ByRoger Cormier|Aug 18, 2017, 6:00 AM EDT
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Making its debut in 1989, MTV Unplugged—in which famous musicians perform stripped-down arrangements of their biggest hits—was a hit for both the cable network and the music industry, particularly in the early- to mid-’90s. Though it lost its regular time slot in 1999, in the near-20 years since, a handful of artists have popped in for brief revivals. But now it looks as if Unplugged is ready for a reboot; MTV has announced that the series will be back beginning on September 8, 2017, with Shawn Mendes as its first guest. In the meantime, here’s a look behind the scenes of the music series that became a phenomenon.
1. OPINIONS VARY ON WHO CAME UP WITH THE IDEA.
Singer/songwriter Jules Shear has said that he came up with the concept for MTV Unplugged to promote his acoustic album, The Third Party. In 1992, The New York Times wrote that Shear was inspired by Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora’s two-song acoustic set at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards.
That’s all well and good, but producers Jim Burns and Bob Small claim they got the idea for MTV Unplugged after Bruce Springsteen treated the two—and the thousands of other fans at one of his concerts—to a final encore featuring just himself and his acoustic guitar. (Springsteen would find his way onto Unplugged in 1992.)
Executive producer Joel Gallen has referred to Unplugged as his “baby” as well and, like Shear, was inspired by Bon Jovi and Sambora’s VMA set, which he called a “jumping off point.” In I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, Small said: “Please do not credit Bon Jovi for creating Unplugged. Jon Bon Jovi thinks he was the inspiration for it. He wouldn’t even do the f***ing show until almost 20 years later.”
2. BOTH HBO AND PBS SAID NO.
HBO passed on Unplugged when Shear proposed the concept to the pay channel. Burns and Small pitched the series to PBS after MTV initially said no. PBS simply echoed MTV and HBO. It was only when Burns and Small ally Judy McGrath got a promotion at MTV that a pilot got a greenlight.
3. IT WAS A CHEAP PILOT TO SHOOT.
Bob Small said he had just four hours to set up for the Unplugged pilot, with another four hours to film it—and all on a budget of $18,000. “I couldn’t get money to hire a director,” Small said. “They said, ‘You direct it.'”
4. THERE WAS A HOST FOR THE FIRST 13 EPISODES.
None other than Jules Shear was the undisputed master of ceremonies for the first season. He also joined in on some songs.
5. THE FIRST GUESTS DIDN’T QUITE GRASP THE CONCEPT OF UNPLUGGED.
Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford from Squeeze were the stars of the first episode, which aired on November 26, 1989. But they were unprepared. “Chris and Glenn showed up for rehearsal with electric guitars,” Alex Coletti, who would end up producing the show through 2001, recalled. “I said: ‘Very funny, guys. Where are the acoustics? It’s Unplugged.’ They looked at each other and went, ‘Riiight… Make a phone call, quick!'”
6. PRODUCERS SCRAMBLED TO GIVE JOE WALSH ACTUAL FRIENDS.
“The fifth episode was billed as Joe Walsh and Friends, and Joe showed up with only one friend—Ricky, his bass player,” Coletti remembered. “We thought it meant his famous friends, but apparently that got lost in translation.” Walsh had been a member of The Eagles, who had an infamous falling-out, but Walsh’s claim of buddies gave MTV employees false hope. Producer Bruce Leddy found Dr. John recording at a neighboring studio and convinced him to come on and be Walsh’s “friend.”
7. DON HENLEY WAS NOT HAPPY THAT WALSH PLAYED “DESPERADO.”
Walsh’s former Eagles bandmate wrote “Desperado,” as well as a three-page fax explaining to MTV that he didn’t want Walsh to play it and he was refusing permission to air the performance. It was after the fax that the network invited Henley to come on the show himself to perform it. Henley was the first artist to get an entire half-hour on his own as the only artist, which quickly became the status quo for Unplugged. In 1994, when The Eagles reunited, they appeared on an MTV Unplugged special.
8. LL COOL J HAD NEVER WORKED WITH A LIVE BAND BEFORE.
The first Unplugged featuring rap artists took place in 1991. Pop’s Cool Love backed LL Cool J, MC Lyte, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest. “[It’s like] you drink milk for 10 years and then [you have to] drink fruit punch,” Quest’s Q-Tip said about performing with the band. “It’s not that the fruit is bad, but you have to get used to it.”
But LL seemed able to adapt. “We rehearsed the night before and LL Cool J had never worked with a live band,” Coletti said. “Before long, he was calling the shots like he’d been doing it his whole life.”
9. LL COOL J KNOWS YOU SAW HIS DEODORANT.
“People have teased me about the deodorant for years, but I love it,” he said. “It was raw! It was nasty! At least you know I wasn’t stinking.”
10. PAUL MCCARTNEY WAS THE FIRST ARTIST TO OFFICIALLY RELEASE HIS UNPLUGGED SET.
Before Paul McCartney, no other Unplugged artist body had thought to release their acoustic set as an album. But after he performed in 1991, the former Beatle was worried about it getting out to the masses illegally. “I figured that as Unplugged would be screened around the world there was every chance that some bright spark would tape the show and turn it into a bootleg, so we decided to bootleg the show ourselves,” he admitted. “We heard the tapes in the car driving back. By the time we got home, we’d decided we’d got an album—albeit one of the fastest I’ve ever made.” He even titled the live performance collection Unplugged (The Official Bootleg).
11. ERIC CLAPTON WAS HESITANT TO RELEASE HIS SHOW AS AN ALBUM.
“Slowhand” performed to acclaim in 1992, but he initially didn’t think it was good enough to be released officially as a CD. So naturally, his live album Unplugged won the Grammy for Album of the Year. His “Tears in Heaven” performance in particular won Song and Record of the Year. Two years later, Tony Bennett followed suit, winning the 1994 Album of the Year prize for his time on the show.
12. NEIL YOUNG WALKED OUT ON HIMSELF.
Neil Young’s Unplugged was supposed to have been taped at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York on December 12, 1992. Instead, on that night—at that venue—the audience saw something they would probably never forget: Neil Young walking out the door after numerous mistakes. The “stunned” crew members managed to get him to come back to try again that night. Young opted to junk the performance entirely, and tried again two months later—this time with a band, and with much more success.
13. TORI AMOS WALKED OUT, TOO.
Amos was thrown off and “couldn’t harness the energy.” But unlike Young, she was able to walk back onstage, perform, and not have to try again with another set on a different night. As the singer/songwriter remembered it, she and her manager paced “beneath the MTV thing” backstage thinking about the problem. “Then my [lighting director] came down and said, ‘Something just doesn’t feel right. I can’t put my finger on it,'” Amos told Worstgig.com. “For 700 shows over the five years (prior to that), I’d played with the lights down. So all the lights were up to catch the audience and I felt like somebody was watching me take a shower. So they dimmed the lights, I felt better. By that point because I’d made the choice to stop it and make some changes, I felt like I began again. And I turned the whole show around.”
14. ALEX COLETTI FOUGHT TO CUT “THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD” FROM NIRVANA’S EPISODE.
“Maybe I shouldn’t give this secret away, but I built a fake box out in front of the amp to make it look like a monitor wedge,” Coletti admitted to Guitar World in 1995. “It’s an acoustic guitar, but he’s obviously going through an amp,” he added, talking about the now iconic David Bowie cover. “I actually fought pretty hard to leave that song out [of the final edit of the show], because I felt it wasn’t as genuine as the rest of the songs. But I’m a huge Bowie fan, so I couldn’t fight too hard against the song.”
15. DAVE GROHL WAS ALMOST UNINVITED TO NIRVANA’S SHOW.
The Nirvana drummer remembered that it was a minor miracle that the band’s Unplugged performance went so well. “That show was supposed to be a disaster,” Grohl said. “We hadn’t rehearsed. We weren’t used to playing acoustic. We did a few rehearsals and they were terrible. Everyone thought it was horrible. Even the people from MTV thought it was horrible. Then we sat down and the cameras started rolling and something clicked. It became one of the band’s most memorable performances.”
As Coletti told it, Kurt Cobain was thinking of just replacing Grohl behind the kit, or maybe not using a drummer at all. “What I didn’t know was up until the day [of the Unplugged performance], there was talk of Dave [Grohl] not playing at all in the show,” the producer revealed in 2014. “Kurt wasn’t happy with the way rehearsals were going; he didn’t like the way Dave sounded playing drums with sticks.”
But Grohl turned up the day of filming, and Coletti gifted him some brushes and sizzle sticks to give his drumming a softer sound. “I was afraid Dave would just roll his eyes, like, ‘Oh great, the a**hole from MTV is trying to be my friend,'” the producer remembered thinking. “But instead he opened the package and said, ‘Cool, I’ve never had brushes before. I’ve never even tried using them.'” The album Unplugged in New York won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album in 1996. It was the band’s lone Grammy win.
16. YES, THEY TRIED TO GET ROBERT PLANT AND JIMMY PAGE TO PLAY “STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN.”
