How Famous Musicians Wasted Their Money On Weird Things

Few songs better depict the ridiculous excesses of rock star life than Joe Walsh’s satirical hit “Life’s Been Good.” Walsh uses tongue-in-cheek humor to depict reckless indulgence, boasting about a mansion he’s never been to because he’s too busy destroying hotel rooms on tour and a pricey Maserati he can’t drive because he lost his license. It’s a scathing critique of the dangers of fame and fortune.

Rock stars have frequently made dubious financial choices; some of the stories are almost unbelievable. For example, Mick Fleetwood, the drummer for Fleetwood Mac, acknowledged to The Telegraph that he has lost count of the number of times he has filed for bankruptcy, including spending an estimated $60 million on cocaine in the 1980s.

Some musicians have indulged in strange obsessions in addition to drugs. Phil Collins, the drummer for Genesis, has an incredible collection of Alamo memorabilia worth $100 million, while Stephen Morris of New Order collects tanks and military vehicles.

The surface is seldom touched by these peculiarities. Discover how other rock stars have spent their fortunes on genuinely unique things by reading on.

Lady Gaga
In addition to being a Hollywood celebrity and worldwide music superstar, Lady Gaga has a strong connection to the paranormal. During her engagement to Gaga’s father, she famously claimed to be the reincarnation of her late aunt Joanne, telling Vanity Fair (via the Boston Herald) that her mother saw a light enter her tummy. “She believes that Joanne came into the room and sort of okayed her for my dad and that Joanne transferred her spirit into my mom,” she said in 2018.

Beyond reincarnation, she believes in the supernatural. Ireland Online (via Glamour) claims that Gaga employs paranormal investigators to inspect hotels before guests stay there because she is so worried about evil spirits. To find ghosts, she even spent about forty thousand dollars on electromagnetic field meters. According to a source, “She believes in paranormal activity and won’t take any risks when she is on the road.” “She wants to be protected from ghosts.”

Michael Jackson
According to rumors, Michael Jackson owed around half a billion dollars after he died in 2009. Given his extravagant spending patterns, this wasn’t shocking. He famously converted Neverland Ranch into a zoo and amusement park. It has even been rumored that he attempted to purchase the remains of John Merrick, also known as the Elephant Man, from a medical institution in London.

Images of Jackson sleeping inside a hyperbaric chamber—a pressure tank intended to pump pure oxygen—came to light during his heyday in the 1980s. While recuperating from burns he had received during the filming of a TV ad, he first came into contact with the gadget. Frank DiLeo, Jackson’s manager, acknowledged in 1986 that Jackson had ordered a $125,000 special hyperbaric chamber to slow down his aging process, according to Newsweek. “Michael says it is good for his body, “Although he acknowledged that neither he nor Jackson’s physician agreed with the proposal, DiLeo told USA Today. Adding, “I can’t figure him out sometimes,” DiLeo said.

Although the chamber was owned by Jackson, it is said that he did not use it in his final years. It was discovered in a warehouse shipping container ten years after his death.

Keith Moon
The great drummer of The Who, Keith Moon, was as well-known for his outrageous antics as his music until his tragic death at the age of 32. Moon personified rock star excess, famously smashing a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool and damaging so many hotel rooms that Holiday Inn banned him for life.

One of Moon’s strange passions was automobiles. He had a personal hovercraft in addition to collecting automobiles. He frequently zoomed around the British countryside in the one-person hovercraft, carrying it to unusual locations, like George Lazenby’s bedroom. One of Moon’s houseguests was Lazenby, who is most renowned for playing James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In a particularly notorious incident, Moon flooded the engine while wearing a Nazi uniform, leaving the hovercraft trapped on railway tracks. Moon’s daughter, Mandy, recalled to Universal Music, “What I mostly remember is going down to the pub on the hovercraft.”

Moon continued to make odd purchases. Additionally, he purchased a British milk delivery van, known as a “milk float,” and converted it into a mobile living space that included a telephone, a record player, and a couch. “The milk float had a couch on it, and it was like a living room,” Mandy said. “It was so funny.”

