Ask Blender
Blender Magazine
Editor's Note: This excerpt was taken from the 'Ask Blender' section of March's issue
Who was the first rock star to tie a scarf around his microphone stand?
Tricia Singer, Charlotte, NC
That boho-chic look has lately been adopted by all sorts of pop stars, from Carrie Underwood to Lindsay Lohan. But the man most frequently associated with the mic-stand scarf, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, insists he was the first and we couldn’t find any evidence to contradict him.
According to Tyler, it started as an accident. “Very early on,” he tells Blender, “I had a favorite macramé shirt that I wore onstage all the time and an Indian scarf in my hair” - trés dude looks like a lady. “The shirt and scarf got worn out and torn off me eventually,” he says, but rather than throw them out, Tyler “hung them on the mic-stand for good luck. Must be the gypsy in me” The look stuck, and its now one of his trademarks.
Interestingly, in addition to looking cool, the scarves doubled as a makeshift medicine cabinet. “Some of them had little pockets sewn in,” Tyler said in the band’s 2003 autobiography, “and I’d weight them with Quaaludes and Tuinals. That way I wouldn’t run out.” Funny - our Aunt Sylvia used to do the same thing.
