10 happy accidents that yielded classic songs
Most artists can only hope to capture pure inspiration within only a few seconds of time. Even though some people have tried their best to make lightning strike twice whenever they go into the studio, there’s no way to make something look authentic unless it’s coming from a place of spontaneity. Although many artists can claim to sit around all day and pump out classics, artists like Green Day have had some of their best songs come together through happy accidents.
Then again, some of the best moments of an artist’s career can come from deleting pieces of tracks that could have been better. Not everyone is a classically trained musician in most respects, but when they find out that they captured something purely on the raw recording, it’s sometimes easier to build the rest of the song around that instead of trying to shoehorn in something else.
Whether that comes from an offbeat drum hit or a guitar riff that’s slightly out of tune, the majority of these songs would have lost a piece of their brilliance had they decided to tidy everything up in the mix. Even when it comes down to a lyric that no one gets completely correct, it’s better to have heard the mistake than have to worry about a musically accurate version of everything.
Because a lot of those happy accidents aren’t accidents at all when it comes to rock and roll. If anything, they are pieces of character that make a song even more endearing, and the more that someone plays the tune, the more they will be drawn to the song itself rather than the one piece that everyone gets wrong.
10 accidents that created classic tracks:
10. ‘Riders on the Storm’ – The Doors
Rock and roll doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Outside of bands that never stray too far from the riffs that AC/DC made their bread and butter, everyone is going to want to stray off the beaten track and find something that no one had ever thought of before. And while nothing The Doors ever did could be considered normal, hearing his fellow musicians jamming on an old cowboy tune gave Jim Morrison the perfect inspiration for ‘Riders on the Storm’.
Since the song already evokes images of driving through a desert on a stormy night, the premise came from Robbie Krieger and Ray Manzarek jamming on the western tune ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. Instead of playing the whole thing straight, the band decided to slow things down and add a jazzy flavour to everything, which worked a lot better when telling the story about a killer on the road stalking his prey.
Then again, The Doors were always meant to have that kind of dangerous spirit behind them. The cowboys of yesteryear had fallen by the wayside, and the gun-toting badass had been replaced with people like ‘The Lizard King,’ looking to cause a lot more havoc than anyone else whenever he got onstage.
9. ‘Gods of War’ – Def Leppard
Some of the best songs in the world don’t come from individual people sitting down on their own. The whole concept of a rock group is to be democratic, and that normally means everyone bringing their own spice to the table. And while Def Leppard never claimed to make anything that was too cerebral, one of their most serious songs came from Steve Clarke creating the intro to ‘Gods of War’ on a whim.
During the band’s shows in their early years, Clarke was known to go on a tangent and play his own guitar feature spot, which eventually birthed the iconic opening guitar line. While the opening itself feels like looking over a vast war-torn landscape, what Clarke actually came up with was a result of him trying and failing to get down the riff from The Police’s ‘Message in a Bottle’.
When flipped around on its head, ‘Gods of War’ became something of a dark masterpiece for the band, talking about the horrors of war in the face of nuclear destruction and what that means for the common man on the street. That’s not the kind of heady introspection most would expect from your average hair metal song, but sometimes a riff demands more weight than songs about sex and drugs.
8. ‘Song 2’ – Blur
The entire 1990s rock scene seemed to be a hot mess going through every single year. One minute the hair metal bands still reined supreme, but the minute that grunge and alternative music took over, no one knew what to do with themselves anymore. Although Blur were always on the fringes of the mainstream, even in their Britpop prime, one of their biggest hits came from them accidentally riding the coattails or the ironic edge of Seattle.
Considering most of the biggest names in grunge had long since fallen by the wayside, ‘Song 2’ became a joke that the band would play in between sessions to mock what alternative music sounded like. Since most of their albums up to this point had been glorified versions of Kinks songs, hearing them adopt the sounds of Nirvana was far more refreshing when they were shipped to the States.
Although Blur would still be known as legends in their home country, ‘Song 2’ was still their most popular song in the States strictly because of how mindless it sounded next to the other alt-rock smashes of the day. I mean, it could be worse. Blur may have made something fairly dumb, but it was a lot better than having to listen to whatever Bush had been putting out around the same time.
7. ‘Master of Puppets’ – Metallica
Most accidents in the studio are normally able to get fixed in the mix. Even though a bass player might hit a wrong note coming out of the second chorus, it’s no big deal when the benefits of editing are more forgiving. When tracking on tape, though, Metallica managed to get one of their most chaotic guitar solos to be borderline impossible to play when Kirk Hammett accidentally slipped.
While Master of Puppets is looked on fondly as the band’s greatest masterstroke, the title track itself is riddled with a few mistakes. Outside of pinching the riff from David Bowie’s ‘Andy Warhol’ for the breakdown, the middle of the guitar solo features Hammett slipping off the side of the fretboard when trying to make his way through a long run of notes. The sound is more felt than heard, though, almost sounding like he got too enthusiastic and ended up pulling the string too far down.
In the context of the tune, though, that’s hardly a bad thing at all. The whole track is about going down a slippery pathway to hell through drugs, so having a piece that’s more than a little bit chaotic is one of the perfect ways of describing that. It could be the sound of the narrator going insane through drugs, or it could be the demons coming for his life should he overdose.
6. ‘Supersonic’ – Oasis
Noel Gallagher has always played fast and loose with his stories surrounding the lore of Oasis. He can say that he wrote a song while waiting for a train, but there was always a lot more that went into a tune rather than coming up with something on a whim and finding the right lyrics to put to it. But in the case of ‘Supersonic’, Noel managed to write a song that was never really meant to be recorded in the first place.
