Musical Missteps: 10 classic bands that had albums ruined by one member
Not every band is structured the same way. For all of the major acts that operate under the ‘Three Musketeers’ mentality, there usually are one or two people who aren’t exactly pulling their weight like the rest of the group. It should be fine as long as the music is good, but while albums from Metallica were great upon arrival, it did come at the expense of some rusty musicianship.
It’s not like the genre isn’t forgiving of a few shoddy performances, either. All good rock and roll should be messed up at least a little bit, so it’s understandable if there are a few rough edges. But in the case of these albums, those rough edges aren’t just a little blemish on the record. No, they’re the stars of the show.
That’s not to say everything about the album is unsalvageable, though. There are moments on every record that seem to be close to perfect, except that they do have a few musical turds floating in the punchbowl that everyone just elected to either ignore or amplify for no reason at all.
However, good songs can be overcome in the harshest of circumstances, and it’s easy to still hear the band that everyone knows screaming to get out somewhere. But as long as it’s buried beneath a pile of guitar overdubs or unnecessary background vocals, people will always wonder whether every artist couldn’t have taken a second pass at the record before it was shipped out.
10 albums ruined by one person:
10. Some Time in New York City – John Lennon
There has always been a little too much revisionist history regarding The Beatles’ legacy and Yoko Ono’s involvement. Yes, she was intruding on their studio sessions some of the time, but when if she hadn’t been there, maybe John Lennon wouldn’t have had the drive to make as many off-the-wall decisions during the group’s final years. There were still diminishing returns when she made music, and Some Time in New York City is where Lennon’s collaborations with his wife eventually hit a brick wall.
While it’s one thing to include collaborations like The Wedding Album and Two Virgins as separate entities, hearing what could be classic Lennon songs juxtaposed with Ono’s more rudimentary approach to music doesn’t really have much to do with each other. Ono’s material is far from bad, but putting her tracks next to Lennon’s is like putting a punk band onstage with David Gilmour as the frontman.
It gets particularly worse on the live disc for the record, which includes Ono doing her now-infamous dolphin-style noises as Lennon grins his way through covers of ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’. He certainly deserves credit for sharing the title with his wife, but Some Time in New York City seems to be jointly billed just so ‘The Clever Beatle’ didn’t have to take all the blame.
9. Mardi Gras – Credence Clearwater Revival
Let’s get one thing crystal clear: John Fogerty was the leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival. No matter what music they decided to make, all executive decisions were made through him and by him, and anyone who had a problem with that could argue with the wall whenever they went into the studio. It’s understandable how annoying that would be, but for all of Stu Cook’s strengths as a bassist, he is far from being a singer.
While Mardi Gras was meant to be the more democratic version of CCR, giving Cook the microphone is one of the most ill-advised decisions in rock history. While Doug Clifford does a serviceable job going through his tunes like ‘Tearin’ Up the Country’ and ‘What Are You Gonna Do’, Cook’s ‘Door to Door’ and especially ‘Take It Like a Friend’ sounds like he’s trying to match Fogerty’s holler and coming across like a wounded gazelle desperately crying to be put out of its misery.
Fogerty did at least leave the group with a few gems like ‘Someday Never Comes’, but you can’t help but listen to Mardi Gras and just feel sad. This was once the bold face of American roots music, and it ended with a squawky bassist trying to become a rock and roll star by screaming his brains out.
8. Alice in Chains – Alice in Chains
Given their backstory, most people would understand if Alice in Chains never made another full-length album after Dirt. While they could still play perfectly well, their drug habits had started getting the best of them, and Layne Staley was already beginning to succumb to his heroin habit. They still had a little bit of gas left in the tank, though, but their self-titled record does suffer from the big drug-addled elephant in the room.
Alice in Chains was always known as a vocal team with Staley and Jerry Cantrell, but the guitarist is really carrying the lion’s share of the singing here. Outside of the singles ‘Grind’ and ‘Heaven Beside You’, Staley fades into the background of most tracks, and when he does take centre stage, his choice to make strange noises on ‘Again’ comes off more like a joke than an actual artistic decision.
