10 band members that were fired for stupid reasons
There isn’t any band in the world that hasn’t had their fair share of drama behind the scenes.
From Yoko Ono getting in the way in the studios to the creative differences driving a wedge between band members, sometimes it’s just natural for some of our favourite musicians to just go their separate ways to let them express themselves the way they want to. Then again, some of the reasons why people like Richard Wright were let go were a little bit much.
As much as some people might be absolutely insufferable to work with day in and day out, the reasons that the fans were given as to why some of these people left the fold are some of the most petty defences that anyone has given in rock music. Although some of these artists might not have been carrying the same weight as their fellow band members at the time, the fact that they got sacked just because of these was absolutely ridiculous, not to mention hypocritical in a few cases, coming from band members who were doing the exact same thing.
Granted, some of these sackings may have been a bit of a blessing in disguise, opening the door for fresh blood to come into the group and adding a much more cohesive feel to the band when they joined. Even if they had to spend time with a new group, they could spend their entire lives trying to remind their old mates how they should have never been let go in the first place.
Still, it can be more than a little bit petty looking at how these artists went from the best of friends to wanting nothing to do with their bandmates virtually overnight. There’s no right way to say that someone has to leave the band, but of all the ways to go about it, they could have picked a much better excuse.
10 band members kicked out for stupid reasons:
Steven Adler – Guns N’ Roses
Guns N’ Roses seemed to be hanging by a thread from the minute they started. By the time they had crafted Appetite for Destruction, they were already the most dangerous band in Los Angeles, but they lived up to that album title nearly every time they hit the streets. But even if the band members lived the most excessive lifestyle anyone had ever seen up until that point, there comes a point when everyone starts staying a little too long at the party.
And that time came calling for Steven Adler when he started working on Use Your Illusion. The last thing they were going to do was accuse anyone of drinking a bit too much, but given how strung out Adler was on drugs, his habit of showing up to the studio completely out of his mind wasn’t going to work well with Axl Rose. This album needed to be legions better than Appetite, and they weren’t going to deal with a drummer nodding off in the studio halfway through a perfect take.
But the irony wasn’t lost on his replacement, Matt Sorum, who wondered how the hell it was even possible for someone to party their way out of one of the most dangerous rock and roll bands ever when he got the call from Slash to join. It’s sad to think that Adler was the first piece of the core lineup to go, but even if Sorum is the more technical drummer most of the time, Adler’s playing on Appetite isn’t something that can be replicated.
Dave Abbruzzese – Pearl Jam
Learning the ins and outs of Pearl Jam normally is based on what drummer they have at any given time. While they were sent into a percussive revolving door for years before they stumbled on Matt Cameron, the Soundgarden drummer was already a core part of their demos before he settled into the drum stool after his old band called it a day. Any musician would have been psyched to join one of the biggest names in music, but Dave Abbruzzese found out real quick that there was a fine line between being proud of their success and being a little too overeager in the early days.
There was nothing inherently wrong with his drumming per se, but when looking at the different personalities in the band, Abbruzzese simply didn’t click with the rest of the group. The frustration that Eddie Vedder had over his gun collection helped inspire ‘Glorified G’, and when Vs started picking up steam, there’s an infamous quote in Rolling Stone where the drummer gets playfully manhandled by the rest of the group for asking about what they had in mind for their next big single.
Pearl Jam didn’t think in the same way that most pop artists did, but as soon as they met someone that seemed eager to play the game of the music business, it only took a couple years before they had had enough, even drafting in new drummer Jack Irons midway through Vitalogy. They were definitely going about the rockstar lifestyle in a kooky way, but it was better for the band to be united than have the one person that didn’t look the part.
Mick Jones – The Clash
Every great band usually has two opposing forces working together. Lennon had McCartney to bounce ideas off of, Page had Plant to breathe life into Led Zeppelin tunes, and even Hetfield and Ulrich brought Metallica to the greatest heights any metal band has ever seen. And while The Clash seemed to be on that same parallel track at the start of the 1980s, their decision to let go of Mick Jones felt like them cutting off a piece of their musical DNA.
