Stevie Wonder in the early 1970s was like Paul Bunyan -- chopping down everything in his path. Signed to Motown a decade earlier, at age 11, Stevland Morris was that rarest of pop performers: a child star who grew into astounding maturity.

Released in early August 1973, his LP 'Innervisions' was the centerpiece of a five-album run that began with the massive hit 'Superstition' and would round out with the 1976 opus 'Songs in the Key of Life.' 'Innervisions' would be the first of three straight Wonder full-lengths to earn Album of the Year Grammys. Despite such heady times, however, upon its release Wonder told a reporter that he was having strange thoughts, fearing for his life.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, country music legend George Jones swore he was fueled by nothing stronger than Coca-Cola in his early years onstage. But his first No. 1 country hit, way back in 1959, was an ode to moonshine liquor – 'White Lightning.' He's had 13 more chart-toppers since then, including three duets with his onetime wife, Tammy Wynette; the stone classic 'He Stopped Loving Her Today'; and a duet with Barbara Mandrell released at the height of the 'Urban Cowboy' craze, '(I Was Country) When Country Wasn't Cool.' He's often been called the best pure country singer alive. Yet he's probably best known not for his prodigious output but his intake.

This past weekend, Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox was doing something he often does: giving away free music. This time 'round, it was two Atlas Sound songs. However, the contents of Cox's entire Mediaire account leaked during the distribution, including personal pictures, demos and complete albums. Oops.

As a result, Cox and Co. were forced to release their forthcoming album, 'Microcastle,' originally due October 28, on iTunes Wednesday.

"I have researched it and am not going to make excuses, but the fact is that Mediafire has made several upgrades recently when I was taking a break from blogging," Cox responded. "In all seriousness, I am the one who f---ed up by not realizing that without creating an account, Mediafire has been archiving my uploads 'for my convenience' via my 'browser cache' and that as part of their new 'convenient' features they offer automatic 'folder sharing' which must be turned off. I don't blame anyone for, and am not accusing anyone of stealing things."

Most rock stars have a special attachment to their equipment. More than 40 years ago, aspiring groupie Cynthia Albritton took it upon herself to immortalize it. Using clay or wax, she and her partner (mysteriously known as Pest) set about taking molds of willing rock stars', ahem, instruments. They put together an official-looking "Plaster Caster" kit and got themselves invited backstage. Cynthia, the one who saw the task as a real calling, soon adopted a nom d'art: Cynthia Plaster Caster.

It started innocently enough: When an art-school instructor gave his 19-year-old student an assignment to make a cast of "something solid," young Cyn's dirty mind instantly knew what that something would be. After settling on a dental-mold material called alginate and perfecting the process on some friends, she famously cast the not-so-Little Wing of the legendarily amorous Jimi Hendrix. As he did for guitar innovation, Hendrix set the bar high for plaster casts.

She once posed nude while running for president. She has stripped teenage boys to their underwear onstage, and she has worn a bandolier of condoms across her otherwise bare bosom.

They don't call her the "Mexican Madonna" for nothing.

South-of-the-border superstar Gloria Trevi built her career during the 1990s as a true pop provocateuse, recording songs about class warfare, childhood poverty and religious hypocrisy. Growing up an impoverished child herself, Trevi performed on the streets of Mexico City before joining a short-lived girl group called Boquitas Pintadas (best translated as "lipsticked kisses"). She met and married producer Sergio Andrade, a Svengali who helped Trevi launch her solo career. By the mid-1990s, she had sold millions of albums worldwide, with her most familiar song, 'Pelo Suelto,' becoming a huge No. 1 hit in Spanish-speaking countries.

The name of the band alone – Dead Kennedys – is about as Twisted as they come. They were looking for some action, and they got it. San Francisco's answer to the Sex Pistols had more than their share of colorful episodes.
Where to begin? We could lead with the time that Jello Biafra ran a campaign for San Francisco mayor, advocating a citywide ban on cars and a requirement that all businessmen wear clown suits. He got more than 6,000 votes, placing him fourth in a field of 10.

