrolled in a school for the blind. Asahara graduated in 1977 and turned to the study of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, which were common careers for the blind in Japan. He married the following year and eventually fathered 12 children. He dedicated his free time to the study of various religious concepts.
In 1987, Asahara started Aum Shinrikyo, a monastic order where members renounce worldly pursuits to devote themself fully to spiritual works. Many lay followers joined. Asahara gained credibility by appearing on TV and on magazine covers. He gradually attained a following of believers and began being invited to lecture at universities and began writing books describing his beliefs. The doctrine of Aum Shinrikyo is based on Buddist scriptures, the Bible, and other texts.
In 1992 Asahara published "Declaring Myself the Christ", within which he declared himself Christ. His purported mission was to take others' sins upon himself, and he claimed he could transfer spiritual power to his followers. He also saw dark conspiracies everywhere, promulgated by the Jews, the Freemasons, the British Royal Family, and rival Japanese religions. He outlined a doomsday prophecy, which included a third World War, and described a final conflict culminating in a nuclear "Armageddon", borrowing the term from the Book of Revelation.
In 1995, members of Aum Shinrikyo attacked the Tokyo subway with the nerve gas sarin. 13 people died and thousands more suffered ill effects. Dozens of disciples were arrested, Aum's facilities were raided, and the court issued an order for Asahara's arrest. Asahara gave orders to attack the Tokyo Subway in order to overthrow the government and install himself in the position of Emperor of Japan.
Both marriage and sexual relations between pupils were forbidden by Asahara, but Aum believed that the founder was exempt from this rule and was permitted to have sexual relationships with many women for the integrity of initiation.
Applewhite and Nettles were similar to John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton, who founded Muggletonianism, a millennialist movement in 17th century England.
Reeve (1608–58) was an English plebeian prophet who believed the voice of God had instructed him to found a Third Commission in preparation for the last days of earth. He and his followers came to be known as Muggletonians, named after his cousin Muggleton. The pair saw themselves as the last prophets and the 2 witnesses foretold in the Book of Revelation.
Reeve was born in Wiltshire. His father, Walter, was styled a gentleman who fell on hard times. As a result, John and his elder brother, William, were apprenticed tailors in the City of London. "A Transcendent Spiritual Treatise" was the first Muggletonian book. It is written in the first person singular by Reeve but appears under the names of both Reeve and Muggleton as "the last true witnesses". It purports to be a message from Jesus to the elect by way of his last prophet and is a forerunner to God's reappearance in the skies above earth on the Day of Judgment.
Reeve embarked upon his career as God's chosen prophet by issuing, in 1653, an 8-page pamphlet. Reeve pronounced sentence of eternal damnation on 2 classes of people:
- those who heard of his commission but despised it, and
- those who continued to preach the message of the existing churches.
Reeve's pamphlet was rapidly making enemies among those who supported Oliver Cromwell's policy of religious toleration as well as those bitterly opposed to it, and for the same reason in both cases. What was the point, the argument ran, of granting toleration to minorities if they then used it as licence to vilify everyone else?
In 1650, Reeve and Muggleton were arrested under the Blasphemy Act. Reeve was charged with self-deification, cursing Cromwell and denying the Trinity. Reeve and Muggleton were remanded to Newgate prison to be tried by jury. They were convicted on a single count of denying the Trinity and sentenced to 6 months.
When the pair were released, they found that they had a following. After Reeve's death, Muggleton became the leader of the group as the sole surviving prophet. Muggleton introduced one novelty into a faith largely of Reeve's devising. This was the principle that God took no notice of everyday doings in human affairs.
Johnny Cash was an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, actor, and author. He is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 90 million records worldwide. Although primarily remembered as a country music icon, his genre-spanning songs and sound embraced rock and roll, rockabilly, blues, folk, and gospel. Cash was known for his deep, calm bass-baritone voice, the distinctive sound of his band, which is characterized by train-sound guitar rhythms, a rebelliousness coupled with an increasingly somber and humble demeanor, free prison concerts, and a trademark, all-black stage wardrobe, which earned him the nickname "The Man in Black."
- “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down living in the hopeless hungry side of town.
- I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime but is there because he`s a victim of the times.
- I wear the black for those who never read or listened to the words that Jesus said about the road to happiness thru love and charity.
- I wear it for the sick and lonely old, for the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold.
- I wear the black in mourning for the the lives that could have been.
- I wear it for the thousands who have died believing that the lord was on their side.
- I wear it for the hundred thousand who have died believing that we all were on their side.
- I love to wear a rainbow every day and tell the world that everything is OK“.
Much of Cash's music contained themes of sorrow, moral tribulation, and redemption. Johnny Cash started working in cotton fields at the age of 5, singing along with his family while working. His family's economic and personal struggles during the Great Depression inspired many of his songs, especially those about other people facing similar difficulties. He had sympathy for the poor and working class. He was very close to his older brother Jack. When Cash was 12, his brother was pulled into a whirling saw in the mill where he worked and was almost cut in two. He suffered for more than a week before dying. Cash often spoke of the horrible guilt he felt over this incident. His father was away that morning and his mother urged Jack to skip work and go fishing with his brother. Jack insisted on working since the family needed the money.
Cash's early memories were dominated by gospel music and radio. Taught guitar by his mother and a childhood friend, Cash began playing and writing songs at the age of 12. When young, Cash had a high tenor voice, before becoming a bass-baritone after his voice changed.
Cash enlisted in the United States Air Force when he was 18 and was sent to Germany as a Morse Code operator intercepting Soviet Army transmissions. In 1951, while in Air Force training, Cash met 17-year-old Vivian Liberto. They dated for 3 weeks until Cash was deployed to Germany for a 3-year tour. During that time, the couple exchanged hundreds of pages of love letters. One month after his discharge, they were married and had 4 daughters. As his career was taking off in the late 1950s, Cash started drinking heavily and became addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates, using them to stay awake during tours.
Liberto filed for divorce in 1966 because of Cash's severe drug and alcohol abuse, as well as constant touring, affairs with other women, and his close relationship with June Carter. Cash met singer June Carter while on tour, and the 2 became infatuated with each other. In 1968, 13 years after they first met backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, Cash proposed to June, during a live performance. The couple married and had one child together. Cash and Carter continued to work, raise their children, create music, and tour together for 35 years until June's death in 2003. Throughout their marriage, June attempted to keep Cash off of amphetamines, often taking his drugs and flushing them down the toilet. June remained with him even throughout his multiple admissions for rehab treatment and years of drug abuse. After June's death, Cash believed that his only reason for living was his music.
Cash began performing concerts at prisons starting in the late 1950s. He played his first famous prison concert in 1958 at San Quentin State Prison. In 1969 Cash became an international hit when he eclipsed even the Beatles by selling 6.5 million albums. Cash enjoyed booking mainstream performers as guests; including Neil Young, Louis Armstrong, Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers, James Taylor, Ray Charles, Roger Miller, Roy Orbison, Derek and the Dominos, Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson. His friendship with Billy Graham led to Cash's production of a film about the life of Jesus. Cash viewed the film as a statement of his personal faith rather than a means of proselytizing.
June Carter died in 2003, at the age of 73. Cash died of complications from diabetes less than 4 months after his wife's death. He was 71 years old.
Charles Manson was an American criminal and cult leader. In the late 1960s, he formed what became known as the Manson Family, a quasi-commune in California. Manson's followers committed a series of 9 murders in 1969. In 1971 he was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murders all of which were carried out at his instruction by members of the group.
Manson was born in a dysfunctional family to an unmarried 16-year-old. His father had a local reputation as a con artist and left before Manson was born. His mother was sentenced to 5 years for charges of robbery and Manson was placed in the home of an aunt and uncle. Manson began stealing from stores and from his home. In 1947, when Manson was 13 years old, he was sent to a school for male delinquents run by Catholic priests. He was raped there by other students with the encouragement of a staff member. He developed a self-defense technique he later called the "insane game", in which he would screech, grimace and wave his arms to convince aggressors that he was insane when he was physically unable to defend himself. After many failed attempts to break out of the juvenile correctional facility, he escaped with 2 other boys in 1951.
Manson supported himself by burgling stores at night, and rented a room. He was eventually caught, and a sympathetic judge sent him to Boys Town, a juvenile facility in Nebraska. After 4 days, he stole a car and obtained a gun, which he used to rob a grocery store and a casino.
On a psychiatrist's recommendation, Manson was transferred in 1951 to a minimum security institution. His aunt visited him and told administrators she would let him stay at her house and would help him find work. He was caught raping a boy at knife-point. He was transferred to the Federal Reformatory in Virginia, where he committed a further 8 serious disciplinary offenses, 3 involving homosexual acts. In 1955, when he was 21 years old, he married a hospital waitress. 3 months after he and his pregnant wife arrived in Los Angeles in a car he had stolen in Ohio, Manson was again charged with a federal crime, for taking the vehicle across state lines and was sentenced to 3 years' imprisonment. While he was in prison, his wife gave birth to their son. In and out of prison by the time of his release in 1967, he had spent more than half of his 32 years in prisons and other institutions.
In the late 1960s, Manson attracted a quasi-communal cult based in California that was later dubbed the "Manson Family". At the time the Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict who had spent half of his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offenses. Before the murders, he was a singer-songwriter on the fringe of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly through a chance association with the drummer and founding member of the Beach Boys.
