Rock Stars Who Wasted Thousands Of Dollars On Bizarre Things

No song better encapsulates the entitled life of a ridiculously wealthy rock star than "Life's Been Good," Joe Walsh's musical satire of pointless excess. From the pricey Maserati he can no longer drive after losing his licence, to a multimillion-dollar mansion he's never been to because he's on the road, trashing hotel room after hotel room, Walsh depicts a life of conspicuous consumption grown out of control. With a seemingly endless supply of money at their disposal, rock stars haven't always made the wisest financial decisions. Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood, for example, once told The Telegraph he couldn't even remember how many times he'd gone bankrupt. "In the end I've lost count," he said. In the 1980s, one tabloid estimated that he'd spent $60 million or so on cocaine.

While spending a fortune on drugs is a frequently told tale in the annals of rock history, there have also been those who've spent their money on some truly strange stuff. Stephen Morris of New Order, for example, has taken to collecting tanks and other military vehicles, while Genesis drummer and frontman Phil Collins continues to remember the Alamo, amassing a collection of memorabilia estimated at $100 million in value.

Of course, those musicians and their off-kilter interests are only the tip of the iceberg. To find out more, read on to learn about some rock stars who wasted thousands of dollars on bizarre things.

Lady Gaga isn't just an internationally famous pop star and Hollywood actor; she's also a committed believer in the paranormal. That's been evident in her well-known contention that she's the reincarnated embodiment of her late aunt Joanne, claiming that her mother saw a light enter her belly while she was engaged to Gaga's father. "She believes that Joanne came into the room and sort of okayed her for my dad and that Joanne transferred her spirit into my mom," she told Vanity Fair in 2018, as reported by the Boston Herald.

According to a 2010 report from Ireland Online (via Glamour), Gaga's belief in the spirit realm extends beyond mere reincarnation. In fact, she is reportedly so terrified of encountering malevolent supernatural entities that she brings in a hired team of paranormal investigators to scan hotels and will only stay in places that have been given the all-clear. In fact, she supposedly shelled out nearly $40,000 on electromagnetic field meters designed to detect the presence of ghosts. "She believes in paranormal activity and won't take any risks when she is on the road," a source told the outlet. "It's important to her to be safe from spirits."

After his 2009 death, reports emerged that Michael Jackson was close to a half-billion dollars in debt. That wasn't surprising given the way he burned through money, including the creation of a theme park and zoo at his Neverland Ranch and his reported attempt to purchase the remains of John Merrick, aka the Elephant Man, from a London medical school. 

Back in his 1980s pop-star heyday, photos surfaced of Jackson napping inside a hyperbaric chamber, a pressurized tank into which pure oxygen is pumped; Jackson first encountered that particular therapy after suffering severe burns while shooting a TV commercial, with the hyperbaric chamber used to accelerate his healing. In 1986, Jackson's manager, Frank DiLeo, confirmed that the singer was commissioning his own custom-made hyperbaric chamber, with plans to sleep in it in order to slow down his body's aging process. "Michael says it is good for his body," DiLeo told USA Today of the $125,000 medical device, as reported by Newsweek, but pointed out that neither he nor Jackson's doctor thought it was a good idea. "I can't figure him out sometimes," DiLeo admitted.

While Jackson did indeed own a hyperbaric chamber, he apparently hadn't been using it in his later years. A decade after his death, the device was discovered in a shipping container housed within a warehouse.

Prior to Keith Moon's tragic death at the age of 32, the doomed drummer for The Who was renowned for his displays of rock-star excess, famed for such antics as driving a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool and trashing so many hotel rooms that he was permanently banned by Holiday Inn.  

Among his various hobbies, Moon collected cars — and once purchased a small hovercraft (pictured at far left) that had been designed to carry a single person. Moon was known to blast around the British countryside in his beloved hovercraft, and he would often pilot the vehicle to places where a hovercraft typically wouldn't go — including the bedroom of houseguest George Lazenby (best known for playing James Bond in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"). "What I mostly remember is going down to the pub on the hovercraft," Moon's daughter, Mandy, told Universal Music. Perhaps the most infamous anecdote involving Moon's hovercraft was the time he flooded its engine and stalled the vehicle on a set of railway tracks — while dressed in a Nazi uniform.

That wasn't Moon's only out-there purchase. He also bought an open-sided milk truck — known in British parlance as a milk float — which he customized by transforming into a portable living room, complete with telephone, furniture, and record player. "The milk float had a couch on it and it was like a living room," recalled Mandy Moon. "It was so funny."

