Believing that the unusual combination of an older, well-known artist and a relatively unknown, albeit highly successful, writer for much younger performers may not be accepted by the public, they adopted an elaborate
back-story conceived by Iovine.
In a November 2005
Rolling Stone interview, Stewart started to plant the new story about the group's origin, stating that he conceived of the project in 1973. At that time he also disclosed that the project would be accompanied by a short film.
This followed a message posted by
Catherine Schwartz on her Web site that she was working on two Platinum Weird projects, a video for "Happiness" and what she described as a
mockumentary set in the 1970s.
Early in 2006, several Web sites appeared, purporting to be maintained by fans of a band named Platinum Weird that existed from 1973 to 1974. Varying in format and appearance, the sites contained mostly the same text, audio files and images, with some sites claiming to have been online since the 1990s.
Weirdos.info even claims to have been on the Web since 1987, even though the World Wide Web itself only appeared in 1991
and the domain was registered on
May 10, 2005.
All of these were linked to one another and to the official Platinum Weird Web site. Some of these domains were in fact registered to the New Media Department of Interscope Records and hosted on the same server as interscope.com
, while others are run by existing
Eurythmics fan site operators.
The remaining sites included
platinumweirdfans.com,
platinum-weird.co.uk,
platinumweird.nl ,
platinumweird.online.fr,
platinumweirdwired.com ,
whatisplatinumweird.com ,
platinumweirdos.com, and
weirdshit.biz. Video clips showing
Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr, Christina Aguilera, Lindsay Lohan, Stevie Nicks and others recalling the band were distributed, along with audio tracks said to have come from 1974.
Prominent in the promotion was an image of the 1974 Platinum Weird album cover. The title font on this cover art is Desdemona, created by
Font Bureau in 1992 and distributed by
Microsoft.
The fictional version of Platinum Weird is a partnership between Stewart and a mythical singer/songwriter from
New York City named
Erin Grace. Erin made a strong impression on numerous artists in the UK, including
Stevie Nicks, who emulated her style. After a handful of performances and with an album partially completed, Erin suddenly disappeared. Apparently distraught over the death of
Nick Drake, she abruptly ran off with
Elton John's boyfriend in late 1974. Soon afterward, she turned up in
Los Angeles, where
Don Henley introduced her to
Lindsey Buckingham, setting into a motion a relationship that would be the inspiration for the Fleetwood Mac
Rumours album.
Years later, a young DioGuardi would meet a neighbour in New York, an older
hippie woman who became a mentor in her song-writing efforts. In her 2004 meeting with Stewart, DioGuardi found that she already knew the words to an old Platinum Weird song, "Will You Be Around", that he was playing on his guitar. She had learned the song from her old neighbour, evidently the lost Erin.
In July of 2006, VH1 premiered a mockumentary entitled Rock Legends – Platinum Weird, an examination of the band’s unusual story, complete with cameo appearances from such rock legends as Mick Jagger, Annie Lennox, Elton John, and Ringo Starr, all reminiscing about the former band’s short-lived heyday and their impressions of the mysterious Erin Grace. The album was further promoted by a series of bogus World Wide Web fan sites, some of which are registered by the New Media Department of Interscope Records and hosted on the same server as interscope.com [5] [6] [7], and related false documents for the "lost" group. On
July 5,2006, the day
Rock Legends: Platinum Weird was shown on VH1, Platinum Weird admitted to the hoax in a
Los Angeles Times interview. Stewart did note that the film was "80% true", with real biographical information mixed into the back-story.
In an August 2006 interview, Stewart explained that he did meet a New Yorker in Amsterdam in the 1970s, and did write some songs during their brief relationship. She was not, however, the Erin Grace portrayed in the film.
A problem with that story is that the drug scene in
Amsterdam was mainly underground in the beginning of the 1970s and it wasn't until 1974 that the first illegal drug houses opened with the first tolerated
coffeeshop established on
December 17, 1975 which marked the beginning of Amsterdam as drugs capital.
Much of the Platinum Weird story line is apparently identical to an earlier promotion by the unrelated band
Unicorn. Their cancelled 1967 debut album,
The Cosmic Storyteller, is said to have been lost forever until the original master tapes were found and released in 2001. Also in common with Platinum Weird are fabricated artifacts and a "documentary" film with celebrity interviews.