When you hear him in the background isolated, there might have been a better reason why he had to be covered up. This was a man staring mortality right in the face, and for as hard as he fought to beat his demons, you can’t help but listen to a song like ‘Over Now’ and see it as a sombre goodbye to the frontman.
7. The Colour and the Shape – Foo Fighters
Rock bands tend to work like a democracy most of the time. Even though there tends to be one core frontman or guitarist who keeps everything going, there’s no denying anyone from raising their voice about what a record should sound like. That’s not how Foo Fighters work, and when they went into the studio for The Colour and the Shape, Dave Grohl knew something was wrong the minute William Goldsmith started playing.
The entire premise of the group was to put together a ragtag team to go on the road for Grohl’s debut record, but Goldsmith was never going to cut it when it came time to record. Grohl usually had a clear vision of what the drums should sound like in his head, and when he redid most of the drums behind Goldsmith’s back, the drummer quit on the spot after refusing to go on tour for the album.
Is it necessarily fair for the songwriter to step in and play all the parts? No, not really, but when you listen to the massive drum fills on ‘Everlong’ and ‘My Hero’, it’s hard to really doubt Grohl’s intuition when it came to creating massive drum hits. The Colour and the Shape is still one of Foo Fighters’ best for a reason, but depending on who you talk to, it was either ruined by Goldsmith’s incompetence of Grohl’s domineering attitude.
6. The Final Cut – Pink Floyd
Every classic record is driven by some sort of emotion. Even if it’s not the most pleasant experience to undergo, it’s important for artists to put a piece of themselves into every song they make in the hopes that their audience will see a reflection of themselves. There is such a thing as too much of yourself, and Roger Waters’s insistence on making The Final Cut his baby all but killed Pink Floyd’s morale.
Although The Wall was already Waters’s brainchild back in the late 1970s, the follow-up feels like a bunch of discarded B-sides from the rock opera with a bunch more trauma dumping thrown in. Without the keyboards of Richard Wright, a lot of the album reads like a hollow theatre piece from Waters, with David Gilmour even claiming that most of the tracks were weak compared to what they had been working on.
While Waters still had the group’s best interests in mind when putting the record together, The Final Cut is a good example of what happens when one man gets too much power. It can be a good thing in some cases, but there’s a fine line between being the group leader and becoming a dictator, and considering Waters’s demeanour, it’s not shocking why Gilmour ditched him one album later.
5. Tusk – Fleetwood Mac
It’s almost a written law in music history that every double album has to be just a little bit messy. Although there have been exceptions in the case of Jimi Hendrix or Elton John, putting that much material out at once is bound to do a number on the artist in question or make for a handful of cuts that should have never seen the light of day. And since Fleetwood Mac were already coming off of one of the biggest albums in history, Tusk was the result of Lindsey Buckingham insisting that he do all the work.
While Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie are still accounted for on the record, many of Buckingham’s ‘experimental’ tunes revolve around him trying to become a new wave pop star in the vein of Devo or Elvis Costello. So for every emotional wrecking ball like ‘Storms’ or ‘Dreams’, there are also tunes like ‘Not That Funny’ that make everything weird and then vanish without a trace.
There are still moments when that strangeness works, like on the title track, but the fact that the group mentioned Buckingham in their personal list of thank-yous is still one of the pettiest ways to air out their grievances. Because this isn’t a Fleetwood Mac project; it’s a Lindsey Buckingham album smushed together with a proper Mac outing.
4. Wings at the Speed of Sound – Wings
By the late 1970s, Paul McCartney had finally shed his Beatles skin and began making beautiful music again. It took him a while to dig out of the critical avalanche that was given to RAM, but after Band on the Run, everything was back up and running with one hit after another like ‘Jet’ and ‘Listen to What the Man Said’. Maybe that’s why Macca felt safe enough to bring in some new singers, but being that diplomatic on Wings at the Speed of Sound did have a lot of sore spots.
That’s not to say that every track is terrible. McCartney is still in fine form, and hearing ‘Beware My Love’ next to softer material like ‘Silly Love Songs’ and ‘She’s My Baby’ could easily fit on Venus and Mars. Whenever another band member takes on a vocal, though, it just feels awkward, especially with Jimmy McCulloch’s neutered hard rock on ‘Wino Junko’ or Joe English’s crooner voice on ‘Must Do Something About It’.
And for as much credit as she deserves for keeping Wings together, Linda McCartney didn’t seem ready to take on something like ‘Cook of the House’, whose melody is better served on a variety show rather than a mainstream rock album. While Wings at the Speed of Sound does make the most out of the ‘band’ mentality, there’s a reason why the group was retitled Paul McCartney and Wings.
3. Van Halen III – Van Halen
For most of their career, Van Halen could get away with murder when making hard rock gems. Even when they went through the trouble of losing superstar David Lee Roth, returning with Sammy Hagar was the reinvention that the rest of the world wanted to hear from them. If they did it with Hagar, they could do it again with Gary Cherone in the 1990s, right? Well…
Okay, first of all, Van Halen was already at a low point coming off of the record Balance, so Cherone already had an uphill battle. But for all of the goodwill he had from being in Extreme, his crooner voice on ‘More Than Words’ got swapped out for a vocal tone that sounds somewhere between Hagar’s rasp, Roth’s theatrical energy, and a broken air conditioner malfunctioning.
Eddie thought that this was the future of the group, though, and his decision to feature Cherone and stretch out each song makes Van Halen III an absolute chore to sit through. This was supposed to be the kind of musical rebirth that everyone wanted from Van Halen, but all that we were left with was a handful of decent licks interspersed between a glorified karaoke version of hard rock.
2. Rattle and Hum – U2
Nothing could have really killed U2’s momentum throughout the 1980s. They were on the path to becoming one of the biggest names in music, and even after a few hiccups, The Joshua Tree established them as one of the important forces in rock and roll, regardless of how preachy their music could be. For all of its classic moments, though, Rattle and Hum is still a U2 album, and Bono can’t help smearing his Bono-ness across every second.
First of all, there are a lot of great moments on Rattle and Hum. ‘Desire’ deserves to be up there with U2’s classics, and hearing them take a few chances on ‘When Love Comes To Town’ and ‘Angel of Harlem’ are inspired choices. But when fans hear the live cuts, Bono’s messiah complex gets the better of him a lot of the time, including him claiming to steal The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ back from Charles Manson and feeling the need to change the words to ‘All Along the Watchtower’.
And the less said about the movie version of the performances, the better, especially when Bono’s face is crosscut with Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech during the performance of ‘MLK’. We get it, U2 is important, now can you let the audience decide that rather than Bono just telling us that he’s God’s gift to frontmen?
1. St Anger – Metallica
For a band as omnipresent in rock culture as Metallica is, it’s shocking how much of a spotty track record they have for production. There are the makings of great tunes across every one of their projects, and yet And Justice For All will always sound like it’s being performed at the bottom of a well because of th lack of any discernible bass tones. It’s one thing to have shoddy mixes, but when Lars Ulrich brought in no proper snare on St Anger, something went dreadfully wrong.
Then again, Ulrich’s snare bashing is far from the worst thing about the record. The entire band was going through therapy, and most of the album was being made just to keep them from falling apart, which means not very many inspired performances from James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett’s guitar solos were being erased almost entirely.
But Ulrich’s snare is still one of the most mystifyingly dumb choices anyone has ever made, being enough to induce migraines if any track is turned up loud enough in a car. Sure, St Anger isn’t meant to sound pretty or anything, but with just a decade removed from the pristine polish of The Black Album, hearing Ulrich bash his way through their material on what sounds like rusty paint cans is never not going to be hilariously tragic.