Manson believed in what he called "Helter Skelter", a term he took from the Beatles' song of the same name to describe an impending apocalyptic race war. This war he claimed would be won by the African Americans, but they would soon turn to whites for leadership. Charles Manson and his cult would hide out during the war, emerging afterward to lead the victors.
To help instigate the race war, Manson ordered killings in the nearby area as a frame job for African-Americans. Nine people were murdered, including coffee heiress Abigail Folger and actress Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of Hollywood director Roman Polanski. Charles Manson was convicted and sentenced to death, but California banned the death penalty, so he lived decades in prison.
From the beginning of his notoriety, a pop culture arose around him in which he ultimately became an emblem of insanity, violence and the macabre. After Manson was charged with the crimes of which he was later convicted, recordings of songs written and performed by him were released commercially.
In 1971, Manson was sentenced to death. When the death penalty was ruled unconstitutional in 1972, he was re-sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
In 2017, Manson suffered from gastrointestinal bleeding and died at the age of 83.
Elvis Presley was an American singer, musician, and actor. Regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century, he is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King". Elvis was an early popularizer of rockabilly, an uptempo, back-beat driven fusion of country music and rhythm and blues. Elvis also popularized the 4-man group of guitars, bass, and drums. He added gospel, blues, and pop influences into his rock and roll/rockabilly sound.
His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of influences across color lines that coincided with the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, made him enormously popular and controversial.
Presley was born in Mississippi, and relocated to Tennessee with his family when he was 13 years old. His music career began there in 1954, when he recorded a song. Presley became close to both parents and formed an especially close bond with his mother. The family attended an Assembly of God church, where he found his initial musical inspiration. Presley's family lived in a largely African-American neighborhood and often relied on help from neighbors and government food assistance.
When Presley was 3, his family lost their home. His father was jailed for 8 months and Elvis moved in with relatives. Presley received only a C in music in eighth grade. When his music teacher informed him that he did not have an aptitude for singing. At age 10, Presley received his first guitar for his birthday even though he wished for a bicycle or a rifle. Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from 2 of his uncles and the new pastor at the family's church. He was usually too shy to perform openly, and was occasionally bullied by classmates who viewed him as a "mama's boy".
In 1950, he regularly began practicing guitar. Presley, who received no formal music training and could not read music, studied and played by ear. He also frequented record stores that provided jukeboxes and listening booths to customers. As a teenager, his musical interests were wide-ranging, and he was deeply informed about African American musical idioms as well as white ones. Many of his future recordings were inspired by local African-American musicians. By the time he graduated from high school in 1953, he had already singled out music as his future. After graduating from secondary school, he thought for a short time about joining a gospel group. He attempted to join a group who sang at the local church, but he was unsuccessful. He worked on an assembly line in his first job, which he quit after a few weeks because he disliked the work. He then decided to become an apprentice electrician.
In 1953, Elvis walked into the offices of Sun Records. He aimed to pay for a few minutes of studio time to record a 2-sided acetate disc: "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin". He intended the record as a gift for his mother. He chose Sun in the hope of being discovered. Asked by the receptionist what kind of singer he was, Presley responded, "I sing all kinds." When she pressed him on who he sounded like, he repeatedly answered, "I don't sound like nobody." He failed an audition for a local vocal quartet. He explained to his father, "They told me I couldn't sing." He was rejected and advised to stick to truck driving "because you're never going to make it as a singer".
The studio was always on the lookout for someone who could bring to a broader audience than the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun focused. The producer said "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars". Presley took his guitar and launched into a 1946 blues number. The producer quickly began taping; this was the sound he had been looking for. 3 days later, his song aired on radio and listeners began phoning in, eager to find out who the singer was, most assuming Presley was black.
He played publicly for the first time, still sporting his child-size guitar. A combination of his strong response to rhythm and nervousness at playing before a large crowd led Presley to shake his legs as he performed: his wide-cut pants emphasized his movements, causing young women in the audience to start screaming. During the instrumental parts, he would back off from the mike and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would just go wild. His movement was a natural thing, but he was also very conscious of what got a reaction. He'd do something one time and then he would expand on it real quick. Trading in his old guitar and seeing it promptly dispatched to the garbage, he purchased a much more expensive one. His trio began playing in new locales in Texas and in Arkansas. By 1955, his regular appearances, constant touring, and well-received record releases had made him a regional star.
His first single, "Heartbreak Hotel", was released in 1956 and became a number-one hit in the United States. After a series of successful network television appearances and chart-topping records, he was regarded as the leading figure of rock and roll.
In 1956, Presley made his film debut in "Love Me Tender". 2 years later he was drafted into military service. He resumed his recording career 2 years later producing some of his most commercially successful work before devoting much of the 1960s to making Hollywood films and their accompanying soundtrack albums, most of which were critically ridiculed.
Presley made his television debut and soon after, Sun had released 10 sides. His trio was joined by a drummer. Some of the songs were described as "R&B, jazz, country, negro, a curious blending of different musics. This blend of styles made it difficult for his music to find radio airplay. Many country-music disc jockeys would not play it because he sounded too much like a black artist and none of the rhythm-and-blues stations would touch him because he sounded too much like a hillbilly. The blend came to be known as rockabilly. The trio became a quartet when a drummer joined as a full member.
Several record companies had by then shown interest in signing him. A deal was struck with RCA Victor to acquire Presley's Sun contract. Still a minor, his father signed the contract. Songwriters were obliged to forgo one third of their customary royalties in exchange for having Presley perform their compositions. RCA began to heavily promote its new singer, and reissued many of his Sun recordings. In 1956, he made his first recordings for RCA enlisting a pianist, a guitarist and 3 background singers to fill out the sound.
Presley was brought to national television for 6 appearances over 2 months. His mother was worried about how the fans were reacting to Presley and had hardly been to any of her son's performances because she was worried he was going to get hurt and that he was “worked to death”. In 1956, Elvis purchased a one-story ranch-style house with 2-car attached garage in a quiet residential neighborhood in Memphis. The home was profiled in national magazines, and soon became a focal point for fans, media and celebrities to visit. Elvis lived here with his parents for a year.
Unlike many white artists who watered down the gritty edges of original R&B versions of songs in the '50s, Presley reshaped them. He not only injected the tunes with his own vocal character but also made guitar, not piano, the lead instrument. Presley began a 2-week residency in Las Vegas. The shows were poorly received by the conservative, middle-aged hotel guests. His show was described by one critic as being "like a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party". Amid his Vegas tenure, Presley, who had serious acting ambitions, signed a 7-year contract with Paramount Pictures. He began a tour of the Midwest in mid-May, taking in 15 cities in as many days.
Presley would often launch into a slow, grinding version accentuated with energetic, exaggerated body movements. His gyrations created a storm of controversy. Newspaper critics were outraged claiming that Presley had no discernible singing ability claiming that popular music "has reached its lowest depths in the 'grunt and groin' antics of Elvis who rotates his pelvis and gives an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos".
Ed Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation's most popular, declared him "unfit for family viewing". He was soon referred to as "Elvis the Pelvis". An urgent message on the letterhead of the local Catholic diocese's newspaper was sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It warned that "Presley is a definite danger to the security of the United States. His actions and motions were such as to rouse the sexual passions of teenager youth”. Many critics thought Presley was talent-less and absurd. Pressed on whether he had learned anything from the criticism to which he was being subjected, Presley responded:
"No, I haven't, I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong. I don't see how any type of music would have any bad influence on people when it's only music. I mean, how would rock 'n' roll music make anyone rebel against their parents?"
When he made an outdoor concert appearance in Memphis, he announced, "You know, those people in New York are not gonna change me none. I'm gonna show you what the real Elvis is like tonight." A judge in Florida ordered Presley to tame his act. Throughout the following performance, he largely kept still, except for wiggling his little finger suggestively in mockery of the order. Sullivan, despite his previous criticism of Elvis booked the singer for 3 appearances. The first in 1956, was seen by approximately 60 million viewers, a record 82.6 percent of the television audience. was filmed from only the waist up.
Sullivan later stated that Presley "got some kind of device hanging down below the crotch of his pants so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline of his cock. I think it's a Coke bottle. We just can't have this on a Sunday night. This is a family show!" The studio audience reacted in customary style - screaming. More than any other single event, it was this appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that made Presley a national celebrity.
Accompanying Presley's rise to fame, a cultural shift was taking place that he both helped inspire and came to symbolize. Igniting the biggest pop craze since Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra. Presley brought rock'n'roll into the mainstream of popular culture. Presley, more than anyone else, gave the young a belief in themselves as a distinct and somehow unified generation, the first in America ever to feel the power of an integrated youth culture. The audience response at Presley's live shows became increasingly fevered. National Guardsmen were added to the police security for crowd control.
Presley merchandise had brought in $22 million on top of his record sales, and he had placed more songs in the top 100 than any other artist since records were first charted. In his first full year at RCA, one of the music industry's largest companies, Presley had accounted for over 50 percent of the label's singles sales. Between film shoots and recording sessions, the singer also found time to purchase an 18-room mansion he called Gracland near Memphis for himself and his parents. Presley undertook 3 brief tours during the year, continuing to generate a crazed audience response.