Eddie Van Halen
Legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen and the frequently criticized rock group Limp Bizkit had a memorable jam session in 2001 that involved one of Van Halen’s most valuable items: a little tank. “Eddie once bought an assault vehicle from a military auction,” according to Andrew Bennett’s Eruption in the Canyon: 212 Days & Nights With the Genius of Eddie Van Halen book (via Ultimate Classic Rock). He went on to say, “It has a shine gun mount on the back and is not legal,” emphasizing the quirky nature of the performer.

Van Halen left suddenly after the session, forgetting his equipment, since he was annoyed by Limp Bizkit’s incessant marijuana smoking. Van Halen took matters into his own hands after Fred Durst failed to return it after repeated requests.

Bennett described how Van Halen left the assault vehicle running on the lawn as he drove it around Los Angeles to a home in Beverly Hills where Limp Bizkit was practicing.

Van Halen, brandishing a pistol, went up to Durst and demanded his equipment. Bennett described the odd picture of Durst dragging instruments and amplifiers out to the car while Van Halen watched over him, writing, “Eddie stood on the front lawn, smoking a cigarette, holding a gun on Fred Durst.”

ZZ Top
To give fans nationwide a taste of Texas, ZZ Top’s 1976 Worldwide Texas Tour was an unparalleled spectacle. The band accomplished this by bringing along a variety of Texas fauna, such as a buffalo, a Longhorn steer, buzzards, rattlesnakes, and a “howling wolf” that turned out to be a German shepherd. The wolf noises were from a cassette recording because the dog was unable to howl.

According to reports, the animals cost $140,000, but controlling the havoc they caused throughout the tour was the true difficulty. A buzzard escaped during one performance and started flying above the crowd. The band had to stop playing while its trainer used a white hat to entice it back.

The buffalo’s bold escape, however, stands out as the most remarkable event. “The only time it got sticky was when the buffalo made his escape,” guitarist Billy Gibbons told the Los Angeles Daily News. He remembered the trainer in a golf cart feverishly chasing the stampeding buffalo as it zigzagged from home plate to third base across Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium.

Slash
Slash, the guitarist for Guns N’ Roses, amassed a strange collection of pets once he earned enough money to purchase a mansion in Los Angeles. He stated, “I installed a full-on reptile zoo over there,” in his book Slash. “Just a gazillion snakes and all kinds of stuff.”

Slash kept a mountain lion named Curtis as a pet in addition to the reptiles. John Borg, the designer of the pinball game, recalled first meeting Curtis when he was just 8 months old. “He was as friendly as your average house cat,” Borg remembered. “He was much larger than a house cat. A little bigger than a German shepherd.”

Slash brought Curtis with him when he temporarily relocated to a hotel after an earthquake damaged his house. “We snuck him into the Four Seasons in his cage and locked him in our bathroom,” said Slash. But after Slash went for supper and saw Curtis wandering the hall after breaking out of his cell and unlocking both doors, things swiftly got out of hand. Slash wrote, “I realized that we had to deal with him immediately, so I called a friend who is an animal caretaker who picked him up and took him up to canyon country, where a friend of mine had a facility that housed exotic animals.”

Jimmy Page
The infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley captivated Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin while he wasn’t creating iconic guitar riffs or enjoying the rock star lifestyle. Crowley’s personal belongings, including manuscripts and souvenirs, were gathered by Page. However, his most expensive acquisition was Boleskine House, the old Crowley residence near Loch Ness in Scotland.

Even before Crowley, the house had a troubled past; according to local legend, it was constructed on the site of a church where worshippers perished in a fire. “The bad vibes were already there,” Page said in 1975 in an interview with Rolling Stone. “A man was beheaded there and sometimes you can hear his head rolling down… Of course, after Crowley there have been suicides, people carted off to mental hospitals.”

After spending thousands to refurbish Boleskine House, Page sold it in the early 1990s. After being destroyed by two fires, the home was eventually purchased by a foundation, which spent millions restoring it.