A 2001 jam session between legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen and widely loathed rock band Limp Bizkit gave the Van Halen founder an excuse to utilize one of his favorite toys: a small tank. "Eddie once bought an assault vehicle from a military auction," wrote Andrew Bennett in his coffee table book, "Eruption in the Canyon: 212 Days & Nights With the Genius of Eddie Van Halen" (via Ultimate Classic Rock), citing one of many weird things about the famed musician. "It has a shine gun mount on the back and is not legal," he continued.

According to Bennett, Van Halen wasn't impressed with Limp Bizkit's incessant weed-smoking and bolted from the jam, leaving his equipment behind. When Van Halen's subsequent calls to frontman Fred Durst to return his gear were continually ignored, the guitarist escalated the situation. "Eddie drove that assault vehicle through LA, into Beverly Hills, then parked and left it running on the front lawn of the house Limp Bizkit was rehearsing in," Bennett wrote, recalling that Van Halen also carried a handgun.

When Durst answered the door, Van Halen reportedly held the gun to his head and ordered the singer to retrieve his gear. "Eddie Van Halen stood on the front lawn of a residential home in Beverly Hills in broad daylight, smoking a cigarette while holding a gun on Fred Durst as he went back and forth from the house to the assault vehicle, lugging amps and guitars," Bennett recounted.

ZZ Top's 1976 Worldwide Texas Tour was a legendary outing, an elaborate production intended to bring Texas to the rest of the country. In order to accomplish that feat, the Texas trio bought an assortment of wildlife from the Lone Star State on the road with them. This traveling menagerie included a Texas Longhorn steer, a buffalo, a few buzzards, some rattlesnakes, and a "howling wolf" that was actually a German shepherd that couldn't howl — that particular sound effect utilized a tape recording of an actual wolf. 

All that livestock reportedly cost the band a hefty $140,000, but the complications involved in touring with all those critters were more than just monetary. That was the case when one of the buzzards got free and began flying above the audience, resulting in the band halting the show so its trainer could attract its attention and convince it to swoop down and land on his white hat.

Even worse, however, was the time the buffalo made a break for it. "The only time it got sticky was when the buffalo made his escape," ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Daily News. "One afternoon ... we played Three Rivers Stadium [in Pittsburgh], and I'll never forget seeing the trainer in a golf cart trying to catch up to the buffalo stampeding and zig-zagging across third base to home plate."

When Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash made enough money to purchase a Los Angeles mansion, he outfitted the place with a unique array of pets. "I installed a full-on reptile zoo over there," the rocker wrote in his autobiography, "Slash." "Just a gazillion snakes and all kinds of stuff." 

In addition to reptiles, Slash also had a pet mountain lion, whom he'd named Curtis. Pinball machine creator John Borg recalled meeting Curtis when he was still a kitten, then about 8 months old. "He was as friendly as your average house cat," Borg recalled for Far Out. "He was much larger than a house cat. A little bigger than a German shepherd," Borg added. 

When Slash's home was heavily damaged in an earthquake, he decamped to a hotel, with Curtis in tow. As he wrote, "We snuck him into the Four Seasons in his cage and locked him in our bathroom." That situation didn't last long; as Slash left his room and headed out to dinner, he saw Curtis following him down the hall, having somehow managed to escape from his cage and open both the bathroom door and the hotel room door. "I realized that we had to deal with him immediately, so I called a friend who is an animal caretaker who picked him up and took him up to canyon country, where a friend of mine had a facility that housed exotic animals," Slash wrote of briefly housing a mountain lion in a luxury hotel.

When not creating legendary guitar riffs and engaging in legendary rock-star debauchery, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page busied himself by indulging his fascination with controversial British occultist Aleister Crowley. Page collected artifacts once owned by the so-called "wickedest man in the world," including his manuscripts and other memorabilia. The most expensive piece of Crowley's history that Page purchased, however, was Boleskine House, Crowley's one-time home on the banks of Scotland's Loch Ness. 

The sinister history of Boleskine House extended far earlier than Crowley; according to lore, the home sat upon the site of a church that burned to the ground while full of worshippers. "The bad vibes were already there," Page told Rolling Stone in a 1975 interview. "A man was beheaded there and sometimes you can hear his head rolling down ... Of course, after Crowley there have been suicides, people carted off to mental hospitals."

Page's plans to restore the decaying home to its former glory cost him thousands over the years, until he eventually sold the property in the early 1990s. Two subsequent fires had left the place a complete ruin by the time a foundation purchased the home, spending millions in restoration efforts.

While Rod Stewart is widely known for his love of soccer — he's such an aficionado that he had his own soccer pitch built in the sprawling back garden of his British country estate — he's just as passionate about model trains. In fact, his home in Beverly Hills features a special room housing his massive train set, which he constructed in a room larger than a tennis court. "It can never be moved," Stewart explained in an interview with The Mirror. "I have 13 trains running at once. For me, the pleasure has been in the building of it."