In 1958, Elvis was drafted into the U.S. Army as a private and this caused a major media event. Hundreds of people descended on Presley as he stepped from the bus. Photographers then accompanied him into the fort. He announced that he was looking forward to his military stint, saying he did not want to be treated any differently from anyone else: "The Army can do anything it wants with me". After training, Presley was sent to Germany. While on maneuvers, he was introduced to amphetamines by a sergeant. He became practically evangelical about their benefits, not only for energy but for strength and weight loss as well, and many of his friends in the outfit joined him in indulging. The Army also introduced Presley to karate, which he seriously studied and later included in his live performances. He donated his Army pay to charity, purchased TV sets for the base, and bought an extra set of fatigues for everyone in his outfit. While in Germany, Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla and they married after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship. Presley returned to the United States in 1960, and was honorably discharged 3 days later with the rank of sergeant.
In 1968, following a 7-year break from live performances, he returned to the stage in an acclaimed televised comeback, which led to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string of highly profitable tours.
Presley was not only deeply opposed to recreational drugs, he also rarely drank. Several of his family members had been alcoholics, a fate he intended to avoid. In 1970, he engineered a meeting with President Nixon at the White House, where he expressed his patriotism and his contempt for the hippies, the growing drug culture, and the counterculture in general. Nixon expressed a belief that Presley could send a positive message to young people and that it was therefore important he "retain his credibility". Presley told Nixon that the Beatles, whose songs he regularly performed in concert during the era, exemplified what he saw as a trend of anti-Americanism and drug abuse in popular culture.
In 1971, an affair he had resulted, unbeknownst to him, in her pregnancy and an abortion. He often raised the possibility of her moving into Graceland, saying that he was likely to leave Priscilla. The Presleys separated in 1972 and 5 months later, Presley's new girlfriend, a songwriter and one-time Memphis beauty queen, moved in with him. Presley and his wife filed for divorce. He became depressed after the break up of his marriage and he never recovered. During a press conference in 1972, a reporter asked Presley whether or not he was satisfied with his image, he replied "Well, the human being is one thing. The image is another. It's very hard to live up to an image".
Twice during the year he overdosed on barbiturates, spending 3 days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first incident. Toward the end of 1973, he was hospitalized, semi-comatose from the effects of pethidine addiction. Presley felt that by getting drugs from a doctor, he wasn't the common everyday junkie getting something off the street. He had been prescribed more than 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines, and narcotics. Presley's condition declined precipitously. He was slurring and it was obvious he was drugged. It was obvious there was something terribly wrong with his body. It was so bad the words to the songs were barely intelligible. He could barely get through the introductions. Despite all that, Presley continued to play to sellout crowds. Presley had become a grotesque caricature of his sleek, energetic former self. Hugely overweight, his mind dulled by the pharmacopia he daily ingested, he was barely able to pull himself through his abbreviated concerts.
Just before another tour, Presley was unable to breathe and he died of drug overdose at the age of 42.
President Jimmy Carter issued a statement that credited Presley with having permanently changed the face of American popular culture. "His music and his personality, fusing the styles of white country and black rhythm and blues, permanently changed the face of American popular culture. His following was immense, and he was a symbol to people the world over of the vitality, rebelliousness, and good humor of his country."
Presley is one of the most celebrated and influential musicians of the 20th century. Commercially successful in many genres, including pop, blues and gospel, he is one of the best-selling artists in the history of recorded music, with estimated record sales of around 600 million units worldwide.
His magical raw, tough yet gentle emotive, and slurred vocal powers, staccato piano pieces, rhythmic blues and melodic spiritual gospel gave him a unique distinct characteristic style of music. He was often compared to a black man in white skin leaving singer and listener both emotionally wrung out by the time the song finally limps to an end. He was known for his mannerisms and his voice that had a very wide range of vocal color with a mixture of tenderness and poise. His voice was variable and unpredictable with an emotional range from tender whispers to sighs down to shouts, grunts, grumbles, and sheer gruffness that could move the listener from calmness and surrender, to fear. Presley was always able to duplicate the open, hoarse, ecstatic, screaming, shouting, wailing, reckless sound of the black rhythm-and-blues and gospel singers.
His visual and aural embodiment of sex owed much to African American sources. He achieved the cultural acknowledgment and commercial success largely denied his black peers. Despite people claiming he invented rock and roll, Presley claimed that "Rock 'n' roll has been around for many years. It used to be called rhythm and blues. Presley was the master of the sexual simile, treating his guitar as both phallus and girl. He was the man who brought overt blatant vulgar sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America.
Presley heralded the vastly expanded reach of celebrity in the era of mass communication. At the age of 21, within a year of his first appearance on American network television, he was one of the most famous people in the world. Leonard Bernstein the famous composer and conductor claimed that Elvis Presley was the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. "He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything - music, language, clothes. It's a whole new social revolution - the sixties came from it". Presley's name, image, and voice are instantly recognizable around the globe. He has inspired a legion of impersonators. In polls and surveys, he is recognized as one of the most important popular music artists and influential Americans.
John Lennon stated that nothing really affected him until he heard Elvis and if there hadn't been an Elvis, there wouldn't have been the Beatles.
John Lennon was an English singer, songwriter, musician, and peace activist who co-founded the Beatles, the most commercially successful band in the history of popular music. He and fellow member Paul McCartney formed a much-celebrated songwriting partnership. Along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, the group ascended to world-wide fame during the 1960s.
John Lennon was born during war-time England. His father was a merchant seaman who was hardly ever at home. After his aunt complained to Liverpool's Social Services, his mother Julia gave her and her husband, who were childless custody of Lennon and he spent his childhood and adolescence with them. Julia visited on a regular basis, and when John was 11 years old he often visited her where she played him Elvis Presley records and taught him the banjo. When John was 16, Julia bought him a guitar. John's aunt was skeptical of his claim that he would be famous one day, and she hoped that he would grow bored with music, often telling him, "The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it".
When John was 17 years old, Julia was struck and killed by a car. Lennon was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art where he acquired a reputation for disrupting classes and ridiculing teachers. He was threatened with expulsion for his behavior, which included sitting on a nude model's lap during a life drawing class. He was eventually thrown out of the college before his final year. At age 15, Lennon formed a band called the Quarrymen. Lennon first met Paul McCartney at their second performance and asked him to join. McCartney recommended his friend George Harrison to be the lead guitarist. Lennon thought that Harrison, then 14 years old was too young. Sutcliffe, Lennon's friend from art school, later joined as bassist. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Sutcliffe became "The Beatles" in early 1960. The band was desperately in need of a drummer and they asked Pete Best to join them. Lennon regularly took amphetamines as a stimulant during their long, overnight performances.
Brian Epstein managed the Beatles from 1962 until his untimely death in 1967. He had no prior experience managing artists, but he had a strong influence on the group's dress code and attitude on stage. Pete Best was replaced with drummer Ringo Starr. This completed the 4-piece line-up that would entertain millions of fans until the group's break-up in 1970. The other Beatles idolized John. He was like their own little Elvis. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest.
The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the UK early in 1963. During their Royal Variety Show performance that was attended by the Queen Mother and other British royalty, Lennon poked fun at his audience: "For our next song, I'd like to ask for your help. For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands... and the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry." After a year of Beatlemania in the UK, the group's historic 1964 US debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show marked their breakthrough to international stardom. A 2-year period of constant touring, movie-making, and songwriting followed. Lennon grew concerned that fans who attended Beatles concerts were unable to hear the music above the screaming of fans, and that the band's musicianship was beginning to suffer as a result. He was unknowingly introduced to LSD when a dentist, hosting a dinner party attended by Lennon, Harrison and their wives, spiked the guests' coffee with the drug. When they wanted to leave, their host revealed what they had taken, and strongly advised them not to leave the house because of the likely effects.
When their manager Epstein died, the band members became increasingly involved in business activities and in 1968 they formed Apple Corps, a multimedia corporation composed of Apple Records and several other subsidiary companies. Lennon's increased drug experimentation and growing preoccupation with Yoko Ono, combined with the Beatles' inability to agree on how the company should be run, left Apple in need of professional management. In 1969, Allen Klein, who had managed the Rolling Stones and other bands during the British Invasion was appointed as Apple's chief executive.
During the new year, the Nixon administration took what it called a "strategic counter-measure" against Lennon's anti-war and anti-Nixon propaganda. The administration embarked on what would be a 4 year attempt to deport him. Lennon was embroiled in a continuing legal battle with the immigration authorities, and he was denied permanent residency in the US. The issue wasn't resolved until 1976. He left Ono embarrassed after he had sex with a female guest and in 1973 they decided to separate. Soon after he was drinking heavily.
In 1977, he formally announced his break from music saying, "we have basically decided, without any great decision, to be with our baby as much as we can until we feel we can take time off to indulge ourselves in creating things outside of the family."
In 1980, Lennon and Ono returned to their Manhattan apartment when he was shot and died. He was 40 years old.
Jimi Hendrix was an American rock guitarist, singer, and songwriter. Although his mainstream career spanned only 4 years, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century considered the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music.
Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at the age of 15.
Hendrix was inspired musically by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored over driven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in utilizing the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began.
Hendrix had only sporadically used drugs, with his experimentation limited to cannabis, hashish, amphetamines and occasionally cocaine. After 1967, he regularly smoked cannabis and hashish, and used LSD and amphetamines, particularly while touring. By the time of his death few stars were as closely associated with the drug culture as Jimi.
