10 legendary musical team-ups that failed miserably

‘Come With Me’ – Diddy and Jimmy Page

Everyone who has ever picked up a guitar since the early 1980s has been trying to play off of what Led Zeppelin did. Despite being the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle band that few others can touch, it’s easy for people to see the kind of swagger of Jimmy Page and try to channel that into their own playing. But whereas most artists want to move on from their glory days, half the time, Page managed to choose the worst possible route when hooking up with Diddy for ‘Come With Me’.

Granted, this is not even about the sample. There’s no possible way for anyone to make the guitar riff from ‘Kashmir’ sound bad, and while Page did end up re-recording the song for the single, the main problem here is hearing Diddy spitting over this. A lot of the song was about promoting the latest Godzilla movie at the time, but this kind of tune is dead on arrival because of his lack of charisma behind the microphone, which would have got him laughed out of any other room that wasn’t full of boardroom executives.

And given how lazy the sample is, it feels like Diddy was trying to profit off of a decent riff rather than earnestly collaborating with Page, which gets even more strange when he sings the title of the tune. Some pieces might work, but in Page’s attempt to become current in the 1990s, he at least had the common sense to only pose with Fred Durst rather than feature on one of Limp Bizkit’s singles.

‘Scream’ – Chris Cornell and Timbaland

No one should be able to tell an artist how they should live their lives. Anyone who has been in the game for a while will want to work with any genre they can get their hands on, and that normally means making some tunes that could upset some fans along the way. It should be fine as long as they have the best interests at heart, but Chris Cornell didn’t necessarily prepare everyone for such a sharp pivot when he started working with the same guy behind the greatest Missy Elliott songs.

While Timbaland has achieved his own classic records by this point, collaborating with Cornell on Scream is like listening to oil and water half the time. There isn’t nearly the kind of chemistry here that a song like this demands, so when it was carried over to a full album of material, people had had enough of what Cornell was doing, especially in his attempts to sound like an R&B artist.

There are a few decent ways for Cornell to have gone pop, but ‘Scream’ is a prime example of him reaching a little too far past his comfort zone. It’s a certain sweet spot that most rock stars have to hit if they want to get played on the radio, but fans would have definitely been able to sleep fine at night, not knowing what Cornell’s answer to Future Sex/Love Sounds would have sounded like.

‘Go 4 It’ – Corey Feldman and Snoop Dogg

So this one might need a little bit of explaining. There are many strengths that Corey Feldman has as an entertainer ever since his days of starring in Stand By Me, but one of the most mystifying parts of his career is that of a musician, especially when he tried to have the same kind of vocal cadence as Michael Jackson. But while there was hardly a chance of ‘Go 4 It’ reaching the same levels as any other song on this list, the real legendary part of this inclusion comes with the fact that Snoop Dogg bothered to show up.

There are probably countless people who would kill to have Snoop on a track, but considering the cluttered mess that Feldman and his producers came up with on this tune, it’s a sight to be-heard. Although Snoop is there if you know where to look for him, the fact that the record was made in this intended format is one of the few instances of a failure that’s almost impressively bad.

So when putting it on this list, remember that this collaboration also deserves all the credit in the world for being so far off the mark. It’s not every day that we get a musical answer to movies such as Birdemic and The Room, but Feldman is nothing if not an entertainer, and this is by far one of the most entertaining duets that anyone will ever hear.

‘Move Me’ – Gregg Allman and Cher

Having a couple make a collaboration album is always like playing with fire half the time. As much as they might love the idea of performing together, there’s a good chance that some people would take one listen to a song about them singing about being in love and automatically roll their eyes. That’s not to say that it can’t be done well, but by the time Gregg Allman got together with Cher, their collaboration album was dead on arrival the minute that the first single ‘Move Me’ came out.

But my mistake, this is not a collab album but a single by the supergroup Allman and Woman, which might be a backdoor way of tricking people into listening out of curiosity. Aside from the fact that they built an entire band around them to play a handful of original songs and cover tunes, there is zero chemistry between either of them when they perform. Since Allman was always known for getting lost in the music, he could not pull off the kind of Vegas-style productions that Cher was pulling off, especially when he sounds like he would rather be doing anything other than sitting behind his piano.

And it’s not like Allman even approved of the final product, saying that he was happy to watch it die and thought his wife was far from the greatest singer he had ever heard. So with a half-hearted idea behind it, zero chemistry to speak of, and one of the members not even wanting to be there half the time, the fact that the album got off the ground at all and managed to sell a handful of copies should be considered somewhat of a victory.

‘The School of Old’ – Run-DMC and Kid Rock

The late 1990s was an incredibly good time for a legacy act to have a comeback. The age of grunge had faded from view, and the larger-than-life superstars that came out back in the 1980s were starting to seem cool again. Def Leppard may have returned to their old sound pretty well, and Santana blew every single person out of the water when winning a Grammy, but Run-DMC should have been able to have a lot more to work with than those who turned up on the album Crown Royal.

There are the makings of a good comeback record here, but outside of some decent bars from Nas at the start of the record, the rock and rollers that they chose to work with were far from perfect. Fred Durst and Stephen Jenkins from Third Eye Blind were already a little bit concerning, but bringing in Kid Rock for ‘The School of Old’ looks unbelievably cringy in retrospect, especially when Rock starts hyping himself up as if he’s a genius for writing the song ‘Bawitdaba’.