Sure, Jones may have been playing into the rockstar angle a little bit too much for Joe Strummer’s taste, but that was no reason for him to be fired on the spot. Tensions needed to be solved one way or another, but Jones was the one who wrote all the great hooks for the group. Without him, you weren’t going to get a ‘Train in Vain’, ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’ or even ‘Complete Control’, and it seemed like Strummer knew that the minute he was gone.
Big Audio Dynamite struck around for a while, but when looking at Cut the Crap, Strummer had the look of a man who had lost a musical soulmate and was left to pick up the pieces, especially on the deep cuts where he completely clocked out when writing lyrics. He could play up the frustration and anger in his voice, but all he did was prove that the magic came from him and Jones working together.
Steve Perry – Journey
Any great rock band is going to have an ace in the hole if they have a good lead singer. It’s not easy to find them out in the wild, but once a Robert Plant or a Roger Daltrey comes out of the woodwork, a band may as well have won the musical lottery half the time. And while the clean precision of Steve Perry’s voice made Journey one of the biggest draws in corporate rock and roll, it’s strange to see them completely drop him the minute that they started to build themselves back up again.
Perry had been MIA for years while the rest of the group worked on solo projects, but ‘When You Love A Woman’ gave them hope that there was still had great music left in the tank. Once Perry had to deal with some back trouble ahead of the tour, though, the recuperation process was going to be a long time, and despite having a massive comeback, Jonathan Cain felt that it was better to move on than waiting on Perry to finish treatment.
Although that resentment lingered on for a while, Perry seems to be more than happy to leave that part of his career in the past. He did release the odd solo album now and again to work out that beautiful voice again, but the fact that he could join his brothers at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and give love to his successors is the best kind of outcome you could hope for from stabbing someone in the back.
Michael Anthony – Van Halen
No one’s arguing that the Van Halen brothers were always going to lead the charge in Van Halen. As much as David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar did the best they could when sculpting their tunes, nothing was going to make it onto a record if it didn’t have the seal of approval from Eddie and Alex first. But for all of the great music that came out of their golden years, Michael Anthony didn’t deserve to be treated like a sideman ever since Hagar left.
While Anthony was always the unassuming member of the group with the golden high harmony voice, Eddie never exactly clicked with what he was doing all the time. His voice was a prime piece of their backing tracks, and yet when they reached Balance, Anthony found himself getting pushed out of the room far too often, even if he stayed on board to work with Gary Cherone on Van Halen III.
When the Hagar reunion happened, though, Anthony was sent packing due to his ongoing friendship with ‘The Red Rocker’, with Eddie drafting in his son, Wolfie, to play all of his parts. Wolfie was more than up to the challenge and has turned himself into one of the greatest rock acts working today, but considering how they acted on their final tours, it felt like Anthony was trying to actively be erased from the band’s legacy.
Glen Matlock – Sex Pistols
Punk rock has never been about following the rules. Everyone had grown tired of what was expected out of rock stars by the end of the 1970s, and whereas Led Zeppelin could make massively long musical masterpieces, a group like Ramones wore their lack of musical expertise as a badge of honour whenever they played. All good punk comes from the heart before anything else, but Sex Pistols were among the first bands where any music theory could get someone fired.
For what it’s worth, though, Glen Matlock knew how to write a hit. His work on Nevermind the Bollocks speaks for itself, given that he helped write tunes like ‘Pretty Vacant’, but when it came time to record, Steve Jones ended up pulling double duty on guitar and bass. But even by punk standards, drafting in Sid Vicious as the bassist felt like a personal slap in the face to Matlock, given how little he knew about bass theory.
Make no mistake, Vicious looked the part and became the co-frontman of the group in many respects, but any of his live takes proved that he was no Paul McCartney behind the four-string, especially when he started cutting himself up onstage. Matlock managed to take the high road and carved out another place for himself in rock history, but even for a band looking to provoke anything and everything, this is the first time when knowing a Beatles chord would have been considered a crime in the practice room.
Joe Perry – Aerosmith
It’s not exactly a mistake that Aerosmith was compared to The Rolling Stones back in the day. Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were practically the American counterparts to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and no matter how hard they tried, the label ended up fitting when they had the same kind of bluesy edge to them whenever they played. But if that’s the case, let me pose this question: how the hell would The Stones have worked if they decided to let Richards go in their prime?