The Led Zeppelin bandmates reunited in 1994 for the Unplugged special: No Quarter: Robert Plant and Jimmy Page Unledded, which at the time was the highest-rated episode of the series ever. MTV suggested they film it in Queens, New York. Plant suggested Morocco and Wales because it was where he wrote “Kashmir” and “Down by the Seaside,” respectively. Network executives explicitly requested “Stairway” but were shot down. “I think we’re in a disposable world and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is one of the things that hasn’t quite been thrown away yet,” Plant said in 1994. “I think radio stations should be asked not to play it for 10 years, just to leave it alone for a bit so we can tell whether it’s any good or not.”
17. LIAM GALLAGHER HECKLED HIS BROTHER.
Oasis lead vocalist Liam Gallagher backed out of the Royal Festival Hall gig in London at the last minute due to a “sore throat,” so songwriter/guitarist/brother Noel took over the vocal duties. Noel would later disclose that Liam in fact appeared an hour before showtime “sh*tfaced,” and when he tried to sing it sounded “f**king dreadful.” Liam watched the performance from the balcony and at times jeered the band. Noel told him to shut up. Coletti thought it was all for the best. “There’s something when the songwriter himself sings it. Maybe he’s a little more connected to the song.”
The Spookiest Star Signs, Ranked By Horror Movie Villains
It turns out some zodiac signs are far deadlier than others—at least on screen.
ByNitya Rao|Oct 27, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT
Have you ever watched a horror movie and realized its antagonist was suspiciously similar to the villain in your own story? Whether it’s the strategic Scorpio mind games or the infamous Gemini two-faced tendencies, some red flags feel like they were written in the stars. But can your birth chart actually predict your evil twin on the silver screen?
Doing the Monster Math
There are 12 zodiac signs: Aries (March 21 – April 19), Taurus (April 20 – May 20), Gemini (May 21 – June 20), Cancer (June 21 – July 22), Leo (July 23 – August 22), Virgo (August 23 – September 22), Libra (September 23 – October 22), Scorpio (October 23 – November 21), Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21), Capricorn (December 22 – January 19), Aquarius (January 20 – February 18), and Pisces (February 19 – March 20).
There are also countless horror characters who wear their signs on their sleeves—from the charmingly polite Libra facade of Norman Bates to the spotlight-stealing, Leo spectacles of Jack Torrance at the Overlook Hotel.
To find out which star signs shine brightest in the horror hall of fame, researchers at California Psychics analyzed 85 famous movie monsters to pinpoint their astrological alignments. Sourcing 23 canonical birthdays from official lore and 62 from fan wikis and Wikidata, the study also factored in character totals and movie appearances to produce a final spookiness score out of 100.
See the full list of the spookiest zodiac signs—from Gemini to Sagittarius—based on their overall score, villain count, and standout slasher icons below:
| Rank | Zodiac Sign | Spookiness Score | Villain Count | Notable Villains |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gemini | 100.0 | 11 | Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th), Damien Thorn (The Omen) |
| 2 | Scorpio | 91.4 | 11 | Count Dracula (Dracula), Patrick Bateman (American Psycho) |
| 3 | Leo | 89.1 | 10 | Jack Torrance (The Shining), Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) |
| 4 | Aries | 79.6 | 9 | Kayako Saeki (The Grudge), Regan MacNeil (The Exorcist) |
| 5 | Libra | 71.5 | 8 | Michael Myers (Halloween), Norman Bates (Psycho) |
| 6 | Virgo | 61.7 | 7 | Carrie White (Carrie), Frankenstein’s Monster (Frankenstein) |
| 7 | Taurus | 54.5 | 6 | Chucky (Child’s Play), Pennywise (It), M3GAN (M3GAN) |
| 8 | Aquarius | 51.9 | 6 | Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs), Samara Morgan (The Ring) |
| 9 | Cancer | 48.6 | 5 | Billy Lenz (Black Christmas) |
| 10 | Sagittarius | 42.1 | 5 | Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Jigsaw (Saw) |
| 11 | Pisces | 39.5 | 4 | Angela Baker (Sleepaway Camp) |
| 12 | Capricorn | 25.9 | 3 | Candyman (Candyman); Clarice Starling (The Silence of the Lambs) |
The Horror Horoscope
The stereotype of twin sign Geminis being two-faced might be an actual archetype, with the hockey-masked Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th confirmed to be one. From The Omen‘s sinister antichrist Damien Thorn, born June 6, to Saw’s cold, calculating detective Mark Hoffman, Gemini tops the list with 11 horror villains, 35 movie appearances, and an eerily perfect spookiness score of 100.0.
Also making up one in eight characters analyzed is the second-spookiest zodiac sign, Scorpio, with a 91.4 score. Scorpio’s ranks include American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman and Halloween-born slashers Victor Crowley (Hatchet) and Ethan Landry (Scream VI). Fire signs Leo and Aries have 10 and nine characters respectively, with the latter including The Exorcist‘s Regan MacNeil, whose embodiment of an Aries sun shines through from her playful, energetic pre-possession self to her explosive emotionality when pushed to the brink.
