The Funniest People in Music, Volume 2: 250 Anecdotes

This is a short, quick, and easy read.

Most of these anecdotes are probably just OK (humor is hard!), but there should be at least one or two that you will want to tell your friends.

Anecdotes are retold in my own words to avoid plagiarism.

Most of these anecdotes are meant to be funny, but some are meant to be thought-provoking.

Samples:

- Songwriter Steve Earle also occasionally acts. To prepare for a role as a recovering junkie in the HBO TV series The Wire, he allowed his hair to grow long and he didn't shave. The preparation worked well. Although he was staying at a swanky hotel in London when The Times' Stephen Dalton interviewed him in August of 2007, he looked very much like a homeless person. In fact, he said, "The other day I noticed the homeless guys that pick up the tin cans on my street, before the recycling people come, they started protecting their cans as I walked past. They thought I was competition."

- Early in their career, the Ramones played in London on July 4, 1976. Some cool kids who called themselves The Clash hung around during a sound check before the concert and talked to the members of the band, mentioning that they played music, too, but weren't good enough to play in public. Johnny Ramone told them, "Are you kidding? I hope you're coming tonight. We're lousy. We can't play. If you wait until you can play, you'll be too old to get up there. We stink, really. But it's great." (Of course, this is a great example of punk rock's DYI -- Do It Yourself -- attitude.) The concert made headlines. A tabloid used the headline "Glue Sniff Shocker" because one Ramones' song was titled "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue." This amused bass player Dee Dee Ramone, who said, "I hope they really don't think we sniff glue. I quit when I was eight."

- Country singers Tim McGraw and Faith Hill became attracted to each other while performing in their Spontaneous Combustion tour in 1996. Right before going on stage, Tim proposed to Faith, who didn't answer right away. But when Tim returned to his dressing room after singing on stage, he found Faith's answer written on his dressing room mirror: "YES!"

- Giacomo Puccini enjoyed hunting pheasant. While living in the country so he could work on composing a new opera, he used to hire someone to go to his composing room and play the music he had written so that his wife would think that he was working on the opera when he was really out hunting.