The whole point behind Oasis recording in the Pink Museum at the time was to get the basic track done for ‘Bring It On Down’. By the time they realised that the drum performance wasn’t working, Noel managed to put together ‘Supersonic’ in under an hour while the rest of the band sat around eating Chinese in the back, even shouting the chords at Bonehead while running through the song for the first time.
But for a band that was as seasoned as Oasis, making something this off-the-cuff made all the sense in the world. This was already a band poised to take over the world, and this was the kind of cock-sure attitude that put them in the same cultural league as Sex Pistols were when punk first broke.
5. ‘Sister Ray’ – The Velvet Underground
The whole point behind The Velvet Underground was to be the antithesis of what a normal rock and roll band was supposed to be. Lou Reed never wanted to be the answer to The Rolling Stones by any stretch, and when working on tracks like ‘I’m Waiting For the Man’, he took the peace and love feeling of the 1960s and made the genre sound dangerous again. That doesn’t mean that everything was necessarily organized, and Moe Tucker admitted that she stopped playing midway through ‘Sister Ray’.
Throughout the making of White Light/White Heat, though, nothing was off the table in terms of raw noise. The whole point was to take everything beyond the scope of traditional hard rock, but once the song was supposed to logically wrap up, Tucker stopped playing, not realising that the rest of the group was only getting started.
Despite Tucker claiming that she wanted to redo her parts, hearing her drop out feels like a perfect breath in between the more ramshackle portions of the tune. No member of The Velvet Underground could claim to be the best musician in the world, but by holding back too much, ‘Sister Ray’ ended up paving the way for everything from grunge to alternative to noise rock.
4. ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ – Eagles
By the time Eagles set about making Hotel California, no one really bothered themselves with writing album tracks. Every single piece of the puzzle had to hold together perfectly, and if that meant that a tune wasn’t good enough to make it on the record, it wasn’t going to be released. Although Joe Walsh was still the new boy in the group at the time, his way of noodling around with different licks brought them to a new level.
After all, the country rockers weren’t known as the heaviest band in the world, but when Walsh was warming up his fingers, the lick to ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ fell out of him. Instead of their usual songs about the sunny side of California, though, this became the bedrock for Don Henley talking about the dark side of Hollywood where people lose their minds on drugs and get tied up with the wrong people as they try to make their dreams come true.
While the warning may have flown right over everyone’s heads, that hardly mattered. The whole point of the tune was about creating that hustle and bustle of life in Los Angeles, and as long as they had that guitar chugging alongside them, the band would always have a thin layer of cool underneath them.
3. ‘Scar Tissue’ – Red Hot Chili Peppers
The entire story of the album Californication was a tale of redemption for John Frusciante. He had spent years away from Red Hot Chili Peppers, and after becoming a heroin addict in the meantime, his motor skills were broken down to the bone by the time he decided to pick up a guitar again. ‘Scar Tissue’ may have been a tale of him slowly healing from all that pain, but no amount of emotion was going to fix his guitar being out of tune.
Because if anyone tries to play along with the record, they’re going to be surprised that the tune is actually slightly flat when playing on one of the strings. When put on a tuner, Frusciante’s B string is slightly off-pitch, which isn’t what you want when half of the song is played on that one string. Once he starts playing, though, the fact that it’s slightly off actually works to the song’s advantage.
Listening to people play the song in tune, there’s something a little bit more organic hearing the out-of-tune version, even managing to sound more in tune in places than a guitar that’s properly set up in the mix. Then again, for an album that’s all about conquering demons and trying to make one’s way to the other side, that common mistake was like Frusciante’s spirit trying to get a bit more airtime.
2. ‘Longview’ – Green Day
By the time that Green Day debuted in the 1990s, they couldn’t have come at a better time. The entire grunge scene had crashed in on itself, and even though people were ready to move on after Kurt Cobain’s tragic passing, seeing Billie Joe Armstrong start playing radio-ready rock tunes was exactly what everyone needed to hear after going through the darkness of Seattle. A lot of the songs took their inspiration from teen angst, but if Mike Dirnt hadn’t been tripping balls, ‘Longview’ wouldn’t have sounded half as good.
One of the biggest hallmarks of Dookie was Dirnt’s bass playing, but the basis for ‘Longview’ came from him taking acid while Armstrong was out of the house. As Armstrong remembered, he came back to the same house where the song’s video was shot, only to find Dirnt wide-eyed, playing the riff on his bass, thinking that he hit on one of the greatest songs ever conceived by human hands.
Then again, it’s a tragedy that what exists now is only a snippet, since Dirnt said that he had completely forgotten how to play the rest of the bassline. Had he known the rest, chances are they could have one of God’s gifts to the low end without Armstrong needing to lift a finger for a guitar break.
1. ‘Rain’ – The Beatles
As the 1960s turned a corner, The Beatles were no longer the fun-loving rapscallions that people thought they were. They had grown into complex musical thinkers, and that meant that many of their songs were being informed not only by their own muse but the substances they were smoking at the time. Despite never taking too much while at the studio, John Lennon found something innovative the minute that he took some acid and played back the tape for ‘Rain’.
Since he put the tape on the wrong way around, what came out was the sound of the entire song in reverse. Whereas the whole thing might have sounded incoherent, Lennon knew that he wanted everything being tried forward and backwards on ‘Rain’, including the song’s outro, where the entire chorus is played in reverse in the background as the rest of the band carry on at normal speed.
But that was only a teaser, with Revolver being a hodgepodge of different sonic experiments, from the backwards guitar solo on ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ to every single piece of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ making their way through the mix. Rock and roll was already changing by the day, but had Lennon played his original tape on the proper side, psychedelic rock would have looked much different.
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