It’s clear that Mr. Rock wanted to turn this into his version of ‘King of Rock’, but since DMC doesn’t even bother to show up on the entire record, it’s safe to say that he was far from the tightest MC they could have worked with. It’s far from the kind of trainwrecks Kid Rock would get up to later, but it’s saying a lot when the Sugar Ray feature on the record is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

Zakk Wylde and Guns N’ Roses

Some of the biggest team-ups that don’t work out are the missed opportunities. As much as people would have loved to work together, either the timing didn’t work out or there were contract disputes that took forever for anyone to care. And while it was bad enough for Guns N’ Roses to hang onto any guitarist after Slash left, they were incredibly close to having another guitar heavyweight among their ranks before things came crashing down.

When working out the first replacements for the band, Zakk Wylde admitted to going down to their rehearsal space and jamming on a few riffs with the group. As he would soon find out, “rehearsing” is a fancy word for waiting in the Guns N’ Roses at that time, and after spending time sitting on his hands and not knowing when things were going to get started, he knew that he would rather go back to Ozzy Osbourne than to leave him hanging every time he was asked if he joined Guns N’ Roses.

And that would only become a bigger problem later, especially towards the start of the 2000s when it seemed like the band were sputtering out of control. Still, the idea of having two bluesy hard rock legends in one band would have given the world one of the most ferocious incarnations of Guns N’ Roses they had ever seen.

‘Rat A Tat’ – Fall Out Boy and Courtney Love

The idea of Fall Out Boy releasing an album called Save Rock and Roll is already enough to fill some casual rock fans with dread. Although the band have had some great moments in their history and have managed to change the rock landscape in the midst of the 2000s wave of emo, having an album with a title like that is something so pretentious even Bono would tell them to tone it down. They did come correct with some special guests, though, but one of them was a bit too off-the-rails to work.

Granted, it’s not hard to see why Courtney Love would work in this scenario. Given how much electronic distortion was on the record, her rough-around-the-edges voice would have brought the band back to their punk roots for a little bit. But by combining both elements under one roof, it feels like Love is shoehorned into the song without knowing the first thing about what she’s doing there, leading to most of the track sounding like she’s being cut from a completely different song.

And judging by what would happen a few years later on Mania, Fall Out Boy didn’t seem to learn their lesson, either, eventually throwing in some of the strangest effects known to man and calling it a song. It’s easy to give it points for strangeness alone, but a song isn’t automatically good because of all of the wacked-out effects that are crammed into every facet of the mix.

‘The View’ – Lou Reed and Metallica

On paper, the idea of Metallica and Lou Reed working together wasn’t without a little bit of merit. Both of them have had some of their greatest highs by defying the conventions of what rock and roll was supposed to be, and without The Velvet Underground, there’s a good chance Metallica would have never been accepted for their dangerous sound. But Reed was always cut from the art-rock cloth, and that was never something that gelled with a band that lived and breathed heavy riffs.

While both of them performing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was cute for what it was, having Metallica create riffs over Reed’s spoken-word retelling of a play is far from either of their strong suits. It’s fairly interesting to hear each of them going back and forth, and it’s clear that both acts have a tremendous amount of respect for each other, but it’s hard to think of how either act’s fanbase would be able to muscle their way through this and not have a few complaints.

No one listening to ‘Enter Sandman’ wants to hear a rock legend spitting hot fire over James Hetfield’s guitars, and while Reed does have a few eccentric moments in his catalogue, this was the melding of worlds that felt like it was pulled from a different dimension. There are the makings of a good idea somewhere in here, but hearing Hetfield trying to deliver lyrics like Reed is the definition of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

‘Dancing in The Street’ – David Bowie and Mick Jagger

It was never out of the question for David Bowie to work with different legends throughout his career. After all, he was always interested in pushing the boundaries of rock, and that meant either working with different people or ditching his old bandmates to find some fresh blood in the scene. So when he had one of his best friends and fellow rock legend Mick Jagger on a track, it should have been a damn fireworks show from start to finish, right?

But we’re talking about Bowie in his self-proclaimed “Phil Collins years”, and hearing him pay tribute to one of the greatest R&B songs of all time is nothing short of hilarious when listening to him and Jagger go back and forth. Outside of the fact that they made one of the funniest music videos known to man during the production, their performances don’t save it, especially when Jagger tries to put some attitude into his delivery and ends up sounding ridiculous over the overproduced backing track.

Out of all the covers that have been made of ‘Dancing in the Street’ since its initial release, this is among one of the first that makes the original hard to listen to. The rock crowd may have expected so much more than this, but considering all of the fun has been neutered from the track on this version of the tune, it’s clear that someone owes Martha and the Vandellas a major apology.

‘Ebony and Ivory’ – Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder

Both Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder have each made songs that belong in the musical heavens. Although many people won’t be able to tell what happens when they enter the afterlife, there’s a good chance that whatever the band is playing could sound remarkably close to anything off of either Sgt Peppers or Songs in the Key of Life on a good day. So, how did two titans of modern music get together and make a song that was this toothless about racial equality?

The message itself is one of the greatest pleas for unity that anyone could ask for, and yet listening to the track itself, it has the same appeal as cheap Wonderbread. Is it catchy? Sure, but this kind of song tends to be catchy in the wrong ways, slipping dangerously close to Macca’s usual saccharine ballads that John Lennon used to dismiss when it gets to the chorus.

There are pieces of the tune that would have been transcendent if they were used in the right context, but whereas their other duet ‘What’s That You’re Doing’ is far superior, ‘Ebony and Ivory’ falls somewhere in the same neighborhood of songs like ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ in McCartney’s catalogue. It’s easy to love on the first listen, but the more it keeps hammering into your head, the more you realise this may have been a mistake.