Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, episode 022: The strange ballad of Doc McGhee

August 23, 2024 Alan Cross 0 Comments

On August 6, 1989, a chartered 757 nicknamed The Magic Bus took off bound for the Soviet Union, Onboard were Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, The Scorpions, Skid Row, Ozzy Osbourne, Cinderella, and a few others/

It was the dying days of the USSR. But other than the communist hardliners (we’re looking at you, Vladimir Putin), few people were sad about that. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, had ushered in the era of glasnost and perestroika. Reforms were being enacted and a few freedoms were creeping into Soviet society.

This trip was part of that. A plane full of Western rockers was headed to play a two-day festival in Moscow with attendance expected to top 200,000 people. It was the Moscow Music Peace Festival, an event designed to promote greater understanding between the West and the East during this time of great change at the end of the Cold War.

It was also set to raise money in conjunction with the Make a Difference Foundation, an organization dedicated to helping local Russian people who were addicted to drugs and alcohol. A lot of the money would go to messaging and rehab treatments.

Wait—what?

Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne, and all these other acts were part of a highly sensitive, properly diplomatic, international anti-drugs-and-alcohol project inside the Soviet Union?

Oh, yes. And on the plane, Ozzy was drunk the whole time. His guitarist, Zakk Wylde, was tripping on LSD. You had to be careful where you stepped because there were syringes on the floor. At the back of the cabin, people rotated in and out of informal jam sessions fueled by booze and drugs.

Now you’re probably wondering who created this idea and how it actually happened. Well, that’s a bit…complicated.

It involved the CIA, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noreiga, and 640 tons of marijuana smuggled into North Carolina. Oh, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

At the centre of it all was a man named Doc McGhee—who just happened to be the manager of most of the bands on the plane.

This is episode 22 of Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. It’s how a drug-smuggling band manager helped end the Cold War. And what you’re about to hear is 100% true.

Get Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry wherever you get your podcasts. Both Uncharted and The Ongoing History of New Music will be heard back-to-back overnights five days a week on these Corus news stations:

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