10 songs legendary musicians struggle to play live
Whether it is The Rolling Stones or Amadeus Mozart, music brings with it a sense of community that other art forms struggle with. There is some comfort in knowing you have things in common with complete strangers, a connection formed by way of sound which links you to people from all over the world. That connection can be shared in listening to music and talking about it but is cemented in the live performance, arguably making the live show one of the most critical aspects of the entire medium.
It’s tough to find a musician who doesn’t revel in performing live, and it’s hard to blame them. The feeling of walking on stage in front of thousands of people, all there to share in a connection that your music has created, of playing the first couple of notes to a song and being met with applause, of people singing your lyrics back to you, it’s a magic that very few of us are ever going to experience.
Of course, playing live isn’t always as glamorous as many musicians make it look. Taking recorded songs and getting them ready for the stage can be difficult for a number of reasons, be it technical ability, emotional attachment or the way the song is mastered. The result is a lot of musicians who are legendary in their own right struggling to bring crowd favourites to the crowd.
It happens more frequently than you might think. The below list will go through some of the biggest names who have struggled to play one of their songs live and exactly why they struggled.
10 songs musicians struggle to play live:
Billy Joel – ‘Just The Way You Are’
Many of the songs on this list consist of pieces that artists have found too tricky to nail live. This can be because of a rhythm structure, high notes or a particularly fiddly solo. However, the first entry is a bit deeper than that. Billy Joel has always been renowned as an excellent live performer, and his hits always make an appearance on his carefully curated setlists. Still, there was one song in particular even he could never bring himself to play.
‘Just The Way You Are’ appears on Joel’s fifth studio album, The Stranger; it’s a good song that fans everywhere would no doubt like to hear him sing live. It wasn’t technical ability that stopped him from doing so, nor was it a disliking towards the track. Instead, it just hit a bit too close to home. The song is about his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, whom he divorced in 1982. After that, he struggled to play the song live, saying it brought up too many emotions about the divorce.
John Paul Jones – ‘Good Times Bad Times’
There is no escaping the musical prowess that every member of Led Zeppelin boasted. They’re still known to this day as one of the best rock bands to take to the stage, and their ability to play individually and together is a massive part of that. Bassist John Paul Jones was able to hold down the band’s initial original tracks, providing structure to the songs and matching both Jimmy Page and John Bonham in their playing styles, but there was one song he struggled with.
The song ‘Good Times Bad Times’ commonly tripped the bassist up. The structure is a relatively straightforward blues number, but Jones struggled with getting into the groove of it. “That’s the hardest riff I ever wrote,” he said, “the hardest to play.”
Angus Young – ‘Thunderstruck’
One of the most appealing factors of many AC/DC songs is their simplicity. The majority of their biggest hits are made up using a straightforward three-chord structure and a catchy chorus. However, Angus Young deviated from that formula on the 1990 hit ‘Thunderstruck’. The song starts with an upbeat guitar lick that quickly shifts from the same repetitive two notes to Angus Young working his way up and down the threat board so quickly it nearly catches fire.
Angus originally used the lick as a warm up but it was his brother Malcolm who convinced him to use it in a song, a move which led to one of AC/DC’s biggest hits. Despite its success, the song also poses a problem for Angus Young when played live. “When we perform it live,” he said, “I have to sit down for an hour and make sure I’ve got my fingers warmed up to take on that track. It’s got an unrelenting intricacy. I have to be confident whenever I play it.”
John Bonham – ‘Four Sticks ‘
Led Zeppelin have always been considered a fantastic live band. “When they went on stage, it was something very special and different and spectacular,” said Jorgen Angel, a photographer who shot their first gig, “they were full of energy”. The ability to play live doesn’t happen overnight, though; practice was always necessary, and even then, the song ‘Four Sticks’ often proved too much for John Bonham.
“It took him ages to get ‘Four Sticks’,” said John Paul Jones. “I seemed to be the only one who could actually count things in. Page would play something, and [John would] say, ‘That’s great. Where’s the first beat? You know it, but you gotta tell us…’”
Slash – ‘Estranged’
Guns N’ Roses are hardly strangers to complexity in their music. Best represented by their 1991 epics Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II, the band loved an elongated solo and real-life recordings put into songs — they never shied away from a challenge. This attitude proved difficult when preparing songs for a live show, though, as Slash explained when talking about ‘Estranged’.