Well, that’s exactly what Perry decided to do once the band hit a creative wall in 1979. Although Perry left of his own accord this time around, all the pent-up anger had less to do with the music they were making and more about the female company that he kept. Perry was in love with his wife, Elyssa, and even if she didn’t see eye-to-eye with Tyler, she became the Yoko of the group pretty quickly, to the point where Perry ended up storming out of the band after a fight backstage when Elyssa threw milk around the common era.
They may have gone out in a blaze of glory, but when the dust had settled, it seemed like one of the most comical ways for any band to go. The group was officially fried, and there was no way for them to reclaim their mojo, and yet the spilt milk is the kind of detail that feels lifted straight out of a bad soap opera starring a rough and tumble rock band.
Don Felder – Eagles
The biggest band breakups of all time usually have to do with everything except the music. Although everyone loves to throw the words ‘creative differences’ on any official band statement, it takes a lot more than bands not seeing eye-to-eye for the business-minded fangs to come out. And for a band that had built their living off of making the most laid-back music on Earth, Don Felder learned the hard way that things could get incredibly ugly if he said the wrong thing in Eagles.
While it’s tempting to count the onstage meltdown that broke the band up back in the 1980s, it seemed like all the dust had settled when they worked on Hell Freezes Over. The band was in good spirits and was happy to be playing together, but once the contracts came out, Felder was far from excited when he saw that the money he was getting for every show was significantly less than what everyone else was.
To the band’s credit, Joe Walsh, Glenn Frey, and Don Henley did have blossoming solo careers, and the fact that they added tunes like ‘New York Minute’ and ‘Smuggler’s Blues’ to the set was reason enough for them to make more. But the minute Frey heard about the problem, the gloves were off, referring to Felder as the “only asshole” in the group in History of the Eagles and letting him go before they started working on Long Road Out of Eden. It was a cold way of going about it, but Felder didn’t realise how much was being thrown away. He thought he could settle it civilly, but after saying those few wrong words, he lost a friend.
Dave Mustaine – Metallica
It was no secret that Metallica liked to drink A LOT back in the day. No one gets the name ‘Alcholica’ by accident, and whenever they showed up in town, they were far more interested in the beer on hand than wanting to stick lines up their noses. But even in that liquored-up state, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich could realise when Dave Mustaine was going a bit too overboard on the road.
Mustaine certainly had the chops as a guitarist and even played the role of co-frontman half the time, but it’s probably not the best look for someone to be trashing the houses of people that have given you a place to stay when on your way to the East Coast. Since he was often an angry and violent drunk, the rest of the band figured out pretty quickly that they needed to cut their losses and get rid of the loose cannon in the group, to the point where Mustaine was out of the group by the time they got to New York.
Still, Mustaine’s raw deal did end up being a bit more cruel than usual, with the band only giving him a token ride to the bus station and even using a handful of the riffs that he wrote for their next three albums. It may have been a blessing in disguise thanks to Mustaine forming Megadeth after the fact, but even if Kirk Hammett brought fantastic lines to the table, who knows what the band could have become had they stayed the course and a combination of ‘Master of Puppets’ and ‘Peace Sells’?
Richard Wright – Pink Floyd
By the time Pink Floyd let go of Syd Barrett, it was practically out of necessity. The frontman had done everything he could for the group, but it was clear that his state of mind was fading fast and wouldn’t be able to function for much longer. Although David Gilmour was the best possible substitute for years, Roger Waters proved that he could be equally as frustrating when he had the right idea on his hands.
Although Waters was well within his rights to get The Wall absolutely perfect, firing Richard Wright was more than a little bit out of order. The band had already tried their best to grasp the concept of the record, but Wright refusing to come back to the studio while he was in the middle of vacation turned out to be the final straw for Waters, with all the keyboards being replaced by session players or played by producer Bob Ezrin.
But if The Final Cut is any indication, Wright was a foundation of their sound, and up until he joined as a permanent member again on The Division Bell, the rest of Floyd’s catalogue ended up sounding like glorified solo projects that happened to feature other members of the band. Waters and Wright did end up burying the hatchet years after the fact, but if their reunion at Live 8 proved anything, it was that each of those core four members were responsible for making them what they were.