Hendrix would often become angry and violent when he drank too much alcohol or when he mixed alcohol with drugs. Hendrix admitted he could not handle hard liquor, which set off a bottled-up anger, a destructive fury he almost never displayed otherwise.
Jimi Hendrix paternal grandmother was African American and one-quarter Cherokee. Hendrix's paternal grandfather was one of the wealthiest grain merchants in the area at that time. Both his parents struggled with alcohol, and often fought when intoxicated. The violence sometimes drove Hendrix to withdraw and hide in a closet in their home. The family frequently moved, staying in cheap hotels and apartments around Seattle. A shy and sensitive boy, he was deeply affected by his life experiences. He was victim of sexual abuse by a man in uniform.
In 1951, when Hendrix was 9 years old, his parents divorced. At Elementary School in Seattle during the mid-1950s, Hendrix's habit of carrying a broom with him to emulate a guitar gained the attention of the school's social worker. After more than a year of his clinging to a broom like a security blanket, she wrote a letter requesting school funding intended for underprivileged children, insisting that leaving him without a guitar might result in psychological damage. Her efforts failed, and his father refused to buy him a guitar.
In 1957, while helping his father with a side-job, Hendrix found a ukulele among the garbage that they were removing from an older woman's home. She told him that he could keep the instrument, which had only one string. Learning by ear, he played single notes, following along to Elvis Presley songs.
In mid-1958, at age 15, Hendrix acquired his first acoustic guitar, for $5. He earnestly applied himself, playing the instrument for several hours daily, watching others and getting tips from more experienced guitarists, and listening to blues artists such as Muddy Waters and B.B. King. He realized that he needed an electric guitar in order to continue. His father relented and bought him an electric guitar. Soon after he acquired the acoustic guitar, he formed his first band.
When Hendrix was 16, his mother developed cirrhosis of the liver, and died in 1958, Hendrix's father refused to take the children to attend their mother's funeral. He instead gave them shots of whiskey and instructed them that was how men were supposed to deal with loss.
Before Hendrix was 19 years old, law enforcement authorities had twice caught him riding in stolen cars. When given a choice between spending time in prison or joining the Army, he chose the latter and enlisted in 1961 as a paratrooper in the Airborne Division.
A fellow serviceman Cox heard Hendrix playing guitar. Intrigued by the proficient playing, which he described as a combination of "John Lee Hooker and Beethoven", Cox borrowed a bass guitar and the 2 jammed. Within a few weeks, they began performing at base clubs on the weekends with other musicians.
His personal conduct had begun to draw criticism from his superiors. They labeled him an unqualified marksman and often caught him napping while on duty and failing to report for bed checks. A report stated: "He has no interest whatsoever in the Army. Hendrix will never come up to the standards required of a soldier. I feel that the military service will benefit if he is discharged as soon as possible." In 1962, Hendrix was honorably discharged on the basis of unsuitability.
Soon afterward, he moved to Tennessee and began playing gigs. Within months, Hendrix had earned 3 UK top 10 hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind Cries Mary".
In 1964, feeling he had outgrown the circuit artistically, and frustrated by having to follow the rules of bandleaders, Hendrix decided to venture out on his own. Hoping to secure a career opportunity, he played the Harlem club circuit and sat in with various bands.
In 1966 Hendrix met Eric Clapton. Clapton later commented: "He asked if he could play a couple of numbers. I said, 'Of course', but I had a funny feeling about him." Hendrix took the stage and performed. Clapton described the performance: "He played just about every style you could think of, and not in a flashy way. I mean he did a few of his tricks, like playing with his teeth and behind his back, but it wasn't in an upstaging sense at all, and that was it... He walked off, and my life was never the same again".
Hendrix was not only something utterly new musically, but an entirely original vision of what a black American entertainer should and could look like. He ended one concert by destroying his guitar and tossing pieces of it out to the audience. At another concert, he set his guitar on fire. Hendrix's burning of his guitar became an iconic image in rock history and brought him national attention. "I decided to destroy my guitar at the end of a song as a sacrifice. You sacrifice things you love. I love my guitar."
He achieved fame in the U.S. after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
By 1969, Hendrix was the world's highest-paid rock musician. He headlined the Woodstock Music and Art Fair that included many of the most popular bands of the time. Before arriving at the engagement, Hendrix heard reports that the size of the audience had grown to epic proportions, which gave him cause for concern as he did not enjoy performing for large crowds. He was an important draw for the event, and although he accepted substantially less money for the appearance than his usual fee, he was the festival's highest-paid performer. As his scheduled time slot of midnight on Sunday drew closer, he indicated that he preferred to wait and close the show in the morning. The band took the stage around 8:00a.m. By the time of their set, Hendrix had been awake for more than 3 days. The audience, which peaked at an estimated 400,000 people, was now reduced to 30-40,000, many of whom had waited to catch a glimpse of Hendrix before leaving during his performance. Hendrix's performance featured a rendition of the U.S. national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner", during which he used copious amounts of amplifier feedback, distortion, and sustain to replicate the sounds made by rockets and bombs. Although contemporary political pundits described his interpretation as a statement against the Vietnam War, 3 weeks later Hendrix explained its meaning: "We're all Americans... it was like 'Go America!' We play it the way the air is in America today. The air is slightly static, see".
Hendrix created sounds with his guitar that sonically represented warfare, including rockets, bombs, and diving planes. Hendrix performed in public for the last time during an informal jam. His performance was uncharacteristically subdued; he quietly played backing guitar, and refrained from the exaggerated over emotional style that people had come to expect from him.
He died less than 48 hours later of drug overdose. He was only 28 years old.
Freddy Mercury was a British singer, songwriter and record producer, best known as the lead vocalist of the rock band Queen. He was known for his flamboyant stage persona and 3-octave vocal range. Mercury wrote numerous hits for Queen, including "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "We Are the Champions". He led a solo career while performing with Queen, and occasionally served as a producer and guest musician for other artists.
Mercury was born descent in the Sultanate of Zanzibar situated in the Indian Ocean, and grew up there and in India before moving with his family to England in his teens. He formed Queen in 1970 with a guitarist and a drummer. He is one of the greatest singers in the history of popular music.
Mercury spent most of his childhood in India and began taking piano lessons at the age of 7 In 1954, at the age of 8, Mercury was sent to study at a British-style boarding school for boys near Bombay. At the age of 12, he formed a school band, The Hectics. The only music he listened to, and played, was western pop music.
At the age of 17, Mercury and his family fled from Zanzibar for safety reasons due to the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution in which thousands of Arabs and Indians were killed. The family moved to England where he studied art. Following graduation, Mercury joined a series of bands and sold second-hand clothes with a girlfriend. He also held a job at Heathrow Airport. He was a quiet and shy young man who showed a great deal of interest in music and joined various bands that failed to take-off and broke up.
Mercury chose the name "Queen" for a new band he started. Mercury wrote 10 of the 17 songs on Queen's Greatest Hits album. The most notable aspect of his songwriting involved the wide range of genres that he used, which included, among other styles, rockabilly, progressive rock, heavy metal, gospel and disco. Mercury tended to write musically complex material. For example, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is acyclic in structure and comprises dozens of chords.
Mercury was noted for his live performances, which were often delivered to stadium audiences around the world. He displayed a highly theatrical style that often evoked a great deal of participation from the crowd.
One of Mercury's most notable performances with Queen took place at Live Aid in 1985. Queen's performance at the event has since been voted by a group of music executives as the greatest live performance in the history of rock music. The results were aired on a television program called "The World's Greatest Gigs".
Over the course of his career, Mercury performed an estimated 700 concerts in countries around the world with Queen. A notable aspect of Queen concerts was the large scale involved. In 1986, Queen played behind the Iron Curtain when they performed to a crowd of 80,000 in Budapest, in what was one of the biggest rock concerts ever held in Eastern Europe. Mercury's final live performance with Queen took place in 1986 in England and drew an attendance of 160,000.
As a young boy in India, Mercury received formal piano training up to the age of 9. Later on, while living in London, he learned guitar. Much of the music he liked was guitar-oriented. His favorite artists at the time were The Who, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, and Led Zeppelin, an English rock band formed in London in 1968. The band's heavy, guitar-driven sound has led them to be cited as one of the progenitors of heavy metal. Their style drew from a wide variety of influences, including blues, psychedelia, and folk music.
Mercury was often self-deprecating about his skills on both instruments and from the early 1980s began extensively using guest keyboardists. He used concert grand pianos and, occasionally, other keyboard instruments such as the harpsichord. From 1980 onward, he also made frequent use of synthesisers in the studio. Mercury was unimpressed with his own abilities at the piano and used the instrument less over time because he wanted to walk around onstage and entertain the audience.
Although he cultivated a flamboyant stage personality, Mercury was shy and retiring when not performing, particularly around people he did not know well, and granted few interviews. "When I'm performing I'm an extrovert, yet inside I'm a completely different man."
In 1987, Mercury celebrated his 41st birthday several months after discovering that he had contracted HIV. Mercury denied he had a sexually transmitted disease and his inner circle of colleagues and friends, whom he felt he could trust, continually denied the stories.
