Morbid Memorabilia from Madtown

How did KYXY-FM salesman Larry Goodman get a free Hoffner bass, autographed by Paul McCartney, from Las Vegas's Hard Rock Cafe? By swapping a piece of the plane Otis Redding died in after crashing into Lake Monona, Wisconsin, in 1967. Goodman didn't salvage the wood from the plane, but he knows who did. He recently told Madison's Capital Times, his hometown paper, "There was this local band, I won't tell you which one, and one night they went out to wherever the salvage team had put the pieces of Redding's plane, and they sawed off the pieces with his name on them."

The "Otis" piece was next seen in the possession of blues guitarist John Davis, who says he left it in an apartment after moving because of "bad karma."

Goodman says, "I knew a guy who was a landlord with a lot of properties downtown.... One day, he had me over to his house, and hanging up in his rec room was part of the Redding plane; it said 'Otis' on it. His wife got tired of it, and one day he just asked me if I wanted it." Goodman says his wife eventually pressured him to get rid of it.