10 albums that bands ran away from

Desperado – Eagles

The concept album is usually the make-or-break moment for many rock and roll stars. Anyone can find time to put a string of decent songs that have the same theme on an album, but having each of them speak to each other in the right way requires a completely different set of skills. Those skills normally take time to foster, but Eagles figured they would jump into the whole thing guns blazing after only their second time around.

That makes it sound like Desperado is a bad album, though, which it certainly isn’t. Some pieces are genuinely interesting in painting the picture of a bunch of outlaws running from ‘The Man’, but it was clear that Glenn Frey and Don Henley were trying to walk before they could run, with even Henley himself saying that the record didn’t really work for what they were trying to bring across at the time.

If there was any silver lining, it at least set the band on the right track to release concepts that worked a little better, like painting a grim picture of Los Angeles on Hotel California years later. That album had them reach that level of songwriter, but while Desperado was too country for their tastes after a few years, there’s no shame in writing something as open and honest as the title track of ‘Tequila Sunrise’.

The La’s – The La’s

Anyone who has their first album be their most critically acclaimed can also be the kiss of death. No one really knows what they’re doing when putting together their debut, and when everyone has a major reaction right out of the gate, it can be a lot harder for them to regain their footing when putting out the next record. In the case of Lee Mavers, though, The La’s was the album that forced him down a rabbit hole that he never came back out of.

Although the band’s debut is one of the greatest pop-rock indie albums of the 1990s, it’s always been a shell of what it was supposed to be in Mavers’s eyes. The band deliberately tried to play as sloppily as they could in the hopes that they would get more time to work on it, but even with the two approved songs from Mavers, the entire record has the kind of quirky energy that predates the Britpop genre by at least five years.

When Mavers was convinced that he needed more time to work on it, though, the band eventually fell apart, with John Power growing tired of waiting, getting into a fistfight with Mavers halfway through a show, and leaving the group to form Cast. Every member of the group could get together for the odd show if they wanted to, but it’s going to be a cold day in hell before we get anything slightly related to new La’s music.

Rock ‘n’ Roll – John Lennon

Looking at John Lennon’s court hearings, he had the easiest of wins for him when he got sued for copyright infringement. He got a slap on the wrist for lifting a piece of a Chuck Berry song for The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’, so the opportunity to work on an album full of old-school rock and roll tunes should have been one of the most fun times that he ever had in the studio. When working with Phil Spector, though, everyone’s pretty much guaranteed to have a bit of a rocky time behind the glass.

While Spector had produced a number of Lennon’s other albums, he proved to be an absolute nightmare working on Rock ‘n’ Roll. There were seeds of something to work with when tearing through tracks like ‘Slippin’ and Slidin’ and ‘Stand By Me’, but considering Lennon was also obliterated half the time he was in the studio, he was usually more interested in what kind of booze they had at the bar that night than tearing through whatever 1950s-style rock tune was up next.

But more importantly, this sums up everything that was chaotic and harmful about Lennon’s “lost weekend” away from Yoko Ono. He could put on a happy face, but he was severely hurting on the inside, and the next few years would see him becoming a househusband and putting this piece of his past behind him.

Tusk – Fleetwood Mac

The success of an album can be reason enough for someone to want to run away from it. It’s nice to know that people out there are listening, but when everyone associates you with only one sound, there can be moments when you want to make something off-the-wall almost out of spite. And while Lindsey Buckingham certainly had that energy on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, it was enough to force one member out of the group for a few years.

That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with Tusk. It’s certainly disjointed as hell thanks to Buckingham wanting to make weird art rock songs, but Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie also come through with some great material on the record. When they were forced to play the album, though, Nicks figured that she couldn’t live with herself knowing that she would have to cater to what everyone else wanted.

By the time the tour wrapped up, Nicks practically needed to break out, and her decision to release Bella Donna was almost a direct retort to being given only a handful of tracks on Tusk. Fleetwood Mac fans may have already thought the album was a little bit strange, but Nicks taking control of her career and making the record that she would have wanted to hear gave us two Fleetwood Mac projects for the price of one.

Harvest – Neil Young

The first rule of approaching Neil Young’s music is to never question his sense of direction. He usually knows exactly what the hell he wants whenever he gets into the studio, and even if it’s not the most listenable piece of music in the world, he’s always going onto the next phase of his career without caring about what happens next. So, for someone who optimised the phrase ‘Don’t look back’, being known as a legacy artist was never going to sit well with him when looking back on Harvest.

Despite being one of the biggest hits of his career, Young never felt comfortable with the legacy it left behind. He was simply trying to cut a few tunes that were country adjacent as he worked on nursing himself back to health, but as soon as people started singing along to ‘Heart of Gold’, it became hard for him to shake the reputation of being the folksy Canadian antecedent to what Bob Dylan used to be.

And if later projects like Trans or Landing on Water were any indication, Young was going to shout out to the world that he was not the artist that they thought he was. He wanted to be far more eclectic, and if that meant putting his chart aspirations in jeopardy, that was what he was going to do.

Appetite for Destruction – Guns N’ Roses

The entire road to Guns N’ Roses making Appetite for Destruction felt like a breath of fresh air for rock and roll. The LA music scene had been bombarded with people trying to see who could tease up their hair the best, and suddenly there was an honest-to-God rock and roll band that actually seemed to take every step of their career seriously. That stripe of band didn’t come to the Sunset Strip that often, but Axl Rose was not going to bother trying to live in one album’s shadow for the rest of his life.

From the minute that he began working on Use Your Illusion, the number-one priority was to bury what Appetite had started. There were always going to be songs that they went back to, but throughout their double album experience, Rose was more concerned with working in different genres, approaching everything from industrial rock to hard rock to punk to piano ballads like a hamfisted version of David Bowie.

There were some fantastic songs to be found in the rubble, but it wasn’t enough to keep the band from breaking up, with everyone walking out after the tour was over because they couldn’t put up with Rose’s antics any longer. You can’t knock him points for ambition, but this is the sad result of what happens when someone’s head grows way too big within the span of only a few years.

Pinkerton – Weezer

Weezer were never supposed to be a band meant to be taken seriously. Compared to every other band that was talking about doom and gloom in the early 1990s, these were the dorky guys that most rock fans hung out with all the time, and hearing them sing about the pleasures of playing Dungeons and Dragons made them appeal to everyone who wasn’t necessarily the coolest kid in class. The minute that Rivers Cuomo thought about taking himself seriously, though, the fanbase seemed a bit too enthusiastic.

But of all of Weezer’s albums, Pinkerton is one of the most openly honest albums that they have ever made. That doesn’t make some of the most repulsive tunes like ‘Across the Sea’ any easier to listen to, but hearing any mainstream rock band be this vulnerable wasn’t something that happened very often at the time. People had moved on to whatever Green Day was talking about, and while Cuomo’s second effort did give him an army of fans after the fact, he knew that he never wanted to get in that headspace again.

Considering the public thrashing that the album took upon release, this was the album that Cuomo sees as a stain on his career, equating it to throwing up in front of everyone and feeling embarrassed afterwards. There’s no shame that can come from someone opening themselves up like this, but given how much of himself he had to put into Pinkerton, Cuomo probably realised that he gave away much more than he intended.

St Anger – Metallica

For Metallica fans, St Anger isn’t an album we listened to; it’s an album we barely made it through alive. The entire idea of what the metal icons stood for had been thrown out the window over those 70 minutes, and it wasn’t clear if they would ever be able to regain their status as relevant megastars ever again. But looking behind the scenes, it turns out the fans were far from the only ones who hardly came out of the record in one piece.

In between the different therapy sessions during recording and James Hetfield storming out of the band midway through recording, the fact that the album exists at all is a miracle. As documented in Some Kind of Monster, they were all on the verge of breaking up with each other at all times, and once they found out they could make music, all they could do was make this piece of emotional vomit that sounded like they were on the brink of insanity whenever they played.

It’s understandable that the band remembers this record as the album that brought them back from the edge, but there’s no disputing that none of them ever want to find themselves in this kind of creative space ever again. And considering the number of times Hetfield sounds like he’s about to tear his throat out or strain himself on the record, chances are the fans probably appreciate that as well.

The Piper at The Gates of Dawn – Pink Floyd

It’s easier for rock fans to think of Pink Floyd in different periods of their career. Although Roger Waters was one of the constants throughout most of their glory years, the David Gilmour era of the group shouldn’t be discounted, since he had a hand in some of the finest records that they ever made. While both Gilmour and Waters acted as co-captains throughout their career, the one certainty was that The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was something that none of them would be playing again.

Since this is the one and only album the band made with Syd Barrett at the helm, it almost feels like it belongs in its own category among their albums. Barrett’s take on psychedelic rock was incredibly unique for its time, but the more that they saw him going downhill and lose his mind after one too many hits of acid, the less enthusiastic they were to perform this kind of music, eventually leading them to make albums like Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here reflecting on their time with their friend.

So while it’s hard to judge The Piper at the Gates of Dawn amongst their other classics, it was almost necessary for every band member to move on from this to survive. They would occasionally make brief callbacks to this era, but since all it did was remind them of those dark times when they lost their friend, there’s a certain amount of regret that comes with them listening back to this record.

Nevermind – Nirvana

Kurt Cobain’s outlook on fame was a beautiful contradiction most of the time. Even though he liked the idea of being up there with the greatest artists of all time like The Beatles, he knew that he didn’t want to become the kind of pin-up star that got flaunted on the covers of magazines around the world. He had to be something different, but the sad fact is that once the rest of the world hears your music, you don’t have a choice any more.

Whereas Bleach was a decent indie record, Nevermind was the kind of album that changed the landscape of rock and roll. Everyone who heard it felt the same frustration that Cobain felt about being spoon-fed mindless entertainment, and the whole thing made everyone step back and listen to more earnest bands like Pearl Jam. That might have been a net positive, but Cobain would have been much happier if it were associated with almost any other album than his.

Outside of it sounding too polished, Cobain made it a point to make sure In Utero was the antithesis of his commercial breakthrough, making the production as dry as it could possibly get and making sure to include songs that were almost anti-commercial in execution like ‘Milk It’ and ‘Tourette’s’. Some of it may have been a subliminal cry for help in the eyes of some fans, but really, Cobain simply wanted to tone himself down after being the most reluctant voice of a generation.