“It was a very tense time”: Five bands that nobody could stand touring with
Who wouldn’t want to be touring in a rock band, every night, heading out on the road, stepping in front of crowds of cheering fans, each of them blurting out the words to your songs the minute they start playing.
Not to mention, after the gig, you can hang out with fans, have a drink and spend the thousands that you’re making from being a famous musician; there’s very little not to like.
Well, it turns out that life on tour can be heaven, but it can also be hell, depending on who you wind up working with. There are some bands out there who are a lot of fun to be travelling around with; meanwhile, there are others who despise one another so much that they make touring miserable for themselves, the crew, and support bands, to the extent that nobody wants to go away with them.
Who are these bands that can take something so good and turn it into a living nightmare? Let’s have a look.
Five bands nobody could stand going on tour with:
Guns N’ Roses
It wasn’t just that a lot of support bands couldn’t stand touring with Guns N’ Roses, but even the band members themselves got fed up with it eventually. The hot-headed nature of the LA rockers meant that they were constantly at each other’s throats, and creative differences trickled down into substandard live performances. Axl Rose admitted to turning down Izzy Stradlin’s guitar while he was on stage because he hated the sound of it so much, and a tour with Metallica showed Slash just how horrible his band’s attitude towards touring was.
“It was a very tense time, a major straw on the camel’s back for me and for everybody in our camp,” he said, “It was actually a huge issue for me because I’d lost face with everyone in Metallica. We didn’t keep our promise to them, the fans, or to ourselves to put on the best show possible. I felt like an ass, and I couldn’t look James, Lars, or anyone from their band in the eye for the rest of the tour…”
Kiss
Kiss is a band made up of some of the biggest egos in rock music, and as such, they were notoriously difficult to be on the road with. However, their egos weren’t the primary problem that stopped other bands from wanting to work with them. The main issue that acts like Black Sabbath faced was their pyrotechnics, as Kiss would completely burn the house down with fireworks and, well, literal fire, to the point that it was borderline impossible for other acts to follow them.
“It was a completely new direction for people,” said Geezer Butler when reflecting on the band’s tour with Sabbath, “People had to start thinking about stage production after Kiss. It was tough to follow them. We went on just as an ordinary band, no effects or anything, and everybody else still had their mouths wide open from seeing Kiss.”
Van Halen
People found it just as hard to go on tour with Van Halen as Kiss because of how impossible they were to go on stage after, with the central hindrance being Eddie himself, who wasn’t just a good guitar player but had invented a brand new style of playing. Once again, it was Black Sabbath who found out the hard way just how difficult Van Halen was to tour with. You have to give the inventors of heavy metal credit, as they took a lot of up-and-coming rock bands on the road with them, but it also led to them getting upstaged on a few different occasions.
It got to the point where the band had to step in and ask Van Halen to tone it down, given they were the support band and their slot was constantly running over its allotted time. “Eddie was doing these extended solos,” recalled Butler, “So Tony had to have a word of him about that”.
Oasis
The recent Oasis reunion tour will go down in history as one of the biggest tours of all time. There was simply no stopping the band, as they seemed capable of taking over the world with a few hits of a drum skin. Crowds, young and old, erupted, and the brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher seemed to genuinely enjoy being on stage with one another. However, this wasn’t the case when they were originally on the verge of breaking up, constantly fixated on tearing each other apart, and so made life on the road an incredibly hostile place to be.
“The other fella is trying to rewrite history that it was all fucking great. It wasn’t all great,” said Noel Gallagher, “It was a fucking dreadful last year of Oasis in 2009 or whatever it was. It was a terrible, terrible time. It had come to an end, you could kind of feel it. It was time to move on.”
Mötley Crüe
Mötley Crüe might be one of the worst bands to ever hit the road, and not just because they were chaotic. Thanks to a combination of drugs, substance abuse, and general madness, the band were constantly putting those they were on the road with (and themselves) at risk. It got so bad that the band’s management stepped in and stopped them from travelling overseas at risk of them taking things too far.
Vince Neil knew the band had stepped out of line and were impossible to be on the road with when Nikki Sixx overdosed because of the amount of drugs he was taking on tour. “Our managers basically said, ‘If we send you guys to Europe with what you guys are doing, someone’s gonna come back in a body bag’,” he said, “And literally right after that, when we would have been in Europe touring, is when Nikki OD’d.”
