Beginning with the apocryphal tale of Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads, veteran music journalists Gary Graff and Daniel Durchholz take on the real stories behind rock's biggest crocks, half-truths, and too-strange-to-be-false myths and legends, examining how and why these tales came to be in the first place and how they have persisted through the years. Of course there's sex (Did members of Led Zeppelin pleasure a groupie with a mud shark in a Holiday Inn bathtub?), drugs (Did the Beatles spark a spliff in Buckingham?), and rock 'n' roll (Does The Wall sync up to The Wizard of Oz ?). But there's also the quasi-medical (Rod Stewart and that stomach pump, Marilyn Manson's spare rib), the culinary (Alice Cooper and chickens, Ozzy Osbourne and bats, Frank Zappa and . well, never mind), the downright silly (McCartney dead? Morrison, Elvis, and Tupac alive?), and even a few doozies that appear to have at least a kernel of truth to them (Keith Richards taking a bump of his dearly departed father's ashes, Van Halen and those M&Ms, and blood in the ink of the 1977 KISS comic book). In all, the authors examine 57 enduring yarns, in the process revealing the machinations of myth-making in the fast and loose world of rock, country, and pop.