Near the end of his life Mercury was starting to lose his sight, and he deteriorated to the point where he could not get out of bed. Due to his worsening condition, Mercury decided to hasten his death by refusing to take his medication and continued taking only painkillers. In 1991, Mercury made the following announcement:
“Following the enormous conjecture in the press over the last 2 weeks, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private to date to protect the privacy of those around me. However, the time has come now for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth and I hope that everyone will join with me, my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease. My privacy has always been very special to me and I am famous for my lack of interviews. Please understand this policy will continue”.
Just over 24 hours after issuing that statement, Mercury died at the age of 45.
Steve Jobs was an American entrepreneur, businessman, inventor, and industrial designer. Jobs was the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc. He was also CEO and majority shareholder of Pixar and a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar. He was founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. In 1978, when Steve was only 23 years old, he was worth a million dollars. A year later he was worth 10 million, and a year after that, 100 million. He was also one of the youngest people ever to make the Forbes list of the nation's richest people, and one of only a handful to have done it without inherited wealth.
Beginning in 1997 Steve worked to develop a line of products that would have larger cultural ramifications. The iMac, iTunes and iTunes Store, Apple Store, iPod, iPhone, App Store, and the iPad. He was a demanding perfectionist who always aspired to position his businesses and their products at the forefront of the information technology industry by foreseeing and setting innovation and style trends. Steve and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak are widely recognized as pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
Steve was born in San Francisco to parents who had to put him up for adoption at birth. His biological father Jandali was the son of a self-made millionaire who grew up in Arab Muslim household in Syria. Jandali was a student activist and spent time in jail for his political activities and ended up in the USA to study. He ended up married to farm girl from Wisconsin. Jandali was very much in love with her but sadly her father was a tyrant and forbade her to marry Jandali because he was from Syria.
When she became pregnant, both felt that at 23 they were too young to marry. There was a strong stigma against bearing a child out of wedlock and raising it as a single mother, and abortions were illegal and dangerous. Adoption was the only option women had, so she packed and moved to San Francisco to have the baby without anyone knowing. She did not want to bring shame onto the family and thought this was the best for everyone. She gave birth to Steve and chose an adoptive couple for him that was Catholic, well-educated, and wealthy. The couple changed their mind, however, and decided to adopt a girl instead.
The baby boy was then placed with the Bay Area blue collar couple Paul and Clara Jobs, neither of whom had a college education. Paul was the son of an alcoholic and sometimes abusive father. The family lived on a farm in Wisconsin. A few years later, Paul and Clara also adopted Steve's sister and the family moved to California.
Clara had taught Steve to read as a toddler. He was bored in school and turned into a little terror bragging in the third grade of destroying the teacher. He frequently played pranks on others. His father Paul who was abused as a child never reprimanded him, however, and instead blamed the school for not placing enough challenge on his brilliant son.
Paul built a workbench in his garage for Steve in order to pass along his love of mechanics. By the time Steve was 10, he was deeply involved in electronics and befriended many of the engineers who lived in the neighborhood. He had difficulty making friends with children his own age, however, and was seen by his classmates as a "loner." Steve had difficulty functioning in a traditional classroom, tended to resist authority figures, frequently misbehaved and was suspended a few times for his pranks. Steve credited his fourth grade teacher with turning him around. She bribed him into learning. But he was often bullied and gave his parents an ultimatum: they had to either take him to another school or he would drop out of school.
Steve was a kind of a brain and kind of a hippie ... but he never fit into either group. He was smart enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he was too intellectual for the hippies, who just wanted to get wasted all the time. He was kind of an outsider. In high school everything revolved around what group you were in. And if you weren't in a carefully defined group, you weren't anybody. He was an individual, in a world where individuality was suspect. In 1972, when he was 17 years old, he attended collage but dropped out after the first semester.
He underwent a change during mid-1970. He developed 2 different circles of friends: those who were involved in electronics and engineering and those who were interested in art and literature. His best friend was Wozniak. In 1973, Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video game Pong. After finishing it, Wozniak gave the board to Steve, who then took the game down to Atari. They thought that Steve had built it and gave him a job as a technician. Steve was living a simple life in a cabin, working at Atari, and saving money for his impending trip to India. He traveled to India in mid-1974 to search spiritual enlightenment and stayed for 7 months wearing traditional Indian clothing and a shaved head. During this time, he experimented with psychedelics, later calling his LSD experiences one of the 2 or 3 most important things he had done in his life. He became a practitioner of Zen Buddhism.
He moved back to his parents, setting up shop in their backyard tool shed which he had converted into a bedroom with a sleeping bag, mat, books, a candle, and a meditation pillow. He engaged in lengthy meditation retreats. He returned to Atari and was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. Wozniak had designed a low-cost digital "blue box" to generate the necessary tones to manipulate the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. Steve decided that they could make money selling it. The clandestine sales of the illegal "blue boxes" went well and perhaps planted the seed in Steve's mind that electronics could be both fun and profitable.
In 1976, Steve and Wozniak co-founded Apple to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. He and Wozniak used Steve`s garage to build them and much of the early work took place in the kitchen on the phone trying to find investors for the company. A year later, Steve and Wozniak introduced the Apple II. It was the first consumer product sold by Apple Computer and was one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products.
When his girlfriend told him she was pregnant with his child, his face turned ugly at the news. But he told her that if she gave up this baby for adoption, that he was never going to help her. She gave birth to her baby girl they named Lisa and Steve gave birth to a new product he named LISA that was an acronym for "Local Integrated Software Architecture. Lisa`s mother ended up on welfare cleaning houses. She sometimes asked Steve for money but he always refused. Steve started to seed people with the notion that she slept around and he was infertile, which meant that Lisa could not be his child. Steve denied paternity, but a DNA test established him as Lisa's father and Steve was required to give the mother who was working as a waitress child support. Steve questioned the reliability of the paternity test which claimed a 94.1% probability that he was the father.
Steve saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to development of Macintosh one year later. In addition to being the first mass-produced computer with a GUI, the Macintosh introduced the sudden rise of the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics.
Macintosh was based on The Lisa and Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface. Despite the fanfare, the expensive Macintosh was a hard sell. Shortly after its release in 1985, Bill Gates's then-developing company, Microsoft, threatened to stop developing Mac applications unless it was granted a license for the Mac operating system software. Microsoft was developing its graphical user interface ... for DOS, which it was calling Windows and didn't want Apple to sue over the similarities between the Windows GUI and the Mac interface. Cheap Windows based IBM PC clones that ran on Microsoft software and had GUIs began to appear. Although the Macintosh preceded the clones, it was far more expensive, so through the late '80s, the Windows user interface was getting better and better and was thus taking increasingly more share from Apple.
In 1985, following a long power struggle, Steve was forced out of Apple. He took a few of its members with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in state-of-the-art computers for higher-education and business markets.
In 1986, Steve funded the spinout of The Graphics Group later renamed Pixar from Lucasfilm`s computer graphics division. The first film produced by Pixar with its Disney partnership was Toy Story in 1995. Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up and Toy Story 3 each received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an award introduced in 2001.
In 1989, Steve fell in love with a student attending one of his lectures. She was in the front row in the lecture hall, and Steve couldn't take his eyes off of her and kept losing his train of thought and started feeling a little giddy. After the lecture, he met up with her in the parking lot and invited her out to dinner. From that point forward, they were together, with a few minor exceptions, for the rest of their lives. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother raised her in a middle class home similar to the one Steve grew up in. After she received her B.A. she spent a short period in high finance but found it didn't interest her, so she decided to pursue her MBA. Unlike Steve she was athletic and followed professional sports. Steve proposed a year later with a fistful of freshly picked wildflowers. They married in a Buddhist ceremony and soon gave birth to their first child of 4 children.
In 1990, NeXT workstations were released. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced and designed for the education sector, but was largely dismissed as cost-prohibitive for educational intuitions. The NeXT workstation was known for its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Steve marketed NeXT products to the financial, scientific, and academic community, highlighting its built-in Ethernet port. Making use of a NeXT computer, English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN in Switzerland.
A year later, NeXTcube was released with its innovative multimedia email system, NeXTcube could share voice, image, graphics, and video in email for the first time. Steve claimed that interpersonal computing was going to revolutionize human communications and group work. In 1996, NeXT Software, Inc. released WebObjects, a framework for Web application development used to build and run the Apple Store, MobileMe services, and the iTunes Store. Apple announced that it would buy NeXT and brought back Steve as the new CEO to the company he had co-founded some years before to revived Apple at the verge of bankruptcy.
In 1998, to concentrate Apple's efforts on returning to profitability, Steve terminated a number of projects. He changed the licensing program for Macintosh clones, making it too costly for the manufacturers to continue making machines. Under Steve's guidance, the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac and other new products with appealing designs and powerful branding. The company subsequently branched out, introducing and improving upon other digital appliances. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, and the iTunes Store, the company made forays into consumer electronics and music distribution.
In 2003, Steve was diagnosed with cancer. Despite his diagnosis, he resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for 9 months, instead relying on a diet to try natural healing to thwart the disease. In 2006, Disney purchased Pixar in an all-stock transaction. When the deal closed, Steve became The Walt Disney Company's largest single shareholder. One year later in 2007, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touch display cell phone, which also included the features of an iPod and, with its own mobile browser, revolutionized the mobile browsing scene.
4 years later, Steve died at the age of 56, 8 years after being diagnosed with cancer.
Michael Jackson was an American singer, songwriter, and dancer. Dubbed the "King of Pop", he was one of the most popular entertainers in the world, and was the best-selling music artist during the year of his death. Jackson's contributions to music, dance, and fashion along with his publicized personal life made him a global figure in popular culture for over 4 decades.
Jackson was influenced by musicians including Little Richard, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Diana Ross, Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, David Ruffin, the Isley Brothers, and the Bee Gees. While Little Richard had a substantial influence on Jackson, James Brown was his greatest inspiration; he said:
"Ever since I was a small child, no more than like 6 years old, my mother would wake me no matter what time it was, if I was sleeping, no matter what I was doing, to watch the television to see the master at work. And when I saw him move, I was mesmerized. I had never seen a performer perform like James Brown, and right then and there I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life because of James Brown."
Jackson explored a variety of music genres, including pop, soul, rhythm and blues, funk, rock, and disco. Unlike many artists, Jackson did not write his songs on paper and instead dictated into a sound recorder. When composing music, he preferred to imitate instruments vocally rather than use instruments.
The eighth child of the Jackson family, Michael made his professional debut in 1964 when he was 6 years old with his elder brothers as a member of the Jackson 5. He began his solo career in 1971 while at Motown Records.
Jackson is also remembered for his philanthropy and pioneering efforts in charitable fundraising in the entertainment industry. He traveled the world attending events honoring his humanitarianism. He supported 39 charities, more than any other entertainer.
He was the eighth of 10 children in the Jackson family, a working-class African-American family living in a 2-bedroom house. His mother left the Baptist tradition in 1963 to become a devout Jehovah's Witness. She played clarinet and piano and once aspired to be a country-and-western performer, but worked part-time at a department store to support the family.
His father Joe, a former boxer, was a steelworker. Joe performed on guitar with a local rhythm and blues band to supplement the family's income. Despite being a convinced Lutheran, Joe also participated in his wife's faith as did all their children. His father's great-grandfather was a Native American medicine man and an US Army scout. Michael grew up with 3 sisters and 5 brothers.
Jackson had a troubled relationship with his father. Joe acknowledged that he regularly whipped him as a boy. Joe was also said to have verbally abused his son, often saying that he had a "fat nose". Jackson stated that he was physically and emotionally abused during incessant rehearsals, though he credited his father's strict discipline with playing a large role in his success.
Jackson acknowledged that his youth had been lonely and isolating. His deep dissatisfaction with his appearance, his nightmares and chronic sleep problems, his tendency to remain hyper-compliant, especially with his father, and to remain childlike in adulthood are consistent with the effects of the maltreatment he endured as a child.
In 1964, Michael and his brother joined the Jackson Brothers, a band formed by their father which included 3 other brothers as backup musicians. In 1965, Michael began sharing lead vocals with his older brother and the group's name was changed to the Jackson 5. The following year, the group won a major local talent show with Jackson performing a dance. From 1966-68 they toured the Midwest, frequently performing at a string of black clubs.
The Jackson 5 also performed at clubs and cocktail lounges, where striptease shows and other adult acts were featured, and at local auditoriums and high school dances. The Jackson 5 recorded several songs, including their first single before they relocated to Los Angeles in 1969 to record music for Motown. The young Michael was described as a prodigy with overwhelming musical gifts. The group set a chart record and in 1971 the Jackson family moved into a large home in California.
During this period, Michael evolved from child performer into a teen idol. As Jackson began to emerge as a solo performer in the early 1970s, he maintained ties to the Jackson 5 and Motown. Between 1972 and 1975, Michael released 4 solo studio albums.
The Jackson 5 were later described as "a cutting-edge example of black crossover artists." Although the group's sales began to decline in 1973, and the members chafed under Motown's refusal to allow them creative input, they achieved several top 40 hits before leaving Motown in 1975. The Jackson 5 signed with Epic Records, a subsidiary of CBS Records, and renamed themselves the Jacksons. Younger brother Randy formally joined the band around this time, while Jermaine chose to stay with Motown and pursue a solo career. The Jacksons continued to tour internationally, and released 6 more albums between 1976 and 1984. Michael, the group's lead songwriter during this time, wrote many hits.
Jackson's work in film began in 1978, when he moved to New York City to star as the Scarecrow in "The Wiz", a musical. The film was a box-office failure. Its score was arranged by Quincy Jones, whom Jackson had previously met when he was 12 at Sammy Davis Jr.'s house. Jones agreed to produce Jackson's next solo album. During his time in New York, Jackson frequented the nightclubs and was exposed to early hip hop.
In 1979, when Jackson was 21, he broke his nose during a complex dance routine. His subsequent surgery was not a complete success. He complained of breathing difficulties that would affect his career. So he had subsequent operations.
In the early 1980s, Jackson became a dominant figure in popular music. His music videos from his 1982 album "Thriller", are credited with breaking racial barriers and transforming the medium into an art form and promotional tool. The popularity of these videos helped bring the television channel MTV to fame. Jackson recorded with singer Freddie Mercury from 1981-1983. The relationship between the singers soured when Jackson insisted on bringing a llama into the recording studio.
The moonwalk that he made famous was an apt metaphor for his dance style. As a technician, he was a great illusionist, a genuine mime. His ability to keep one leg straight as he glides while the other bends and seems to walk requires perfect timing.
Jackson's 1987 album "Bad" spawned the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles becoming the first album to have 5 number-one singles in the nation. He continued to innovate with videos throughout the 1990s, and forged a reputation as a touring solo artist. Through stage and video performances, Jackson popularized a number of complicated dance techniques, such as the robot and the moonwalk, to which he gave the name. His distinctive sound and style has influenced numerous artists of various music genres.
Jackson became a figure of controversy in the 1980s due to his changing physical appearance, his relationships, and behavior. The controversy intensified due to a 1993 child sexual abuse scandal when a family friend accused him of sexually abusing his son. The case led to an investigation but was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
In 1988, when he was 30, he purchased land in California, to build Neverland Ranch. He installed several carnival rides on the 11km2 property, including a movie theater and zoo. A security staff of 40 patrolled the grounds. In 1989, Jackson's annual earnings from album sales, endorsements, and concerts were estimated at $125 million for that year alone. Shortly afterwards, he became the first westerner to appear in a television ad in the Soviet Union. Jackson's success earned him the nickname the "King of Pop".
In 1991, Jackson renewed his contract with Sony for $65 million and released his eighth album, Dangerous which was awarded the best-selling album of the year worldwide and "Black or White" was awarded best-selling single of the year worldwide. Jackson also won an award as best-selling artist of the 1980s.
Jackson founded the Heal the World Foundation in 1992. The charity brought underprivileged children to Jackson's ranch to enjoy the property's theme park rides, and sent millions of dollars around the globe to help children threatened by war, poverty, and disease. In the same year, Jackson published his second book, Dancing the Dream, a collection of poetry, revealing a more intimate side.
Jackson gave an interview in 1993, his second television interview since 1979. He grimaced when speaking of his childhood abuse at the hands of his father; he believed he had missed out on much of his childhood years, admitting that he often cried from loneliness. He denied tabloid rumors that he had bought the bones of the Elephant Man, slept in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, or bleached his skin, and stated for the first time that he had vitiligo, a skin disease.
In 1993, Jackson was accused of child sexual abuse by a 13-year-old boy and his father. The family demanded payment from Jackson, which he refused. The boy eventually told the police that Jackson had sexually abused him. The boy's mother was, however, adamant that there had been no wrongdoing on Jackson's part. The father was recorded as saying that his intention to pursue charges because "If I go through with this, I win big-time. There's no way I lose. I will get everything I want or Michael's career will be over." Jackson used the recording to argue that he was the victim of a jealous father whose only goal was to extort money.
Police raided Jackson's home and, according to court documents, found books and photographs in his bedroom featuring young boys with little or no clothing. The books were not under any legal restrictions towards the public and were free for anyone to purchase and own in the United States. Jackson was not indicted. The boy gave police a description of Jackson's intimate parts drawing an accurate pictures of a dark spot on Jackson's penis only visible when his penis was lifted. Despite jurors feeling that the photos did not match the description, the DA stated his belief that the description was accurate. Rather than let the trial drag on, Jackson's defense agreed to an out of court settlement.
In 1994, Jackson married Lisa, the daughter of Elvis Presley. As the child molestation accusations became public, Jackson became dependent on Lisa for emotional support. She was concerned about his faltering health and addiction to drugs. She eventually persuaded him to settle the civil case out of court and go into rehabilitation to recover. The marriage ended less than 2 years later with an amicable divorce settlement. They spent 4 more years after the divorce getting back together and breaking up until it stopped. Jackson then married his longtime friend, a dermatology nurse. She was 6 months pregnant with the couple's first child at the time. The couple divorced amicably 2 years later in 1999, and Jackson received full custody of the children.
In 2002, Jackson allowed a documentary film crew to follow him around nearly everywhere he went. Jackson brought his infant son onto the balcony of his room as fans stood below. The baby was briefly extended over a railing, 4 stories above ground level, prompting widespread criticism in the media. Jackson later apologized for the incident, calling it a terrible mistake. In a particularly controversial scene, Jackson was seen holding hands and discussing sleeping arrangements with a young boy.