In an interview, he said, “The most challenging guitar bit is ‘Estranged’… playing that live, it demanded a lot of concentration. It’s not your typical sort of turn up the volume and crank it up sort of thing. It took a lot of concentration to get all of the nuances throughout the whole song and there’s a lot of arrangements and stuff going on in there, so that was definitely the most challenging.”
Keith Richards – ‘Mother’s Little Helper’
With a career spanning as long as The Rolling Stones has, a journey through their discography will expose listeners to a huge variation of genres, sounds and themes. One of their more experimental numbers was ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, which ended up being tough to record and almost impossible to play live.
The song’s muse is a woman who overdoses on pills and runs around the house all day. The tempo is quite bluesy, with guitar interims coming between Jagger’s emotional lyrics. “We’ve often tried to perform ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, and it’s never been any good,” said Charlie Watts, “It’s either me not playing it right or Keith not wanting to do it like that. It’s never worked. It’s just one of those songs. We used to try it live, but it’s a bloody hard record to play.”
Brian Johnson – ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll’
Slightly different from the above, Johnson struggled with playing this song live, not because of any physical limitations, but emotional ones. ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)’ is one of AC/DC’s biggest tracks and features Bon Scott reflecting on his rock band experience, including getting robbed, stoned and beaten up.
In 1980, Bon Scott passed away from acute alcohol poisoning. In time, AC/DC started making music and touring again, this time with Newcastle’s own Brian Johnson on lead vocals. Though a lot of their back catalogue was brought forward and the band continued to perform many Bon Scott tracks with the new singer, Johnson decided it would be insensitive to sing a song Scott wrote about living destructively.
David Gilmour – ‘Echoes’
Pink Floyd is another band renowned for their ambition when it comes to both writing and performing music. ‘Echoes’ was already a tough song to perform live, with elongated instrumental passages and a runtime of nearly 25 minutes. There were plenty of chances to slip up during a live run-through.
The deciding factor that would see the band retire the song for good was the passing of keyboardist Richard Wright in 2008. “Yes, it would be lovely to play ‘Echoes’ here,” said Gilmour ahead of a gig at the Amphitheatre of Pompeii, “But I wouldn’t do that without Rick. There’s something that’s specifically so individual about the way Rick and I play in that you can’t get someone to learn it and do it just like that. That’s not what music’s about.”
Gene Simmons – ‘I Was Made For Lovin’ You’
What is arguably one of Kiss’s biggest songs is also the one which Gene Simmons struggles to play live the most. The self-proclaimed God of Thunder holds his stage presence and coolness in high regard and feels like ‘I Was Made for Lovin You’ contradicts that image, hence why he has never been too comfortable playing it.
“That’s really cool,” he said in an interview with Howard Stern talking about when Paul Stanley brought the song to him, “what’s my part?” Gene then goes on to imitate the high-pitched “do do do do do” that he does on the song, shaking his head with every syllable. “I hate it to this day,” he says, “except stadiums full of people, they jump up and down like biblical locusts.”
Jimi Hendrix – Foxey Lady
It’s hard to imagine Jimi Hendrix struggling to play anything live. After only spending a short amount of time as a mainstream artist before his untimely passing, he is still considered one of the greatest guitarists ever to put a pick to string. His difficulty with playing the hit ‘Foxey Lady’ live was less about having the ability to perform it, but rather, an unexplained dislike that he took toward the track.
In an interview, Alice Cooper said about hanging out with Hendrix, “I was talking to Jimi Hendrix, and Jimi goes, ‘Man, if I have to play ‘Foxey Lady’ one more time, I’m going to go crazy.’ I was sitting there going, ‘If I was in the audience and he didn’t play ‘Foxey Lady,’ I would really feel cheated.” Hendrix did continue playing ‘Foxey Lady’ live but with complete contempt, the reasoning behind which is still unknown.
