Myth
Prior to the announcement of the 70th birthday release in 2008, Vega was thought to have been ten years younger. The 2005 book Suicide: No Compromise lists 1948 as his birth year and quotes a 1998 interview in which Vega talks about watching Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show (1956) as a "little kid". A 1983 Los Angeles Times article refers to him as a 35-year-old. Several other sources also list 1948 as his birthdate.
Two 2009 articles confirm the 1938 birth date, one in Le Monde about the Lyon exhibit and one in the magazine Rolling Stone.
Vega also long claimed to be half-Catholic, but later, in a 2008 interview with The Jewish Chronicle, admitted he lied to "fuel the myth".
Read more about this topic: Alan Vega
Famous quotes containing the word myth:
“For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman—a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“The myth of black women profiting at the expense of black men is the oldest rap around.”
—Johnnetta Betsch Cole (b. 1936)