As soon as the documentary aired a criminal investigation was begun. After an initial probe, it was initially concluded that molestation allegations were "unfounded" at the time. After the young boy involved in the documentary and his mother had told investigators that Jackson had behaved improperly, Jackson was arrested and charged with 7 counts of child molestation and 2 counts of administering an intoxicating agent to the 13-year-old boy shown in the film.
Jackson denied the allegations, saying the sleepovers were not sexual in nature. In 2005, Jackson was acquitted on all counts. After the trial, in a highly publicized relocation, he moved to the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain.
"I've been in the entertainment industry since I was 6 years old, and as Charles Dickens would say, 'It's been the best of times, the worst of times.' But I would not change my career ... While some have made deliberate attempts to hurt me, I take it in stride because I have a loving family, a strong faith and wonderful friends and fans who have, and continue, to support me."
In late 2008, Fortress Investments threatened to foreclose on Neverland Ranch, which Jackson used as collateral for loans running into many tens of millions of dollars. Jackson held a press conference to announce a series of comeback concerts titled "This Is It". The shows would have been Jackson's first major series of concerts since 1997. Jackson suggested retirement after the shows, saying it would be his final curtain call. The initial plan was for 10 concerts in London, followed by shows in Paris, New York City and Mumbai. The London residency was increased to 50 dates after record-breaking ticket sales. Over 1,000,000,were sold in less than 2 hours.
Less than 3 weeks before the first show was due to begin in London, with all concerts sold out, Jackson died after suffering cardiac arrest. Jackson stopped breathing while attempting to sleep under the care of his personal physician who gave him an array of medications in an attempt to help him sleep.
Sony released a documentary film about the rehearsals, Michael Jackson's "This Is It". Despite a limited 2-week engagement, it became the highest-grossing documentary or concert film of all time, with earnings of more than $260 million worldwide. Jackson's estate received 90% of the profits.
Jackson's death triggered a global outpouring of grief. The news spread quickly online, causing websites to slow down and crash from user overload, and putting unprecedented strain on services and websites including Google, AOL,Twitter, and Wikipedia. Overall, web traffic ranged from 11% to at least 20% higher than normal. In the 12 months after his death, Jackson sold more than 8.2 million albums in the United States and 35 million albums worldwide, making him the best-selling albums artist of 2009.
Jackson's earnings have exponentially increased following his death. He became the first artist to sell one million downloads in a week in music download history, with a record-breaking 2.6 million downloads of his songs.
Jackson owed his vocal technique in large part to Diana Ross. Not only a mother figure to him, she was often observed in rehearsal as an accomplished performer.
He said: "I got to know her well. She taught me so much. I used to just sit in the corner and watch the way she moved. She was art in motion. I studied the way she moved, the way she sang – just the way she was." He told her: "I want to be just like you, Diana." She said: "You just be yourself."
David Koresh was the American leader of the Branch Davidians religious sect, believing himself to be its final prophet. He joined the Church of the Seventh Day Adventists, but was expelled due to his radical views. Among these views were the fact he was a messiah and all women were his spiritual wives. Wielding a guitar, he went on to form the Branch Davidians, who believed the end of the world was near and he spoke the word of God. They located to Waco, Texas and began to amass an armory of weapons. The combination of arming themselves in their Waco compound and his own scandalous sexual practices, including sleeping with other church member’s wives and marrying underage girls, brought an unwelcome spotlight on the Branch Davidians.
This culminated in a 1993 botched raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) which ended with 4 ATF agents and 6 Branch Davidians dead and Koresh wounded. A 51-day siege of the compound ensued, a siege which was covered 24/7 by CNN and other news agencies.
Every day, the media reported how much money the raid was costing the government, while pressure mounted on new Attorney General Janet Reno to be strong and decisive. Finally, tanks were used to inject tear gas into the sides of building in the compound. Soon, flames began to erupt throughout the compound. In the end, 77 Branch Davidians died in the fire. Among those were 20 children.
Gun advocates took a dim view of the Feds seizing weapons, while the American public was appalled at how the Clinton Administration handled the events. 2 years later to the date of the deaths, Timothy McVeigh who was not a Branch Davidian bombed and destroyed a building in Oklahoma City, supposedly as payback for the raid. The Oklahoma city bombing killed 168 people and injured over 680 others.
Koresh came from a dysfunctional family background and claimed to be a Christian in the Davidian Seventh-day Adventist, a reform movement that arose from within the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He joined a spiritual group where he competed for dominance with another leader named Roden, until Roden was jailed for murdering another rival. Koresh was then accused of statutory rape of a 12-year-old girl, apparently with her parents' consent, a relationship that he sanctified as a 'spiritual marriage'.
Koresh was born to a 14-year-old single mother. Before he was born, his father met another teenage girl and Koresh never met his father. His mother began cohabiting with a violent alcoholic. In 1963, when he was 4 years old, his mother left her boyfriend and he was placed in the care of his maternal grandmother. His early childhood was lonely, and he was once gang-raped by older boys when he was 8 years old. When he was 22 years old, he had an affair with a 15-year-old girl who became pregnant. He claimed to have become a born-again Christian and joined his mother's church, the Seventh-day Adventist Church where he fell in love with the pastor's daughter.
While praying for guidance he opened his eyes and allegedly found the Bible open at Isaiah 34:16, stating that "...none should want for her mate..."; convinced this was a sign from God, he approached the pastor and told him that God wanted him to have his daughter for a wife. The pastor threw him out, and when he continued to persist with his pursuit of the daughter he was expelled from the congregation.
In 1982, when he was 23, he moved to Waco, Texas, where he joined the Branch Davidians originated by Roden. He played guitar and sang in the church services. A year later, he began claiming the gift of prophecy. He had a sexual relationship with Roden`s wife, the prophetess and leader of the sect, who was then 65 years old. Roden`s son George intended to be the group's next leader and considered Koresh an interloper. In the ensuing power struggle, George forced Koresh and his group off the property at gunpoint.
In 1985, Koresh and around 25 followers set up camp at Palestine, Texas, 140km from Waco, where they lived under rough conditions in buses and tents for the next 2 years. During this time he undertook recruitment of new followers in California, the United Kingdom, Israel and Australia. That same year he traveled to Israel where he claimed he had a vision that he was the modern day Cyrus.
Koresh also wanted to be God's tool and set up the Davidic kingdom in Jerusalem. At least until 1990, he believed the place of his martyrdom might be in Israel, but by 1991 he was convinced that his martyrdom would be in the United States. Instead of Israel, he said the prophecies of Daniel would be fulfilled in Waco. After being exiled to the Palestine camp, he and his followers eked out a primitive existence. He enjoyed the loyalty of the majority of the Branch Davidian community. Roden's support was in steep decline. To regain his leadership, he challenged Koresh to a contest to raise the dead, going so far as to exhume a corpse to demonstrate his spiritual supremacy. Koresh went to authorities to file charges against Roden for illegally exhuming a corpse. Koresh seized the opportunity to seek criminal prosecution of Roden by returning to Waco with 7 armed followers attempting to get photographic proof of the crime. His group was discovered by Roden and a gunfight broke out. When the sheriff arrived, Roden had already suffered a minor gunshot wound and was pinned down behind a tree. As a result of the incident, he and his followers were charged with attempted murder. At the trial, Koresh explained that he went to Waco to uncover evidence of criminal disturbance of a corpse by Roden. Koresh's followers were acquitted.
In 1989, when a man claimed to be true messiah, Roden murdered him with an axe. Roden was convicted of murder and imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital. Since Roden owed thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes, Koresh and his followers were able to raise the money and reclaim the property. Roden continued to harass the Koresh faction by filing legal papers while imprisoned. When Koresh and his followers reclaimed Waco, they discovered that tenants who had rented from Roden had left behind a methamphetamine laboratory, which Koresh reported to the local police. Koresh is the Biblical name of Cyrus the Great, a Persian king who is named a Messiah for freeing Jews during the Babylonian Captivity. His first name, David, symbolized a lineage directly to the biblical King David, from whom the new messiah would descend. Koresh, professed himself to be the spiritual descendant of King David, a messianic figure carrying out a divinely commissioned errand. Child abuse and sexual abuse claims were widely circulated in the press coverage.
Koresh's doctrine of the House of David led to "marriages" with both married and single women in the group and with at least one underage girl. In 1992, an investigation of child abuse allegations by the Texas Child Protection Services failed to turn up any evidence, most likely because the Branch Davidians concealed the spiritual marriage of Koresh to the girl. A second allegation involved an underage girl who testified that when she was 10 years old, Koresh forced her to perform sexual acts. Koresh had fathered at least 15 children with various women. Koresh annulled all marriages of couples who joined the group, had exclusive sexual access to the women, and had sexual relations with young girls. Koresh had multiple children by different women in the group. His House of David doctrine based on a purported revelation involved the birth of 24 children by chosen women in the community. These 24 children were to serve as the ruling elders over the millennium after the return of Christ.
In 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raided Waco. The raid resulted in the deaths of 4 agents and 6 Branch Davidians. Shortly after the initial raid, the FBI took command of the federal operation, since the FBI has jurisdiction over incidents involving the deaths of federal agents. Contact was established with Koresh inside the compound. Communication over the next 51 days included telephone exchanges with various FBI negotiators. As the standoff continued, Koresh, who was seriously injured by a gunshot wound, along with his closest male leaders, negotiated delays, possibly so he could write religious documents he said he needed to complete before he surrendered. His conversations with the negotiators were dense with biblical imagery. The federal negotiators treated the situation as a hostage crisis.
