Halloween and rock and roll go together like peanut butter and jelly. Something about darkened rooms filled with outlandish costumes and screaming girls, we guess. Some of the rock's most ghoulish stars are also its most fun, as Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson will no doubt prove once again at Reliant Arena Tuesday.
Derided as the devil's music from its earliest days, rock and roll has always enjoyed a heavy flirtation with the dark side. After all, as the soundtrack to youthful rebellion, rock could hardly remain steadfastly on the side of the angels and still stay interesting as long as it has.
But there's a difference between the shock and horror that true artists inject into their performances and genuine, irredeemable evil. Though the rock and roll lifestyle has certainly attracted its fair share of damaged and unsavory characters over the years, surprisingly few have ever crossed the line. Those who do find not fame, but chilling infamy.
Ready for a few real-life rock and roll horror stories? Then turn out the lights, turn up the stereo and behold the Top 5 most evil rockers of all time.
5. Gary Glitter Like all the best pedophiles, Gary Glitter seemed completely harmless. Back in the '70s, Glitter challenged the likes of Slade, T. Rex and Sweet for glam-rock supremacy in the UK, and his mondo hit "Rock and Roll (Part II)" caught on here in the U.S. as an all-time great jock jam. If you don't have fond memories of screaming "HEY!" along to its chorus during the Rockets' early-'90s championship runs, then you simply weren't there.
Glitter's blinding stage costumes hid a very real, very dangerous dark side, however. In 1997, his perverse sexuality was exposed the way it always seems to be: The idiot took his laptop in for repairs with the hard drive chock full of kiddie porn. Glitter was slapped with a four-month prison sentence and began a new career as a registered sex offender.
Now a pariah, the former star fled scrutiny to the seediest places on earth, eventually settling in Vietnam. There, he was convicted in 2006 of committing obscene acts with two girls, aged ten and 11, and served three years in prison. As if that weren't enough, news emerged earlier this month that Glitter now faces police questioning in England over a woman's claim she saw him rape a teenager in the 1970s. Charming.
4. Ernie Carletti
Heavy metal music is full of male power fantasies, but for a few twisted freaks, fantasies just aren't enough. If you've never heard of Ernie Carletti, it's because he wasn't much of a rock star. The former Naughty Naughty guitarist's most high-profile gig was a short stint in the metal band Iced Earth in 2006.
Maybe it was frustration over never achieving fame and fortune that drove Carletti to do what he did, or maybe he's just a rotten fucker at the core. Whatever the reason, the guitarist is currently serving 33 years in prison for kidnapping, raping and torturing a University of Delaware student in 2003.
The poor victim testified that Carletti, a total stranger, forced her into his car at gunpoint in a Burger King parking lot in Newark. The coward then handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded her before taking her to his home in Maryland, where he hog-tied her and ordered her to call him "master" as he raped her. When he was finished, he dumped her on the side of the road.
Small comfort that the piece of shit will spend the next three decades years as a sex offender in the prison system.
