Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry Curiouscast

The very last thing an artist or a promoter or owner of a venue wants is for someone to get hurt—or worse--at a concert…but it does happen…
There are always stories about bad behaviour or unexpected crowd dynamics… Altamont in 1969, The Who crowd crush in 1979, Woodstock 99, the nine dead during Pearl Jam’s set at the Roskilde Festival in 2000, the deaths at the Astroworld Festival in 2021, and the Brixton Academy crowd crush in 2023 all come to mind…
Those were security failures and problems with crowd control…but occasionally, there’s a different type of disaster, the kind that happens suddenly and without warning…
When you go to a show, you expect that the building and everything in it will be safe, that all has been constructed to proper standards, and won’t present any kind of danger to anyone at the gig…
The last thing you think about is the stage coming down on top of the performers, the crew, and the crowd…
Saturday, June 12, 2012, at Downsview Park in Toronto was a clear, calm summer day. But just minutes before the grounds were to open for fans, thousands of pounds of equipment and scaffolding suddenly came crashing down…one person died and three people were injured…
What happened?...and why did it take so long for justice to be served?...and while we’re at it, was justice served? I'm Alan Cross and this is “Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem the Music Industry, episode 16”…the Radiohead stage collapse…have I got a story for you…
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There are monsters who walk among us, people who prey on the young and vulnerable…and they have always been out there and in all walks of life…
John Wayne Gacy hired himself out as a clown for parties…it was later discovered that he raped, tortured, and murdered at least 33 boys and young men…26 bodies were found in the crawl space under his home near Chicago…
Robert Anderson was the sports physician at the University of Michigan…he was accused of raping over a thousand men and women during routine medical exams…
There are plenty of celebrities who are convicted sexual offenders…director Roman Polanski can’t come back to the u.s. because he’ll be arrested on rape charges over an encounter with a 13-year-old-girl back in the 70s…
Jared Fogel, the subway guy…he was sentenced to 15 years in jail after being convicted of child porn and sex acts with minors…R. Kelly is in jail for 30 years on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering, and child sexual abuse…
Woody Allen, Mike Tyson, Bill Cosby, Tupac, Michael Jackson—they’ve all been implicated and, in some cases, charged and convicted…and then there’s Jimmy Savile, the British DJ and media personality who, under the veneer of being philanthropic, may have been one of the most prolific predatory sex offenders in British history…
There’s more, too…this is episode 15 of “Uncharted: crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry”…and I have three stories of evil predators from the world of rock…
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The Manson family murders are among the most famous crimes in American history…their actions have been documented over and over and over…this program will not be a recitation of what happened…instead, we’re going to look specifically at how music figures into this story, before, during, and after these horrific events…music had a much bigger part in the murders than most people realize…
This is a story that involves The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Neil Young, The Mamas and Papas, a couple of famous record producers, a large discography of Manson-made records, and a long list of artists who have at least some relationship to Manson and his people…
I'm Alan Cross and this is episode 14 of “Uncharted: Music and Mayhem in the Music Industry”
This time, it’s the musical nightmare of Charles Manson


Show contact info:
X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross
Website: curiouscast.ca
Email: Alan@alancross.ca
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Since homo sapiens gained consciousness and self-awareness, we’ve been asking some big questions…what does it all mean?... What’s the purpose of existence?... Is there something more to life and the universe than what I can see?...
This has led us down all kinds of spiritual journeys and rabbit holes…for billions, this means turning to religion…but what if traditional spirituality and beliefs don’t cut it?...if you’re not careful, you might find yourself in a cult…
Maybe you’re seduced by a charismatic leader who claims to have all the answers when it comes to religion, philosophy, spirituality, and maybe even politics…it's non-mainstream stuff, which is part of the appeal…maybe this leader and his followers really do have all the answers to everything you’ve been searching for…
Here’s where things get weird…you’re introduced to unorthodox teachings, strange rituals, odd practices, and wild belief systems…maybe you’re given a task or caught up in the group’s goals and objectives…
Then we get into mind control, brainwashing, shaming, suppression of individual identities, totalitarian enforcement of behaviour, separation from family and friends, and even terrorism, violence, and death…
There are thousands of groups around the world…many are generally benign hare Krishnas, for example…others are sketchy and warrant skepticism…I’d put the wacky Raelians in that group…and a few are downright dangerous…think the Heaven’s Gate UFO group and suicide cult in San Diego…
Now: what happens when you mix cults with music?...a lot of very, very bad things…I'm Alan Cross and this is Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, episode 13…have i got some stories for you…this is what can happen when music and cults intersect…


Show contact info:
X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross
Website: curiouscast.ca
Email: Alan@alancross.ca
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When something bad happens, we want to know why…the weirder and badder the event, the more we need to know…
It can’t possibly be random…someone needs to be responsible and held accountable…someone needs to be blamed…and there had better not be any loose ends…
Certain segments of the population have always been suspicious of the official story…forget the simplest of most logical explanation…these awful events or phenomenon’s are the work of some kind of secret cabal or organization pulling the strings of life on earth…it was a conspiracy…
For example, the most famous murder of modern times was the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963…more than sixty years later, it seems like no one believes that lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman…
To be fair, they might be right…there’s been a lot of investigation into the JFK case over the decades…i’m one of those nuts who reads, watches, and listens to everything involved with the assassination…and I gotta tell you that i’m convinced this was the result of a loose need-to-know operation involving the CIA, the deep stage, Cuban exiles, and American mobsters…
There’s also something called “Occam’s razor” which dates back to the 14th century…this Monk—William of Occam—was annoyed at how people blamed supernatural forces when even the simplest thing went wrong…his answer to that was “look, the simplest and most obvious explanation is usually the correct one”…
But try that approach with people who believe the earth is flat and that we never went to the moon…Covid-19 was engineered by the media…and the Illuminati live beneath the Denver airport…
The world of conspiracy theories is a bottomless pit of weirdness…and when it comes to music, one of the deepest and strangest of these theories has to do with what happened above a greenhouse in Seattle on April 5, 1994…
Boy, have I got stories—multiple stories, in fact—about this one…in fact, it might be the most compressive study you’ve ever heard on the subject…this is uncharted: music and mayhem in the music industry, episode 12: it’s the ever-popular Kurt-Cobain-was-murdered theory…

Show contact info:
X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross
Website: curiouscast.ca
Email: Alan@alancross.ca
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In the summer of 2006, a young Calgary woman was on top of the world. She had a supportive family, amazing friends and a great job. But life as she knew it came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the night on August 6, 2006. In this episode, Global News senior crime reporter Nancy Hixt shares details of a violent attack- a story that’s every woman’s worst fear.
www.calgarycrimestoppers.org - reference case # 06274598
https://newsroom.calgary.ca/sexual-assault-case-from-2006-has-new-lead/
Contact:
Instagram: @nancy.hixt
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NancyHixtCrimeBeat/
Email: nancy.hixt@globalnews.ca
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