Music So Dangerous It Had to Be Banned

Variations of "Frankie and Johnny" have been around since the early part of the Twentieth Century. Like in the cases of "Mack the Knife" and "Stagger Lee", some versions are more vivid than others in the description of the transgression involved. What we hear on recordings of "Frankie and Johnny" is generally a scrubbed-up version of what you'd hear in a club or at a "smoker". There's a live recording of Harvey Fierstein at the Bottom Line in 1995 ("This is Not Going to Be Pretty") in which he does some of the 22 historically suppressed verses which a friend was able to uncover, some dealing with Frankie's line of work at a "hump house" and some dealing with exactly what she found Johnny doing to Nelly Bly, which I'll leave to your imagination, and some dealing with what damage (and where) she did with her gun. Over the years it's been cleaned up enough that we got an Elvis movie out of it, but there's a trail of raunchy stuff from over the years associated with it. Here's a Mae West version, nothing too salacious but "hump joint" made it.

Naughty tots as well. You get extra points for that one.

 You sure can come up with some naughty ones, I Love Melvin!!
 Not to alarm you, but they've got their watchful eyes on you...

                     

We also have bands telling sweet little lies about their music being banned.
Although I can't for the life of me find the alleged A&M advertisement.



"Roxanne" was issued as a single in the spring of 1978, while other album tracks were still being recorded, but it failed to chart. It also failed to make the BBC's playlist, which the band attributed to the song's subject matter. A&M consequently promoted the single with posters claiming "Banned by the BBC", though this was a misconception. It was never banned, just not play-listed.

Copeland later admitted, "We got a lot of mileage out of it being supposedly banned by the BBC."