James Brown blew The Rolling Stones away

It was a feverish day in show business on October 28th, 1964, after James Brown departed the stage on The TAMI Show. He swept the floor with everyone, and a bewildered Rolling Stones took note. In fact, apparently Mick Jagger was almost too scared to leave his dressing room. It took Marvin Gaye to go in there and say, “Just go out there and do your best,” to encourage Jagger to take the stage and bust his own moves, but thereafter, he knew he had to up his game.

He certainly did that. He took what Brown offered and bolstered it with his own unique energy as he explained himself regarding the Godfather of Funk, ”A huge influence,” Jagger said. “It wasn’t just the moves he made – it was the energy he put into it, that was amazing.” So, it might have buoyed them in the long run, but Keith Richards described following the performance as one of the biggest mistakes he and his mates ever made.

James Brown and his Famous Flames might have only performed an 18-minute set that day, but it was a blitzkrieg powerful enough to leave the young Brits shaking. No wonder Richards would also later call Brown an ”asshole”.

Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers depressed Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan has played somewhere around 3,000 shows, so he knows the highs and lows of the road better than just about anyone. Perhaps the sorest was when he hit the road with his younger pals. ”I’d been on an eighteen-month tour with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It would be my last,” he mournfully wrote in his 2004 memoir. ”I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever had been there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine.”

Our hero was crushed. Young blood had swept him off of his tracks, and he was having to be bludgeoned by this reality night after night as The Heartbreakers seemingly soared to new heights with each new show and Dylan sank ever lower. The 1986 to 1987 True Confessions and Temples in Flames tour started Down Under in Wellington, New Zealand, and Dylan figured he never found his way back Up Top, so to speak.

”It wasn’t my moment of history anymore. There was a hollowing singing in my heart, and I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent. One more big payday with Petty, and that would be it for me,” he tragically put it. We’re all fallible, after all.

AC/DC terrified Van Halen

It was 1978, and Van Halen were a rising group fresh from opening for Black Sabbath when a lucrative offer came their way. The band figured things were going swimmingly. On the Sabbath tour, without the slightest of a sound check and a mere 30-minute slot, with six Marshall heads stacked high, they played loud and “just blew people’s minds”. Word was getting around about their ferocity. The group themselves were confident that they could replicate it on a big festival stage.

“We had an offer to play Day on the Green, which was Bill Graham’s annual festival thing, and I think that was Aerosmith and Foreigner playing,” Eddie recalls. With that in mind, they left the Sabbath tour behind and ventured towards the huge Day on the Green crowd. Things looked set for the next chapter for the group—one where they dominated the live circuit of rock ‘n’ roll.

They confidently nestled into this mindset backstage. “We played at high noon following AC/DC and I’m onstage watching AC/DC,” Eddie Van Halen recalled. “80,000 people in the crowd were just jumping up and down because they got that infectious sound.” Suddenly, the first prangs of nerves that the group had felt for a long time began to flutter: how do you follow a band like AC/DC? “I’m going, ‘Holy shit, we gotta follow these guys’. So we didn’t blow them away,” Eddie conceded.

The Clash threatened The Who

The Who had a lot of time for punk. In fact, you could argue that their guitar-smashing ways helped to inspire the genre. However, there was also no doubt that punk represented a departure. ”I felt very threatened by the punk thing at first,” Roger Daltrey happily admitted. His band went from feeling threatened to feeling like the old forebearers. All the same, this took a while to settle in.

As it happened, it took a tour with one of the leading lights to truly hit home. ”We toured with The Clash in 1982. We took them to the US with us, and I used to fucking love watching ’em. I’m still a huge Joe Strummer fan,” Daltrey recalled. They played a whopping 67 dates in America that year, and The Clash left them in awe when they shared a stage. That is saying something, given the plethora of talent who also played alongside them on the stateside jaunt. The likes of Jethro Tull, Joan Jett, Joe Jackson, and The B-52s were all also part of the run, but none of them matched The Clash.

Daltrey even admits that trying to match their riotous energy ”unsettled” his vocals. But he happily concedes that it was a privilege to play with them all.

Led Zeppelin shocked Vanilla Fudge

Live shows are what truly define an artist. It is under a spotlight where many bands are truly forged. “I realised what Led Zeppelin was all about around the end of our first US tour,” Robert Plant once recalled. They had begun as unknown entities, decided to skip the usual British invasion trick of conquering the UK before going overseas, and after a jaunt in Scandinavia, they headed to the States.

“We started off not even on the bill in Denver,” the golden frontman continues, “And by the time we got to New York we were second to Iron Butterfly, and they didn’t want to go on.” This fearsomeness was also ratified by Vanilla Fudge, who claimed that Led Zep were the only band that could match them.

”We played with Hendrix, Cream, The Who, and at times, we blew everybody off the stage,” Fudge drummer Carmine Appice told Songfacts. ”We were a very hard act to follow. We were known for being very aggressive live and different from anyone else. We were wondering who was going to blow us off the stage – it was Led Zeppelin.”