Rod Stewart
Rod Stewart is well-known for his love of soccer, and his British estate even has a dedicated soccer field. He is as committed to model trains, though. There is a massive train in a space bigger than a tennis court at his house in Beverly Hills. According to Stewart, “It can never be moved,” The Mirror reported. “I have 13 trains running at once. For me, the pleasure has been in the building of it.”

For some rock artists, such as Neil Young and Roger Daltrey, model trains are a pastime, but Stewart goes above and beyond. When he is on tour, he even rents an additional hotel room to build up a duplicate set. “When I’m on the road in hotel rooms, like the Ritz-Carlton in New York, they clear out a room for me,” he said. Building and operating his trains is more than just a hobby for Stewart; it’s a serious obsession. “All my cases come in and they set up tables and lamps and it becomes my workshop.”

Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran is known for giving memorable gifts, and he outdid himself when he presented Elton John with a 6-foot-tall, 2-and-a-half-ton marble statue of a penis. “What do you buy the man who has everything? A huge marble penis!” Elton declared on Britain’s Carrie & Tommy radio show, according to NME.

After hearing about this unique gift, Sheeran’s friend Sam Smith asked for one too. “Then Sam was around my house … and Sam saw one of them and said, ‘Can I have one?'” Sheeran recalled on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “And I said, ‘What would you like?’ And Sam said, ‘One the size of me. One that’s 6-foot-2.'”

Smith didn’t expect Sheeran to actually fulfill the request. “It’s actually wild. I thought it was a joke,” Smith said on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “It’s a 6-foot-2 marble penis. It’s 2 tons, and I’m gonna have to get it craned into my house.” Smith also joked about turning it into a fountain, “Which I think will be hard to do.”

Bono
Rock singers are notorious for spending a lot of money on ostentatious attire, but Bono went above and above when he paid more than $1,200 to have his favorite hat flown from London to Modena, Italy, so he could wear it when performing with the renowned tenor Luciano Pavarotti.

The Telegraph claims that shortly before the performance, the U2 leader discovered his cherished black trilby was still in London. He purchased a first-class ticket for the hat to guarantee its timely arrival because he was determined to have it for the performance. The hat was removed from its first-class seat and placed in the cockpit with the captain, where it remained for the duration of the voyage because the flight crew was so worried about its safety. The hat was subsequently taken by a driver and given to Bono before the performance.

Axl Rose
Frontman Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses once found himself in a bit of a dilemma when he discovered that, while on tour in England, his favorite yellow jacket had been left behind. Rose was adamant about wearing the jacket onstage because she had a big show on another continent, so she came up with an extravagant solution. To promote his HBO series Roadies, rock journalist and Hollywood heavyweight Cameron Crowe told Entertainment Weekly that a roadie was hired to board an aircraft as quickly as possible, travel to London, locate Axl Rose’s yellow jacket, and return so he could perform.

That act of sending a roadie on consecutive transatlantic flights for a jacket was so drastic and memorable that it became the subject of a legend among roadies. “The best part about that story is not that somebody had to go get a yellow jacket for Axl Rose, but that it became such lore among other roadies that it became a verb — to yellow-jacket,” said Crowe.

Elvis Presley
When it came to furnishing his renowned Graceland house in Memphis, Elvis Presley did not cut any corners. There was a lesser-known area devoted solely to his collection of talking Myna birds, in addition to the well-known Jungle Room. The Bird Room, adjacent to the Jungle Room, was featured on The Express following a 2021 Graceland visit. The amount Presley spent on the space for his feathered friends is unknown, but it had specially designed stained-glass windows with peacocks.

The myna birds would hear maids discussing Elvis’ absence and would repeat it, according to Graceland historian Angie Marchese. “The funniest story I’ve ever heard about the myna birds is that when they would hear that Elvis wasn’t home, they would say, ‘Elvis isn’t home right now! Elvis isn’t home right now!'” she continued. She found it funny, though, that the birds would continue to declare, “Elvis isn’t home,” even after Presley had returned.

Myna birds are not present at Graceland today. The Express claims that cleaning materials and barriers for events and photo shoots are now kept in the Bird Room.