The 10 worst frontmen of all time

Ray Manzarak – The Doors

The Doors’ main message was always about something bigger than the music. Jim Morrison allowed us to go to places that rock and roll had only suggested, and even if they were at half-capacity on some albums, he would be the one steering everything forward and creating that creative musical world through every word he said. So when he died, there was bound to be a hole in their sound, but Ray Manzarek surely could be a frontman, right? Wrong.

While there are no bad words to be said about how Manzarek plays the keyboards on all of those classic Doors songs, he is not cut out to be a frontman, and Other Voices proves it. There are still some decent jams to be found on the record akin to some of the Grateful Dead’s work, but listening to him croak along in his lower voice sounds like he’s going for a bluesy swagger but ends up sounding like a schoolteacher who jams with his colleagues on the weekends.

Even though a lot of what turned up on The Doors Morrison-less projects are still a decent facsimile of rock and roll, there’s no reason for them to continue on under that name. The Doors had existed before, and they might have had a chance to exist again, but any chance of Manzarek getting the same reaction out of the crowd Morrison did when he sang ‘Light My Fire’ was virtually non-existent.

Vince Neil – Mötley Crüe

Not everyone in Mötley Crüe was meant to have the best rock and roll chops. Mick Mars could certainly play, and Tommy Lee had enough stamina for two different drummers, but Nikki Sixx had that same punk rock ethic that most kids of his generation had when putting together the group. Even for a band where accuracy wasn’t their strongest suit, having Vince Neil anchoring every one of their songs made them insufferable throughout most of their non-classic period.

Outside of the fact that Neil has seemed to have lost what he already had in recent years, he wasn’t exactly working with a lot. He did have an impressive shout on him in moments, but he was the biggest case of someone being one-note in hair metal history. There had been ways for people like Bret Michaels and even Sammy Hagar to stretch themselves, but Neil’s only strength is sounding snotty, which isn’t something you should be going for when making a heartfelt power ballad, is it?

Once the band tried to adapt to the times in their later career, a big reason why Generation Swine doesn’t work is because Neil refuses to change his style, meaning most of their records blend together after a while. There’s a lot of potential in a band like this, but given the fact that everyone shunned a new version of them with someone who could actually sing, it seems that the world is content having a man half-ass it every time that he got behind the microphone.

Donald Fagen – Steely Dan

Most rock bands are known to turn every single one of their shows into a spectacle. No matter if you’re sitting in the nosebleed seats or at the lip of the stage, the best frontmen of all time are the ones who make you believe that the gig wouldn’t be the same if you hadn’t been there to see it. In the case of Steely Dan, no one seemed to give two shits one way or the other when it came to who they had in front of them.

Granted, it’s not like they didn’t try in the beginning. Donald Fagen did have his fair share of decent moments behind the microphone, but most of his greatest accomplishments were destined for the studio. And when the band went out on the road again, Fagen was more than happy to face down his piano than bother to try to liven things up for the crowd or channel his inner David Lee Roth.

It’s easy to chalk up that to a case of stage fright, but the idea of the stage was practically alien to all of Steely Dan’s work. They were always children of the studio, so while he does earn a spot as one of the least captivating frontmen of all time, that’s not to take away from his abilities. Fagen can throw down when he wants to, but his success should be every single wallflower’s dream regarding rock stardom.

Kid Rock

When the nu-metal movement officially began, it’s not like it didn’t have merit. There was some innate silliness to the way that everyone moved, but it wasn’t like Jonathan Davis wasn’t coming from a genuine place whenever he sang about his pain. If the genre was already a joke by 1999, though, Kid Rock put the entire genre to bed by sounding like the tightest MC to come out of the sticks.

Then again, it would be easy for me to distil this to things that Mr. Rock has done wrong, but that’s not what this is about. He can still entertain a crowd whenever he plays, and his eclectic music taste has at least put him a notch above some of his peers, but once he bothers to open his mouth, his political takes are absolutely abhorrent, which he decides to place front and centre every time he plays, all while rapping about the pleasures of downhome living.

There’s a place for that, too, but Rock’s entire facade is based on a lie, considering he came from the mean suburbs of Detroit and grew up as a kid who didn’t have to worry about paying his dues in his life. Many rockstars have been able to do a lot more with a lot less than what Rock is working with, but when you realise that everything comes back to him cosplaying what he thinks a typical American should be caring about, it gets a little bit hard to take anything else he says seriously.

Axl Rose – Guns N’ Roses

When talking about Guns N’ Roses, it really is a tale of two different bands. Although they have gone through many iterations throughout their timeline, there’s no getting around the glory days when every one of them seemed dangerous, as if a street gang manifested itself onto the charts with guitars as weapons instead of knives. The minute that they became successful, though, Axl Rose seemed to take all of his goodwill and have it all go right to his head.

Even though Rose was good at pushing the boundaries of what was typical of rockstars back in the day, seeing him commandeer Guns N’ Roses without consulting anyone is hard to watch now. He was definitely an all-star frontman, but the entire Use Your Illusion cycle felt like having to deal with a decent band with a diva at the front, each night being unaware whether he would show up on time, show up at all, or leave halfway through because of what was on someone’s T-shirt in the crowd.

So, while there are pieces that seem to work about Rose today, it’s been an uphill battle for him with the fans knowing what he was capable of back in the day. It’s one thing for an artist to cancel a show at the last minute, but when the cancellation becomes the main attraction half the time, it starts to look less like a badass rock and roll band and closer to a sideshow act.