We could start with the obscenity charge brought on Biafra's band by Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center for an H.R. Giger poster the group packaged in its 'Frankenchrist' album. The offending poster is now known, unofficially, as 'Penis Landscape.'

"She was there one minute/And then she was gone the next," sang Linda Thompson on the gloomy album classic 'Shoot Out the Lights,' which she recorded with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Richard Thompson. "Lying in a pool of herself with a twisted neck." The song, fans have suspected for years, is about Sandy Denny, the couple's old friend from Fairport Convention, the fated band that almost single-handedly invented the British version of electric folk-rock.

Inspired by West Coast groups such as Love and the Byrds and quickly dubbed the "British Jefferson Airplane," Fairport Convention were nudged toward a kind of psychedelic interpretation of more traditional folk music with the 1968 addition of singer Denny. When she first auditioned, one bandmate would recall, the wondrously talented Denny stood out "like a clean glass in a sinkful of dirty dishes." Her song 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes' and the group's fourth album, 'Liege & Lief,' are considered definitive examples of the genre.vermore.

He was the heir apparent to Jimi Hendrix, in more ways than one. Funk shredder Eddie Hazel squandered his spectacular talent with hard-core addiction, dying of internal bleeding and liver failure by the age of 42.

Born in Brooklyn but raised in Plainfield, N.J. -- where his mother, sadly, thought she could keep her son from the ravages of big-city temptation – the young Hazel taught himself to play guitar alongside a school-age buddy, Billy "Bass" Nelson. Within a few years. a fellow local musician named George Clinton came calling for both potential protégés, convincing Eddie's mother that her 17-year-old belonged on the road with Clinton's band the Parliaments, where the youngster could show off his jaw-dropping guitar skills.

On tour in Philadelphia, Hazel befriended a drummer named Tiki Fulwood, who was soon hired to join the guitarist and Nelson as the core of Funkadelic, Clinton's backing band. With the name the Parliaments in dispute (the bandleader later changed it to Parliament), Funkadelic emerged as the freewheeling Clinton's main project. Hazel's prodigious psychedelic playing helped vault the group from a classic R&B style to the fantastic, mind-altering sound introduced on Funkadelic's 1970 debut and its sequel, 'Free Your Mind ... And Your Ass Will Follow.'

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame began inducting extraordinary sidemen in 2000. Session drummers Hal Blaine and Earl Palmer, Motown bassist James Jamerson and Elvis guitarist Scotty Moore were among the inaugural class.

Based on his astounding track record, drummer Jim Gordon should be on any voter's short list for the honor. He played with the Byrds, the Everly Brothers and three-fourths of the Beatles and was a member of Traffic and Derek and the Dominos. He's one of the most sampled musicians of all time. He was even the original recording artist behind Animal, the Muppets' super-furry drummer.

But murdering your mama is a surefire way to find yourself in a different kind of institution.

If true punk is the defiant determination to make music without any actual musical training, the backwoods eccentric Hasil Adkins might have been a certified original punk. Writing thousands of songs with recurring themes that included chickens and decapitation, Adkins carried on a half-century, largely self-released career that inspired the Cramps, the Flat Duo Jets and the entire psychobilly genre.

Born in the 1930s in rural Boone County, W. Va., the wholly untutored Adkins – he claimed to have attended a grand total of four days of school – set out to become the world's greatest one-man band when he fell under the mistaken impression that the country stars he heard on the radio recorded while playing every instrument themselves simultaneously. As the liner notes to one of his records would attest, he played "guitar, vodka, harmonica and drums all at once." Among his earliest home recordings were defining hunks of unbridled weirdness, including the marble-mouthed 'She Said' (later covered by the Cramps) and the would-be dance craze 'The Hunch.' Still without a label by the 1970s, he once received a thank-you note from Richard Nixon after sending the sitting president his latest recording.

To the fierce activist and reggae superstar Peter Tosh, the English language was a deadly weapon in the struggle against corruption and oppression. Politics were "politricks"; managers were "damagers" and producers "reducers."

Tosh, co-founder of the Wailers with Bob Marley, also had a name for Kingston, Jamaica, the rough city of his upbringing: "Killsome." In early September 1987, the towering musician was murdered in his home in an attack that remains mysterious to this day.

