Bill Wyman – "(Si Si) Je Suis un Rock Star" (1981)

They’ll think I’m your dad

And you’re my daughter

Former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman – who is only five feet, seven inches tall – estimates that he’s slept with a thousand women.

Bill Wyman in 2009

Wyman admitted he was “girl mad’ in a 1987 interview:

This life is incredibly destructive. [You] need a crutch sometimes to get you through. . . . I suppose [my crutch has] been women.  There are so many famous people who turned to drugs and alcohol, but I suppose I became totally girl mad as my crutch.  All of us need to compensate somehow.  You’re not normal anyhow.  Look at any member of this band.  They’re not normal people.  We’re all completely nuts in a certain way, aren’t we?

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Fun fact about Bill Wyman:  in 1989, the 52-year-old Rolling Stones bass player married the 18-year-old Mandy Smith, whom he started “dating” when he was 47 and she was only 13.  (He said he had the blessing of Mandy’s mother.)

Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith

Fun fact about Bill Wyman’s son, Stephen: not long after his dad and Mandy Smith split up, the 30-year-old Stephen married Mandy’s 46-year-old mother.

So Mandy was briefly Stephen’s stepmother.  But later he became her stepfather.  

If Bill and Mandy had remained married, Stephen would have been his father’s father-in-law and his own grandpa.  Bill would have been his son’s son-in-law and his own grandson.  

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From an 1877 article in the Fitchburg (MA) Sentinel:

A man at Titusville, Pa., recently committed suicide in his horror at finding that he was his own grandfather.  The way it was thus told in his dying statement:  “I married a widow who had a grown-up daughter.  My father visited our house very often, fell in love with my step-daughter and married her.  So my father became my son-in-law, and my step-daughter my mother, because she was my father’s wife.  Sometime afterward my wife had a son; he was my father’s brother-in-law, and my uncle for he was the brother of my stepmother.  My father’s wife – i.e., my stepmother – also a son; he was, of course, my brother, and in the meantime my grandchild, for he was the son of my daughter.  My wife was my grandmother, because she was my mother’s mother.  I was my wife’s husband and grandchild at the same time.  And as the husband of a person’s grandmother is his grandfather, I am my own grandfather.”

Click here to listen to Lonzo and Oscar’s 1947 recording of “I’m My Own Grandpa.”

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Bill Wyman was born William George Perks Jr. in South London.  He describes his childhood as “scarred by poverty.”

When he joined a local band called the Cliftons in 1961, he called himself Lee Wyman at first, then Bill Wyman.  (Wyman was the surname of a friend he had served with in the Royal Air Force a few years earlier.)

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Click here to watch the official music video for “(Si Si) Je Suis un Rock Star,” which may be the biggest solo hit any of the Rolling Stones ever had.  (The record didn’t chart in the U.S. when it was released in 1981 but was a top twenty hit in the UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands and a top ten hit in Australia and New Zealand.)

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: