From Pink Floyd to The Clash: 10 albums that artists refuse to revisit
When people call albums a labour of love, the word ‘labour’ should be put in big block letters. There may be a thousand avenues for artists to work with in the studio, but no album comes together without hard work trying to get everything recorded properly. If you end up putting that much effort into something and it doesn’t work out, though, artists like David Bowie prefer not to touch on them ever again.
While there may have been nothing wrong with the tunes going in, something strange happened in the mixing stages to turn them into musical trash. For all of that hard work that an artist put into it, it’s borderline heartbreaking when you get to that final hurdle and then get to see all of that work means nothing once it hits store shelves.
Then again, there are just as many artists guilty of not putting the kind of effort they should have into their records, and the biggest names in music sometimes put together projects that seem to be doomed within the first few seconds of listening to them. It may have had good intentions, but the result feels like the band moaning in the studio, just waiting for everything to end.
That didn’t stop many of the albums from becoming classics on their own, with fans relating to either the human elements left in the mix or the handful of strange choices that made it into the final track. Despite these albums having their circles of fans out in the wild, that hasn’t stopped artists from washing their hands with an album and never coming back.
10 albums artist won’t revisit:
10. Technical Ecstasy – Black Sabbath
As far as Ozzy Osbourne was concerned, the core of Black Sabbath should have called it a day after making Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. They may have had great albums on the horizon after that, but the camaraderie amongst every band member had basically gone kaput when lawyers began getting involved in their affairs. They may have shouted in pain on Sabotage, but Technical Ecstasy is where everything the band loved started slowly being sucked out of them.
While there’s almost nothing that can stop a riff lord like Tony Iommi from coming up with classics, there were just as many head-scratching moments on the album as there were bangers. For every song like ‘Dirty Women’, there are tracks like ‘Rock and Roll Doctor’, which unintentionally sounds like the kind of parody of rock and roll that Spinal Tap would have had no problem writing.
You also know something has gone seriously wrong when you let the drummer start singing, with Bill Ward taking vocal duties when Osbourne didn’t show up to the studio. Technical Ecstasy is far from being a bad record, but it’s certainly not the same band that descended upon the Earth to bring dark hymns like ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Symptom of the Universe’.
9. Tusk – Fleetwood Mac
Success can sometimes be the hardest thing in the world to deal with. There may be some amazing by-products of being able to travel the world and live out the fantasies that you only read about in magazines, but there comes a point where you need a break. Everyone needed a breather by the time Fleetwood Mac made Tusk, but Lindsey Buckingham’s insistence on moving full speed ahead was not what everyone was clamouring for.
Since no one was going to give up their songs anymore, the album is practically the band’s answer to The Beatles’ White Album, as every songwriter is shoved into their own corner and forced to make songs on their own. While this kind of freedom normally lets bands cut loose, Christine McVie wasn’t shy about calling the album an absolute mess when she first listened to it.
Rather than the cohesion of Rumours, most of the non-Buckingham members of the group felt that the album was a touch disjointed, usually cherry-picking songs off the record to play live rather than taking everything in as a whole. There are many great ideas on Tusk that could even rival that of Rumours, but taking it in as a whole feels like pulling back the layers of drama hidden in these rock icons.
8. Extra Texture – George Harrison
For the first half of the 1970s, it looked like George Harrison was going to be the most famous ex-Beatle. He had already turned in a mammoth triple album to start with, and Living in the Material World set everything off in the right direction as Paul McCartney and John Lennon still struggled to find their footing. For every high, there has to be a low, and Harrison first had to admit that he overdid it on Extra Texture.
Venturing to California to cut most of the album, the kind of spiritual whimsy of Harrison’s last few records is nowhere to be found here. Outside of the pop song ‘You’ that he wrote for Ronnie Spector, the majority of the album is centred around plodding soul songs that are a lot more pedestrian than any of Harrison’s earlier songs, including a massively disappointing follow-up to ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ called ‘This Guitar (Can’t Keep From Crying)’.
Compared to the other Beatles, who were slowly building themselves back up again, this was Harrison going through one of the worst periods of his life, later describing the album as “grubby” when he looked back on his discography. Harrison had a real knack for writing songs at this point, but this is where the wise guru behind the Fab Four started to lose his passion for making music.
7. The Bridge – Billy Joel
The music of Billy Joel has always divided the world of classic rock. While many have rightfully called albums like The Stranger classics for their complex approach to pop songs, others have labelled Joel’s music as a little bit corny, thinking that he wasn’t nearly cool enough to have the same kind of attention given to a Mick Jagger-like figure. No, Joel is far from the boring artist he’s made out to be…but if you needed ammunition for that argument, start at The Bridge.
Across every song on the album, Joel admitted to feeling on autopilot when writing most of the songs, taking the sounds that he had worked on and just rehashing what he thought his audience wanted. For the first time in his career, this was an album that felt like a hack-piece from Joel, especially when he tried his hand at making more aggressive music like ‘Running On Ice’, which pales in comparison to his more dramatic albums.
Luckily, Joel’s personal life began to turn around following this album, leading to him making albums that reflected his more elated state of mind on projects like An Innocent Man. If Joel hadn’t turned his life around a little bit earlier, there was a good chance that he would have retired after he finished this album.
6. Echo – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
By the 1990s, Tom Petty was much more famous than most artists of his generation could have ever imagined. Since the rock scene was being populated by artists bringing a more authentic approach to rock and roll, people like Petty, who had been making earnest music since the beginning, were suddenly really cool again. If the audience wanted something real, though, Petty would have to suffer first before making Echo.