On the less sinister side of the spectrum is Capricorn as the least spooky zodiac sign with a spookiness score of 25.9 out of 100, known for its logical, no-nonsense attitude. Capricorns, like the sharp, determined Clarice Starling of The Silence of the Lambs, prioritize practicality over paranormal activity, cementing the sign’s spot far from the superstitiousness of it all. Watery Pisces also lands near the bottom overall with just four characters, followed by Sagittarius, which Freddy Krueger and Jigsaw share as a sun sign.
Grounded earth signs like Virgo and Taurus sit near the middle of the rankings with around 7% to 8% of horror characters each. While they can produce tragic monsters like Carrie White as well as chaotic characters like Chucky and Pennywise, they leave the highest body counts to air and fire signs.
Who’s Your Spooky Star Sign Soulmate?
Do you share a birth chart with an iconic horror villain, or does your zodiac sign land among the least deadly?
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The Scariest Movie the Year You Were Born
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Year of the Fire Horse: Meaning, History, and Why It Sparked Widespread Fear
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The Spookiest City in Every U.S. State, Mapped
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The Halloween Rituals People Once Used to Predict Marriage
20 Legendary Artists and Bands Who Never Had a No. 1 Hit
They made songs everybody knows by heart that never hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
ByMatt Hoffman|Oct 28, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT
Back in August 1958, Billboard published its first Hot 100, with Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” at No. 1. In the decades since, that top spot has gone to the likes of the Archies and Henry Mancini’s orchestra—but never to any of the iconic acts on this list. Here, we’re talking about songs they performed rather than songs they wrote for other people, which don’t count, nor does a charity single like “We Are the World.” Mental Floss has already quizzed readers on the No. 1s that classic rock bands did produce; this list is about the acts that never got there, in order of how close they came.
- Bob Dylan
- Creedence Clearwater Revival
- Johnny Cash
- The Allman Brothers Band
- Journey
- Bruce Springsteen
- James Brown
- Tom Petty
- Led Zeppelin
- R.E.M.
- The Kinks
- Nirvana
- Joni Mitchell
- Lynyrd Skynyrd
- The Who
- Van Morrison
- Grateful Dead
- Jimi Hendrix
- AC/DC
- Bob Marley
Bob Dylan
“Like a Rolling Stone” reached No. 2 on the chart dated Sept. 4, 1965, and spent two weeks there behind the Beatles’ “Help!” The next spring, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” stalled at No. 2 behind the Mamas & the Papas’ “Monday, Monday.” Dylan’s name did reach the top once, as a writer: the Byrds took his “Mr. Tambourine Man” to No. 1 on June 26, 1965, four weeks before “Like a Rolling Stone” entered the chart.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
“Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Green River,” “Travelin’ Band,” and “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” all peaked at No. 2 in 1969 and 1970, the most runner-up hits for any act that never reached No. 1. It took six different songs to keep them there, from Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy” and the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The band did land two No. 1 albums, Green River and Cosmo’s Factory, which had to help a little.
Johnny Cash
Most people probably don’t know it, but Shel Silverstein—yes, the one who wrote The Giving Tree—wrote “A Boy Named Sue,” the tale of a man hunting down the father who gave him a girl’s name. Johnny Cash recorded a version live at San Quentin, and it became his biggest pop hit, sitting at No. 2 for three weeks in August and September 1969 and spending all of them behind the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.” Silverstein’s songbook also included “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone,’” a Top 10 hit for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.
The Allman Brothers Band
Dickey Betts wrote “Ramblin’ Man” at 3 a.m. at the kitchen table in bassist Berry Oakley’s house, and it was the last song Oakley ever recorded. It became the band’s biggest hit, reaching No. 2 on the chart dated Oct. 13, 1973, with Cher’s “Half-Breed” in the way. A week later, the Rolling Stones’ “Angie” took over No. 1, and “Ramblin’ Man” slid to No. 3.
Journey
“Open Arms” reached No. 2 on the chart dated Feb. 27, 1982, and stayed there for six weeks. For the first three, it sat behind the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold,” and when that finally slipped, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts’ “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” jumped right over it and held No. 1 for the next three. “Don’t Stop Believin’” had already peaked, at No. 9, in December 1981.
Bruce Springsteen
“Dancing in the Dark” spent four weeks at No. 2 in the summer of 1984, the highest the Boss has ever reached as an artist. Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” held No. 1 the first week, and Prince’s “When Doves Cry” held it for the other three. However, Springsteen did write a No. 1: Manfred Mann’s Earth Band took his “Blinded by the Light” to the top in February 1977, and the Pointer Sisters got his “Fire” to No. 2.