Derek St Holmes – Ted Nugent

Anyone who hasn’t even heard of who Ted Nugent is would logically think that ‘Uncle Ted’ is the face of his group. After all, he’s the one whose name is on the albums, he’s usually featured on the cover by himself, and a lot of the tunes feature a lot of his guitar licks as well. So when people heard some of his first albums and heard a different voice, that was normally the high sign that the band dynamic wasn’t exactly equal.

While Nugent would have been nowhere without everyone helping to anchor him down back in the day, Derek St. Holmes is far from the icon that most frontmen were destined to be. Then again, it’s easy to cut him some slack when he wasn’t allowed to do much since most of Nugent’s antics, like being decked out in a loincloth, ended up taking up the majority of the show in between a handful of decent guitar licks.

And what makes it even more depressing is seeing him attempt to make a “supergroup” with Brad Whitford of Aerosmith in between tours, making for the clash of musical titans that no one really cared about. Holmes does have a certain track record of being a good singer all-around, but when you have to compete with someone who treats himself like the alpha male and looks like a version of Tarzan who occasionally makes racist remarks, there’s no real way of competing with that.

Morrissey – The Smiths

For a decade that was so preoccupied with MTV, the 1980s were also extremely kind to artists a little left-of-the-dial. There was still room for people to make something that sounded a bit weird, and thanks to college radio, everything from REM to The Replacements seemed to have a shot at the mainstream in some capacity. And while The Smiths deserve to be revered in the hallowed halls of alt-rock until the end of time, ‘The Moz’ has done everything in his power to tarnish their legacy ever since their downfall.

There are hardly any outright duds in The Smiths’ catalogue, but once Morrissey moved on to his solo career, he started to lose his filter and a few more of his brain cells in the process. Outside of being candid about subjects that are more than a little bit comfortable, seeing him constantly shoving his beliefs down everyone’s throat is the ultimate example of someone putting their needs before their audience, like insisting that no one be eating meat at any of the shows that he plays.

Combine that with the fact that he has come to the aid of people like Harvey Weinstein, and you will start to understand how important Johnny Marr was in terms of the band’s goodwill with their fanbase. There are still ways to enjoy The Queen is Dead and reminisce on those times, but for as melodramatic as he could seem back in the day, ‘The Boy With the Thorn In His Side’ has seemed to not only not grown up, but also become even more whiney with age.

Mike Love – The Beach Boys

The mark of any good frontman is usually being a good spokesperson for the music. Every show should be a celebration of what the music was about, and for The Beach Boys, Mike Love did his job incredibly well when serving as the face of the group and making sure that they all appeared as the fun-loving kids who wanted to surf all day and drive their cars through the night. If anyone bothered listening to them for more than two seconds, though, they’d start to realise that Love is more than a little bit slimy behind the scenes.

Even if he was an all-star performer back in the day, Love did everything in his power to not stray too far from the formula, which meant trying to put Brian Wilson in a box during the making of Pet Sounds when writing songs like ‘I Know There’s An Answer.’ And when he was left to his own devices, everything he said made him look like an entitled asshole, like at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony where he felt the need to call out every other band that was too chickenshit to get onstage with them.

There was always more to The Beach Boys than those soaring harmonies and tunes about fun in the summertime, but if Summer in Paradise is any indication, Love would have preferred if the band hadn’t grown a bit since 1965. The California rockers may have had to dodge a few bullets when people called them preppy dorks once The Beatles came along, but when looking at how Love has conducted himself over the years, it’s not like that claim isn’t founded.

Gene Simmons – Kiss

It would be sacrilege for any rock fan to say that Kiss doesn’t put on a good show. Even if they turned the entire concept of a show into a circus act, every single band member managed to put everything they had into making sure everyone was satisfied with whatever kind of crazy stage antic they had to throw at them. All of them felt like superheroes once they got onstage, but every hero is only as good as the villain, even if they are hidden amongst the band.

While Gene Simmons should deserve kudos for bringing some of the band’s greatest ideas to life, everything that he has done since the 1980s has painted him in a bad light. He can be commended as being one of the few rockstars from his time who stayed off drugs, but he traded that in for being one of the more deplorable people in the industry, usually making sexist remarks at everyone’s expense and living up to his Demon persona when gatekeeping different aspects of rock and roll.

Maybe earning a certain amount of money makes people behave this way, but at this point, it feels like Simmons never genuinely liked music all that much. He had a great knack for hooks and could get millions of people to sing lyrics along with him, but he seems to be more interested in being a businessman who happens to play music rather than the other way around.

Fred Durst – Limp Bizkit

No rock band can have a perfect lineup throughout their history. The Beatles had to break up because they could no longer get along, and even acts like Van Halen had to find time to change the lineup when David Lee Roth got out of hand. Even though Limp Bizkit had all of the makings of a decent band hidden in there somewhere, it all went wrong the minute that Fred Durst opened his mouth on any of their songs.

Outside of his get-up and general reputation as a nasty human being, Durst’s rhymes would barely get him through a decent freestyle on a middle school playground, much less on a platinum album. While Wes Borland did everything he could to make everything sound great, a song with potential like ‘Take A Look Around’ gets neutered the minute that Durst’s nasal whine starts, which gets even more inexcusable when all of his lines are from a 30-year-old talking about high school.

And while many genres have managed to die out along the path of music history, no one can claim to have an effigy to their name like Durst does when he incited a riot and left Woodstock 1999 in shambles at the end of the millennium. Some of the worst frontmen of all time might be easy to ignore or at the very least not to someone’s taste, but the behaviour Durst displayed throughout his career is enough to make any rock fan cry a single tear in disappointment.