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 I heard Jim Henson stole The Muppet Show theme song from an old Italian porno. True?
Tabitha Guzman, Pompano Beach, FL
Almost. The song isn’t the Muppet Show theme, but a catchy number called “Mah Na Mah Na.” The simple four-note melody was originally written by the Italian composer Piero Umiliani for Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso (Sweden, Heaven and Hell), a 1968 soft-core porn film purporting to document Swedish babes and their wild, lingonberry-loving ways. The movie was reportedly banned in Sweden for its depictions of lesbian sex, wife-swapping and general Scandinavian debauchery. (Hit YouTube for a clip of the song in its original, NSFW context.)
Since Henson’s reworking, the tune has been used in a number of non-X-rated spots, including ads for Big Lots and Dr Pepper. It’s also been covered by Cake and partially inspired the name of the Portland, Oregon, indie band Menomena. And, bonus factoid! The singer on Umiliani’s version, Alessandro Alessandroni, was a longtime Ennio Morricone collaborator who whistled on several of Morricone’s famous spaghetti-Western soundtracks, including A Fistful of Dollars and Once Upon a Time in the West.
How is it possible that Girl Talk hasn’t been sued for copyright infringement?
Nick Mathis, Brentwood, CA
It does seem a little crazy that the Pittsburgh mash-up DJ (Gregg Gillis), has thus far avoided getting busted for intellectual-property-jacking. But sure enough, he appears to have Lady Justice on his side. According to Lawrence Lessig—Stanford Law School professor and author of the forthcoming Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy—“Girl Talk falls under the category of ‘fair use.’” That’s the doctrine that allows reproduction of a copyrighted work without permission for purposes such as criticism, commentary and scholarship. Because Gillis uses tiny snippets in a “transformative” manner, and because his samples are unlikely to hurt the market value of the original work, “there’s little doubt he’d win any suit brought against him,” Lessig says. Plus, he adds, “no one wants to be seen as a plaintiff against creativity. Not even record companies.”
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 Did Frank Zappa really have a backing band made up entirely of groupies?
Sammie Avila, San Diego
They weren’t his backing band, but Zappa didput together an all-groupie group in late-’60s Los Angeles. Called the GTO’s, for Girls Together Outrageously, the sextet—Pamela Des Barres, Linda Sue Parker, Christine Frka, Mercy Fontenot, Sandra Leano and Lucy Offerall—openedfor Zappa with a bizarremix of singing, dancing and spoken-word poetry.
The GTO’s recorded a single album, 1969’s Permanent Damage, which included songs like “Love on an Eleven Year Old Level” and spoken-word interludes about stuffed bras. It was an all-star affair: produced by Zappa, with guest appearances by the Monkees’ Davy Jones, Rod Stewartand Jeff Beck. It’s also widely agreed to be terrible. But mostly the girls were, like Zappa, provocateurs, playing games with female sexuality—“When I say, ‘Sandra, you have the most beautiful breasts in the whole world,’ that’snot homosexual, it’s just what I feel,” said one of the girls in a 1969 interview—and presaging the all-girl punk bands of the next decade.
I just started getting into buying records. What’s the deal with 180-gram vinyl? What’s so good about it?
Ernie Jandel,Henderson, NV
A lot of vinyl albums are pressed on something called 120-gram vinyl, one square meter of which weighs (duh) 120 grams—about the same as an apple. But record geeks and audiophiles often prefer a higher-grade format known as 180-gram vinyl, which weighs—you guessed it—180 grams per square meter. (That’s about the same as a hockey puck.) The 180-gram records are thicker and heavier, and less prone to warping (although not, as is wrongly believed, blessed with deeper grooves). They’re also often pressed on so-called virgin vinyl, meaning none of it has been recycled, making for fewer impurities in the record (i.e., the clicks and pops you hear during playback).
Of course, being thicker and heavier, 180-gram albums are also more expensive. And for the truly snobbish, there is limited-edition 220-gram vinyl, which sounds like angels whispering the secrets of heaven inside your brain.
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 Nas’s new record got me wondering: Has anyone ever used the N-wordin an albumtitle before?
E.J. West, Bethesda, MD
When Nas announced he was calling his ninth album Nigger (he ultimately bowed to pressure from retailers and left the LP untitled), it was shocking but not unprecedented. Richard Pryor released a pair of N-word albums in themid-’70s: That Nigger’s Crazy (1974) and Bicentennial Nigger (1976). A few years earlier, Sly & the Family Stone had a jam entitled “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey” (1969), and JohnLennon and Yoko Ono dueted on the provocative “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” in 1972. Patti Smith had “RockN Roll Nigger” in 1978, and in 1991 N.W.A released Efil4zaggin—Niggaz4life spelledbackward—which topped the Billboard charts.
But to find the word’s earliest appearances in pop, you have to go back to the blackface-minstrel songs of the pre–Civil War South. Titles include Dan Emmett’s “Nigger on De Wood Pile” (1845), R.W. Pelham’s “The Free Nigger” (1841) and the earliest example we could find, “Whar Did You Come From? (Knock a Nigger Down),” performed by the blackface performer Joel Sweeney in 1840.
I heard Neil Young stole one of his album titles from Devo. Which one?
Penny Stroud, Burlington, VT
Well, “stole” isn’t quite right—but he definitely borrowed one. In 1978, Young—working under his pseudonym, Bernard Shakey—directed and starred in a low-budget black comedy called Human Highway, about a nuclear holocaust. New-wave weirdos Devo also appeared in the movie, and bandleader Mark Mothersbaugh lent music to the soundtrack. (He’d go on to contribute to Wes Anderson’s films and Rugrats.)
One day, Young spotted Mothersbaugh wearing a T-shirt with the slogan RUST NEVER SLEEPS. Mothersbaugh and Devo bassist Gerald Casale had made itfour years earlier, when they owned a printing business in Ohio, to advertise an anti-rust chemical called Rust-Oleum. Young liked the line so much he named his next album afterit. “It relates to my career,” he later said.
“The longer I keep going, the more I have to fight this corrosion.”
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 Did Elvira really lose her virginity to Tom Jones?
Don Sparks, Broken Arrow, OK
Weirdly, yes. Before she donned the campy mantle of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the former Cassandra Peterson was one of rock& roll’s first groupies. A cute redhead from Colorado Springs, Colorado, Peterson canoodled with Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Elvis but always refused to go all the way. After high school she moved to Las Vegas and got a job in a nude revue called Viva Les Girls—where, one fateful night in 1969, she met the tight-pantsed Jones.
“I was fresh meat,” Peterson recalled last year. “Tom seemed gentlemanly and nice, so when he was jumping on me a few hours later, I thought, Well, if I’mever gonna do this, it might as well be with Tom Jones.” Butthe well-endowed Welshman wasn’t very gentle with her what’s-new-pussycat. “It was painful and horrible,” Peterson said. Truly horrible—Jones had done some damage to her lady parts. She had to go to the ER alone to get a couple of stitches.
“I thought for sure we were gonna run away together and get married. I went backstage to see him the next night, buthe was with his two background singers … and was all over them. I was devastated.”
I heard Vampire Weekend got their name from a movie, but I can’t find it anywhere on IMDB. What gives?
Rick Schevling, Alpharetta, GA
The summer after his freshman year at Columbia University, future VW frontman Ezra Koenig filmed a super-low-budget horror flick, Vampire Weekend. “It was about a guy, that I played, called Walcott, whose dad gets killed by vampires because vampires take over his country,” Koenig said.
He set the footage aside and promptly forgot about it. When he found it a couple of years later, he decided the title would make for a good band name. The movie was never finished, but Koenig did edit it into a trailer. Search YouTube for “vampire weekend trailer” to check it out.
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 Is there really a hidden meaning behind Radiohead’s In Rainbows?
Steven Chu, Oakland, CA
Not since Dorothy Gale followed the yellow brick road to the strains of The Dark Side of the Moon have music-conspiracy geeks done as much voodoo-theorizing as they have with In Rainbows. One camp claims the album is organized according to the Golden Ratio, a governing principle of classical architecture and Renaissance art. More plausible is the binary theory, which focuses on the plethora of ones and zeros surrounding In Rainbows: on sale in stores beginning 01/01, released to the Internet on 10/10, announced to the world 10 days earlier, comprising 10 tracks, with 10 letters in the title, preceded by 10 message-board posts that alluded to the Roman numeral X and to binary code. What’s more, the working title of Radiohead’s OK Computer—released 10 years prior—was Zeros and Ones. Also, if you get high and play the album backward, it will totally tell you who shot JFK.
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