Wildflowers had already hinted at Petty going through a separation from his wife, and this album is the cold repercussions of it, containing the most revealing lyrics of his career. Not in the best spot to write lyrics, Petty would say that he was hardly in control of his own songs half the time, feeling like he was going through the motions whenever he presented tracks to the band.
There was an even darker shadow looming overhead, though, with bassist Howie Epstein barely turning up for any of the promotional cycles before eventually dying of a heroin overdose halfway through the next album. Petty would later come to appreciate the work he put into Echo, but every time you listen to it, you’re hearing the sounds of Petty trying to put together his broken heart and barely succeeding.
5. Katy Lied – Steely Dan
Whenever Steely Dan went into the studio, they were never going to settle for anything less than perfection. This was serious business to them, and if they happened to hurt the players’ feelings when working on a song, it didn’t matter as long as they got the right take. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker may have been cold-blooded in their approach to getting the right song, but that doesn’t discount the nightmare that happened in the final stages of Katy Lied.
After coming through one of the more adventurous musical cycles they had ever put together, the band got to the mixing stages to find out that the songs sounded like crap. When the band were transferring the songs to new software, the new sheen put on the album absolutely wrecked the sound quality, leading to them having to mix the whole thing again to try to salvage them.
Even when working on newer material, ‘The Dan’ refused to listen to the album in the years following its release, thinking that it was a botched job that never came together. Katy Lied still has the same kind of musical sophistication you’d expect from them, but you know that a Steely Dan record went wrong when the songs sound better live than they did in the studio.
4. Cut the Crap – The Clash
After the punk explosion collapsed in on each other, The Clash seemed to be the last men standing. Sex Pistols had been folded, and Ramones had started working on different genres of music, leaving Joe Strummer and Mick Jones as the two leaders of militant rock and roll in the 1980s. Just like all great punk acts, though, the band went out with a bang on Cut the Crap, and many fans still haven’t forgiven them for its problems.
What problems, you may ask? Well, for a start, Jones was fired from the group before the band started recording, which is practically like if Led Zeppelin decided to continue on without Robert Plant as their vocalist. While lineup changes happen, Strummer’s insistence on bringing electronic music into the mix tends to feel like ‘Baby’s First Rock Album’ half the time, especially when the band try their best to create anthems and fall flat on their face.
So how badly does the band hate this thing? When putting together their massive archive collection with all of their albums, Cut the Crap is not included in any of them, with most fans and journalists only giving it a passing mention, if that. For hardened punk fans who want to be completionists, this album is a necessary evil that you’re going to have to inflict upon yourself if you really want to see where the band ended up.
3. Atom Heart Mother – Pink Floyd
The fact that Pink Floyd was able to carry on past the 1960s is somewhat of a miracle. Since Syd Barrett was the leader of the group, the fact that the band could carry on with Roger Waters at the helm made it feel like everything was going to be okay again, especially when they found their voice in songs like ‘Echoes’. Every band has growing pains before then, though, and Atom Heart Mother is the musical equivalent of the band looking through awkward high school photos.
Putting together one of their first major epics on the title track, the album is a decent look at what the band were working towards, bringing in the horns that would coat Dark Side of the Moon and the band leaving some decent stuff on the back end like David Gilmour’s ‘Fat Old Sun’. For any of the band members, there’s a good chance that they would need a hefty sum if they wanted to see the album live.
For years, Gilmour and Waters have expressed their regret about ‘Atom Heart Mother’, thinking that it was one of the biggest missed opportunities the band had made when constructing a longer piece. It’s hard to get the two Pink Floyd to decide on anything these days, but out of all the things to agree on, why does it all lead back to this album not holding up?
2. In Utero – Nirvana
Any grunge fan was probably hoping to see an album like Nirvana’s Nevermind top a list like this. Kurt Cobain famously hated the mixes of the album that made him a star and wasn’t all that comfortable with what fame did for him after he became the voice of a generation. While In Utero was meant to be the angsty follow-up that gave them more credibility, Dave Grohl was never satisfied when he went back to listen to it.
Then again, much of that can be attributed to what happened afterwards. Even though Grohl was proud of his drum sound on the record and would even play a lot of the songs live on their stadium tour, the aftermath of Cobain’s passing in 1994 really paints the lyrics in a different light, especially songs about profiting off of teen angst and the frontman screaming his brains out about his inner turmoil.
When talking about songs like ‘Scentless Apprentice’, Grohl said that he still felt uncomfortable listening to the album, seeing less of the songs and more of the death of his friend as he moved further along. If anything, that’s really a testament to what the band created. Cobain may have been going through pain, but maybe by laying it out bare for the world to see, he may have helped other people deal with their own pain.
1. David Bowie – David Bowie
By the time ‘Space Oddity’ took off, David Bowie had arrived in the rock world fully formed. He was always going to be considered a musical chameleon, but seeing the sparkling main of hair singing about space travel felt like the perfect mission statement for ‘The Starman’ to shape his entire persona around. This is the kind of debut that most artists dream of hitting…but keen-eyed viewers will notice this wasn’t his debut.
Instead, what Bowie actually came out with in 1967 was a collection of tunes that seemed to come from the vaudeville tradition. Before he had teased up his hair and started singing about foreign lands, Bowie was writing songs that felt like they should have been played during some kind of dopey cartoon show from around the same time, especially considering the videos he made dressed up in some of the least ‘David Bowie’ outfits you can imagine.
While Bowie never claimed to have the best streak of albums and would even have told you that albums like Never Let Me Down didn’t hit the mark, he wanted his proper debut purged from existence half the time, never wanting to bring it up during any of his interviews afterwards. Considering the quality on here, it’s easy to see where he’s coming from. I mean, when you listen to a song like ‘Rubber Band’, do you really think this is a guy who’s going to change the world of rock?
