![]() Sorgatz explains that “the record spent twelve weeks on the Billboard charts, eventually selling more than 100,000 copies” at a list price of $4.98 each. It was released in November 1969 sporting liner notes credited to T.M. Soon, Warner Bros., Sorgatz writes, “signed the band for $15,000.” Unlike the two-record set reviewed in Rolling Stone, the real album was reduced to a single LP on the newly created Warner subsidiary Deity Records, the same label name as that of the fictional album. Once the band recorded the first three songs of the album, the tapes were played on radio stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco to whet the appetite of the public and record labels. The group hired to fill in for the musicians reputedly on the album was called The Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band. (‘This is stupid, let’s make it stupider,’ Marcus later explained.) He recruited a real skiffle band from Berkeley to record the fake album, with each song painfully matching its description in the review.” Rather than admit to the hoax, he created the band to personify it. Rex Sorgatz’s The Encyclopedia of Misinformation reports that “Marcus took an unusual next step. Gleason, a writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, broke the news in his ‘On the Town’ column that the whole thing was a joke, calling the review “a delightful bit of instant mythology.” “Thousands believed it.”Īccording to various online sources, a few weeks later, on Wednesday, October 18, 1969, Ralph J. “The response to the review was enormous,” The Rolling Stone Record Review noted. Christian,” a reference to Terry Southern’s novel The Magic Christian, which had been recently adapted as a film featuring Ringo Starr. The review was published under the collaborative pseudonym “T.M. “The unmistakable vocals make it clear that this is indeed what it appears to be: John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, backed by George Harrison and a drummer yet unnamed-the ‘Masked Marauders.’ ” It was reported that the album, the production of which is credited to Kooper, was recorded “in a small town near the site of the original Hudson Bay Colony in Canada.”īut the recording was actually concocted in the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco, “an innocent hoax dreamed up by Greil Marcus and Bruce Miroff,” the 1971 Pocket Book collection The Rolling Stone Record Review revealed. Among them was an eponymous two-LP bootleg set by a collective known as the Masked Marauders that was reviewed in Rolling Stone in its issue cover-dated October 18, 1969, which was probably on newsstands at the end of September. On the heels of the release of Super Session, a 1968 album featuring Al Kooper, Michael Bloomfield and Stephen Stills, a flurry of similar records followed. It was a moment of fakery that subsequently managed to de-falsify itself to some degree. ![]() But possibly the most curious incident of intentional misinformation occurred just over 50 years ago in the pages of the still nascent Rolling Stone magazine. The term “fake news” has become a regular part of our modern-day vocabulary, taking its place with the “yellow journalism” of the late 19th century.
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