Make accuracies a prioritization.
On this page I will discuss some strange, incorrect ideas that I have had to deal with (mostly from my friends) and how they might have gotten started. (If I can figure that out. If you are wondering about the father-bother thing, I cannot help you with that.)
See my footnote on the facts you may not want to know about Gin Blossoms. I believe the problem arose because my friend knew the lost band member was important, and she usually thinks of the lead singers as the most important band members.
A couple of my friends made some serious errors when trying to remember why Steve Perry left Journey. They basically blended three different stories together into one mutant hybrid myth, which read as follows (different colored text indicates parts from different stories):
Perry was temporarily unavailable for musical business because his mother was ill, so he was taking care of her, and because he had a medical condition that made it impossible for him to tour. He asked the rest of the band to wait for him to be able to get back to work with them, which resulted in him being ousted in an acrimonious split.
The green text is details from why Journey fell apart the first time, during the 1980s. Once I had debunked the ousted in an acrimonious split
part by reading on Wikipedia that Perry gave his own announcement that he was permanently leaving the band, my friend was inspired to recheck her sources, and was able to confirm what she remembered about his mother, but it turned out it was a completely separate incident from when Perry had his own health problems - a distinction we had not been making before.
The regular white text in the myth is the part derived from the story of why Perry left Journey in 1997.
The red text is not actually Journey related at all, but is what happened to former Styx frontman Dennis DeYoung when he was not well enough to tour at a time when there were already tensions between him and other members of the band. It seems that a major part of the problem was a troubled part of Styx history being transposed onto Journey. (As you can see from the section about the funny drunk on this page, this would not be the only time my friends conflated things like that.) One of said friends actually did once remark that the Perry story sounded like a repeat of the DeYoung story - which, in hindsight, is what should have made us suspicious. I now know this to be because a repeat was exactly what it was. It is possible that both bands could have done the exact same thing, but it would have been quite the coincidence. (It probably did not help that my friends and I once got taken over by caricatures who were the terriblest at making connections. At one particularly notorious point, their influence left my readers oblivious to the fact that comic strips I was drawing about a troubled father character could have been inspired by my recent discovery of a song about a similarly tragic father - which they were, of course.)
Then came time for me to write my main subjects page, with facts you may not want to know about Journey. Not a topic I was eager to research, but for the sake of my site, I needed to know what I was talking about - and for good reasons, as it turned out none of us knew what we were talking about. Just goes to show you, it never hurts to recheck your facts.
This comes up because it is mentioned on my advice on general types of problem entertainers. The Night of the Mary Kay Commandos was a collection book of the comic strip Bloom County, notorious among my friends for containing strips that had little if any funny content and instead served to protest against animal testing. Particularly remembered by at least one friend was a strip about rabbits who had had unpleasant things done to their eyes - which just made her not want to read the strips, even though she agreed with the sentiment that such things should be stopped, because covering things like this is not what a comic strip is supposed to be all about.
One day, I studied the volume to learn about what happened when the cartoonist burned out, and therefore on what the signs can be when it is time for an entertainer to retire. It did contain good examples of that, but to anyone who can access a copy, I have to warn you - do not crack the book open thinking the whole thing is going to be like that like I did.
It had been a long time since my friends had read it, and they had not been able to inform me very well of the details. While the unpleasant strips certainly have significant negative power, it turned out they only make up a small percentage of the volume, and do not start until more than halfway through. Admittedly, it is still not a great book as a whole, but for quite a while, it really did not match the recollection of it my friend had. Nothing to write home about, but nothing terrible either for many pages, even actively amusing me once every dozen pages or so. (Around the third time I laughed, I looked with suspicion at the cover to make sure I really was reading the infamous Mary Kay Commandos.)
With the help of some paper clips, I hid the worst of the volume from view, either by clipping pieces of paper over the unpleasant strips or simply closing double pages off entirely. This was not only a service to my friends in itself, but in the future will also help them remember that the book had its good parts.