Winston Hubert McIntosh moved from the Jamaican countryside to Kingston at the age of 15, bringing nothing but "meself and Jah in my heart," as he would recall. In the tenement slums known as Trench Town, he befriended fellow aspiring musicians Marley and Bunny Livingston (later known as Bunny Wailer). Their very first recording, 'Simmer Down,' cut in late 1963, was a smash hit across the country. The Wailers had their international breakthrough after signing with Chris Blackwell's Island Records in the early 1970s. But the band's mounting indebtedness to the label for touring costs pushed Tosh toward a distrust of record-company businessmen. In his vocabulary, Blackwell became "Whiteworst."

The Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito, Calif., were legendary for their rock 'n' roll excess in the 1970s. Sly Stone liked recording amid the facility's shag rugs and redwood paneling so much that he took up residence in one of the studios. The members of Fleetwood Mac did a mountain of white powder under the skylights while recording their blockbuster album 'Rumours' there.

No one, however, enjoyed the laissez-faire attitude at the Plant like Rick James did. Following in Sly's footsteps, the Jheri-curled funk hitmaker set up a bedroom in one of the studios. He ordered a custom doorway that looked like a giant pair of puckered lips and lived there for half a decade. "You didn't have to leave to get drugs or get high," he recalled 10 years ago, after his release from Folsom State Prison.

"You gotta suck the head off dem dere crawfish." That was one of the milder visuals in the New Orleans rapper Mystikal's exceedingly graphic breakthrough song, 'Shake Ya Ass.' A bit of Louisiana folk wisdom, the saying had another, very different pop culture presence as one of the prerecorded messages on a novelty key chain called Cajun in Your Pocket. When 'Shake Ya Ass' blew up, the key chain maker sued the rapper for copyright infringement. Mystikal's lawyer was indignant. "To suggest that Mystikal's song went multiplatinum because of these gizmos defies explanation," he said.

That's probably the most comical episode in the relatively short but seriously checkered career of the attack-dog rapper, who showed up on hit singles by Master P and Snoop Dogg before busting out on his own with 'Shake Ya Ass.' That song cleared the path to his first R&B No. 1, 'Danger (Been So Long).' In 2001, Mystikal had another hit with 'Bouncin' Back (Bumpin' Me Against the Wall),' a song about resilience that might be due for a resurrection: Just a few years after being nominated for a Grammy, the rapper born Michael L. Tyler is in the midst of a six-year incarceration after pleading guilty to sexual assault.

He might have been the black Elvis. They called him "Mr. Easy," both for his smooth delivery and his facile knack for writing new songs. He had a No. 2 R&B hit before turning 21. One of his biggest smashes closed Alan Freed's and Dick Clark's shows every night. He wrote a four-million-selling hit that has been called the most popular R&B song of all time. Never heard of Jesse Belvin? That's because he died in a head-on car crash, at age 27, in 1960, seated beside his wife.

Born in San Antonio in 1932, Jesse Lorenzo Belvin soon moved to Los Angeles with his family. Still in his teens, he joined saxophonist Big Jay McNeely's band as a vocalist. Like many black L.A. singers of the time, he recorded for the independent record label of a Hollywood store owner name John Dolphin, whose underhanded tactics eventually led to his shooting death at the hands of a disgruntled songwriter.

For British rock, one dashing young American singer made an unmatched impact in the late 1950s. The Who, the Beatles, even the Sex Pistols were all die-hard fans of ... Eddie Cochran. With his hair pomade and his hula-hipped strum, the kid was clearly cut in the Elvis mold. In the U.K., though, he might have surpassed even the King in terms of idol worship, short-lived though it was.

Raised in Minnesota and Southern California, the teenage Cochran briefly shared an act with unrelated country singer Hank Cochran as the Cochran Brothers before going whole-hog for the new rockabilly sound. The photogenic musician made appearances in teen flicks such as 'The Girl Can't Help It' and 'Untamed Youth,' and his singles soon began to chart: 'Summertime Blues' in 1958, 'C'mon Everybody' the following year.