Model trains are certainly not unheard of within rock-star circles; Neil Young is likewise an aficionado and has his own elaborate setup at his Northern California ranch, while such rockers as Roger Daltrey, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, and Bruce Springsteen are also model train buffs. Stewart, however, has taken his love affair with his trains to a whole other level by having a duplicate set that he brings with him on the road whenever he goes on tour — renting out an extra hotel room in which they can be set up in case he feels like playing with them. 

"When I'm on the road in hotel rooms, like the Ritz-Carlton in New York, they clear out a room for me," he explained of his hobby. "All my cases come in and they set up tables and lamps and it becomes my workshop." 

Ed Sheeran is no slouch when it comes to giving gifts, something he demonstrated when he presented pal Elton John with a 6-foot-tall, 2-and-a-half-ton marble statue of a penis. "What do you buy the man who has everything? A huge marble penis!" Sir Elton declared in a radio interview with Britain's "Carrie & Tommy" show, via NME. 

John's mention of Sheeran's distinctive gift in interviews led another of Sheeran's musician friends, Sam Smith, to request that Sheeran gift them a massive marble penis as well. "Then Sam was around my house ... and Sam saw one of them and said, 'Can I have one?'" Sheeran recalled while appearing on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert." "And I said, 'What would you like?' And Sam said, 'One the size of me. One that's 6-foot-2.' So there we go. That's it."

Smith, however, didn't realize that Sheeran was going to take his request seriously. "It's actually wild. I thought it was a joke," Smith said during an appearance on "The Kelly Clarkson Show.". "It's a 6-foot-2 marble penis. It's 2 tons, and I'm gonna have to get it craned into my house." According to Smith, they were planning on turning the sculpture into a fountain. "Which I think will be hard to do," the singer quipped.

It's not unheard-of for rock stars to spend exorbitant amounts of money on their attire, but it's another matter entirely to purchase a first-class airline ticket for a particularly beloved item of clothing. Yet that's precisely what took place when Bono remembered that he'd left his favorite hat in London — and wanted to wear it during a performance in Modena, Italy, alongside famed tenor Luciano Pavarotti.

According to report in The Telegraph, when the U2 frontman realized his beloved black trilby was still in London, he plunked down more than $1,200 so that his hat could make it to Modena in time for the show. Legend has it that the flight crew was so fearful that the hat might become damaged in transit that it was taken from its first-class seat and placed in the cockpit with the captain, where it safely sat for the remainder of the flight. A driver picked it up and delivered it to Bono before the show. 

Guns N' Roses singer Axl Rose once found that his favorite yellow jacket had been accidentally left behind in England while the band was touring. With a big show coming up on an entirely different continent, and Rose anxious to wear that particular jacket onstage, a rock-star level plan was hatched. "So a roadie was given the job to get on a plane as fast as possible, go to London, find Axl Rose's yellow jacket, and come back so he could play the show," rock journalist-turned-Hollywood heavyweight Cameron Crowe told Entertainment Weekly while promoting his HBO series about rock roadies, titled "Roadies."

Sending a roadie on back-to-back transcontinental flights to retrieve a jacket is so extreme that the incident has become legendary among the tight-knit roadie community. "The best part about that story is not that somebody had to go get a yellow jacket for Axl Rose, but that it became such lore among other roadies that it became a verb — to yellow-jacket," Crowe explained.

Elvis Presley spared no expense when furnishing his iconic Memphis estate, Graceland. Along with Presley's famed Jungle Room, there was a lesser-known room entirely devoted to his collection of talking myna birds. Following a 2021 tour of Graceland, a feature in The Express pointed to the Bird Room, adjacent to the Jungle Room. While it isn't known how much money it cost Presley to outfit the space to accommodate his feathered friends, the room does feature some custom-made stained-glass windows depicting peacocks.

As Graceland archivist Angie Marchese told the outlet, the myna birds living in the Bird Room would overhear Graceland maids discussing Presley's absence from the home. "And so the myna birds would often repeat that," she said. "The funniest story I've ever heard about the myna birds is that when they would hear that Elvis wasn't home, they would say, 'Elvis isn't home right now! Elvis isn't home right now!'" However, Marchese revealed, the birds would continue to make that same declaration after Presley had returned. "Even though he was home, which was kind of funny," she added.

These days, there are no longer any myna birds living at Graceland. According to The Express, Graceland's Bird Room is now used to house cleaning supplies and barriers that are put up whenever photoshoots or other functions take place at the mansion.