The 51-day siege of Waco ended when U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno approved recommendations of FBI officials to proceed with a final assault in which the Branch Davidians were to be removed from their building by force. In the course of the assault, the church building caught on fire. Barricaded inside the building, 80 Branch Davidians, including Koresh, perished in the ensuing blaze. 22 of these victims were children under the age of 17. Koresh's right-hand man shot and killed him and then committed suicide.
The raid was cited by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as motivation for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 - timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the Waco assault. The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist truck bombing in downtown Oklahoma City in 1995. The bombing killed 168 people, including 15 children, injured more than 680 others, and destroyed one-third of the building. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings within a 16-block radius, shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, and destroyed or burned 86 cars, causing an estimated $652 million worth of damage. The Oklahoma City bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil until the September 11 attacks 6 years later, and it still remains the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in United States history. Within 90 minutes of the explosion, McVeigh was stopped for driving without a license plate and arrested for illegal weapons possession. Forensic evidence quickly linked McVeigh and Nichols to the attack.
Satoshi Nakamoto conceived Bitcoin and created its original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, he also devised the first Blockchain database. In the process he was the first to solve the double-spending problem for digital currency. He was active in the development of Bitcoin up until 2010 when he suddenly disappeared owning 1,000,000 Bitcoins.
Satoshi was a single child of a very poor Japanese family living in Chicago. When he was 18, both his parents died in a car accident. He was self-taught and had no friends. He was very disturbed that money was hijacked by a few greedy and power hungry people. He realized that with computer programming, he could create a virtual currency that had all the characteristics needed for an ideal form of economics that took the power of controlling and issuing money from the greedy and corrupt hands of a few elite banksters and return it to the people. This allowed for the first time in the history of mankind to democratize money. He created a distributed databank without any central control to record transactions. He used Blockchain Proof of Work and consensus rules to make it secure, honest and “trust-worthy”. He used encryption to make it fool-proof. He used a protocol for coin issuing that was deterministic and inflation proof.
Satoshi devised a way that anyone can open a Bitcoin account without permission of any centralized gatekeeper that is otherwise required to ensure that all accounts are unique, never duplicated and free of any falsification or censure from outside. To open a Bitcoin account a number between 1 and a number higher than the number of atoms in our universe is randomly chosen. This extremely large number is used as a private key to access your Bitcoin account and allow for spending. It is also used to generate another very large number to be used as your public address of your account so that anyone can send Bitcoins to your account.
To overcome the problem of trust, he developed a system of 51% consensus to determine trust. To ensure past transactions could not be changed, he hashed all date so that any changes to it were clearly marked. As for Bitcoin issuance, to ensure that it could not be manipulated, Satoshi set the rate and the amount that Bitcoins are issued to be fixed and not alterable. To keep everything honest, he offered his program to the world as open code, transparent of any hidden back doors.
To protect the Bitcoin network against spammers and attempts to weaken it, Satoshi developed a system that discouraged dishonest users. Users called miners had to invest in equipment and electricity and keep the ledger of Bitcoin transactions as a distributed database called Blockchain. Because of the 51% consensus rule to keep the blockchain honest, the more miners there are , the more secure the network becomes. To ensure a high number of miners, they are rewarded by the possibility of receiving newly issued Bitcoins.
In 2008, at the age of 24, he published a paper on a mailing list for Cryptography describing the Bitcoin digital currency. It was titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. In 2009, Nakamoto released the first Bitcoin software that launched the network and the first units of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, called Bitcoins. He created a website with the domain name bitcoin.org and started a Bitcoin Community with other “geeks” with common interests. He continued to collaborate with other developers on the Bitcoin software until 2010. Then he got very ill and unable to work, he handed over control of the source code repository to Gavin Andresen and transferred several related domains to various prominent members of the Bitcoin community, and stopped his involvement in the project. As he was slowly recuperating, he went for a short hike, fell down a very steep hill into a lake and died. He was never found.
Nakamoto left a text message in the first mined block which reads 'The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'. The text refers to a headline in “The Times” published on 3 January 2009. Nakamoto did not try to mine all the early blocks solely for himself. Being the sole miner he was awarded bitcoin for 10 days mining 1,000,000 bitcoins that remained unspent. Nakamoto did not disclose any personal information when discussing technical matters. He provided some commentary on banking and fractional-reserve banking.
After Nakamoto died, Ross Ulbrict a passionate anarchist and close friend of Nakamoto took on a pseudonym as Dread Pirate Roberts and created and ran the Silk Road as a market place that used Bitcoins instead of credit cards for trading illegal goods. Silk Road was founded on libertarian principles, regulated by market forces instead of a central authority.
Ross attended University on a full academic scholarship, and graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in physics. He then started a master's degree program in materials science and engineering and studied crystallography. By the time Ross graduated he had become more interested in libertarian economic theory. In particular, Ross adhered to the political philosophy of Ludwig von Mises and participated in college debates to discuss his economic views. Ross graduated in 2009. Finding regular employment unsatisfying, he wanted to become an entrepreneur, but his first attempts to start his own business failed. He had tried day trading and starting a video game company. His LinkedIn profile stated that:
"I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression among mankind... The most widespread and systemic use of force is among institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort. The best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed, however. To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."
As early as 2009 Ross had been contemplating the idea of building an online black market that would use Tor and Bitcoin anonymity to evade law enforcement. Tor is a protocol which encrypts data and routes internet traffic through intermediary servers which anonymize IP addresses before reaching a final destination. By hosting his market as a Tor site, Ross could conceal its IP address.
In 2013, Ross was arrested by the FBI in the San Francisco Public Library, and accused of being the "mastermind" behind the site. To prevent Ross from encrypting or deleting data on the laptop he was using to run the site as he was arrested, 2 agents pretended to be quarreling lovers. When they had sufficiently distracted him, a third agent took his computer away, and inserted a USB flash drive that cloned all the data on the hard drive. Then he was arrested.
Ross was charged with money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic narcotics, and procuring murder. The charge of procuring murder was removed from the indictment although the evidence was factored into Ross's sentence. Ross was convicted of all the remaining charges after a jury trial that concluded in 2015. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Joe Ova was born in the year 3,100 AD in New York City. His father was a distinguished philosopher, scientist, engineer, and business man who conceived and developed Heaven Inc. a high security storage facility for human brains.
1,000 years before, Willem Kolff showed that organs that keep brains alive could be manufactured. Eventually the body and all organs, except for the brain were replaced by a remote controlled robot. It was known that brain cells were the only cells in the human body that did not reproduce and die. Brains cells lived as long as they were supported by organs that provided nourishment and sensations.
The cells making the organs that supported the brain and kept it alive however multiplied and divided and died. Each new cell that was born from an older cell dividing before it died was not perfectly copied and over many divisions, mistakes accumulated to the point where the cell was so degraded as to not function correctly. Eyes became blind, ears became deaf and organs became diseased as people aged. As the organs degraded because of their degraded cells, the brain eventually died a slow death.
When organs were replaced by artificial organs, it was seen that the brain could be kept alive indefinitely. People became brains in robot bodies, and lived as long as their robot bodies functioned. Unfortunately natural disasters, crime, careless accidents or deliberate suicides destroyed robot bodies which resulted in the death of brains and people dying. To solve this unavoidable death and to achieve immortality, Heaven Inc. was built whereby brains were stored in high security vaults and robot bodies were controlled remotely.
Joe Ova married Dr Lucy Fer, a daughter of a colleague of Joe's father. Together, they lived a very long life. Nature eventually died of a technology over-dose and when that wasn't bad enough, humanity was forced to flee earth when it was feared that the sun would no longer support planet Earth. They went thru a black hole where they found a universe that they could settle in. Having taken with them all the genes from all the life forms, they populated their new universe with life. Combining genes from different life forms, they were able to create a new life form they called “new-man”.
“New-man” eventually convinced Joe and Lucy to search for the god that they had long ago forsaken and forgotten. Joe and Lucy eventually found the god they were seeking and realized that their assumed immortality was actually an immoral prison. They were able to see that in order to get a new life, you had to die.
Dying in the highly secure Heaven Inc. was not easy but there was a loophole that Joe used to kill himself. That was to kill his one and only son, Chris. There was a law that killing a brain before it was baptized with a new robot body and admitted in Heaven Inc. was punishable by execution and your brain permanently disconnected.
Once Joe was dead and finally back home, he was able to share with us some of his past lives. They are documented in a book called “A few short lives of Joe Ova.”.
When his wife Lucy Fer tried the same trick to get herself killed, she was placed in an extra high security place called Hell. Inc. The laws were changed from execution to eternal imprisonment. Joe and Chris took on new lives in an attempt to rescue Lucy. Joe reincarnated into the newborn pet poodle of Gabriel, the chief administrator of Hell Inc. Chris reincarnated on new earth as a “New-man”. They were able to rescue Lucy and both Lucy and Chris were able to kill themselves and thus return home to us. Unfortunately Joe got left behind and ended up as the very first immortal pet in a new Heaven Inc. made for pets.
Unfortunately, Joe is still alive, and his current life is not complete to be shared. Life is like a book, and Joe`s life is still being written at this moment. You cannot share your life until it is over - and it is not over until you die.
THE END
