Five times musicians nearly murdered someone
Conflict will always arise in creative industries as ego meets heightened personalities meets money meets fame. It’s a concoction that only ends in disaster. Usually, when we listen to the tour stories of bands such as Black Sabbath, AC/DC and the Ramones, we do so with glee, giddy at the conflict that rockstars face on the road, basking in the dramatic nature of rock ‘n’ roll. However, there are some instances when things are taken a bit too far, and people’s lives are threatened as a result.
You would be surprised how many times musicians have tried to kill one another. Jealousy can seep into the artistic process, and when they see an underdog artist start to get more respect than them, tempers can flare, manifesting in a genuine, blind rage.
Equally, because of conflicts between music industry executives and the artists they’ve signed, musicians also lash out against industry professionals. Many times, interviews and meetings have been broken up by disgruntled artists making very genuine threats to those involved in them.
With hindsight and knowing that nobody got genuinely hurt, we can read back on these stories with whimsy. However, at the time of the incident, there were genuine fears that somebody could be seriously hurt. These are five different instances when musicians have almost murdered somebody.
Five times artists almost killed someone:
Geezer Butler and Angus Young
When AC/DC and Black Sabbath were on tour together, tension began to grow between the two bands when AC/DC, the support band, began to upstage Black Sabbath on multiple occasions. One night, as Geezer Butler was crying into a beer, he told Angus Young, “Wait til you guys are around ten years. You’ll feel like us.”
Young disagreed, and in the heat of the moment, down and out on tour and verging on rat-arsed, Butler pulled out a flick knife and went for the guitarist. Ozzy Osbourne had to step in at the last minute to break up the altercation. If not for the Prince of Darkness, that night in a hotel on tour could have ended in rock legends bloodshed.
Black Sabbath and Bill Ward
Bill Ward was always the lightning rod that absorbed a lot of Black Sabbath’s mischief when they were on tour. The band often plays pranks on Ward, but they take things a step too far when they discover gold paint and try to paint Ward gold from head to toe.
“He started having convulsions,” recalled Tony Iommi, “The ambulance people gave us a right bollocking: ‘You idiots! You could have killed him’. They gave him adrenalin and we had to use paint stripper to get it off. He looked like a beetroot by the end.”
Eddie Van Halen and Fred Durst
Van Halen and Limp Bizkit may not be a band you associate with one another, but one day, in Hollywood, they found themselves jamming together at Fred Durst’s house. Soon, drugs started to get passed around, which wasn’t Eddie Van Halen’s scene, so he left his equipment there and went home. The next day, when he called Durst to come pick up his guitar, the Limp Bizkit singer never responded, which prompted an emotional reaction in Eddie.
The Van Halen guitarist had once bought an assault vehicle from a military auction, which he decided to hop in and drive to the Limp Bizkit singer’s house. He then jumped out of the tank with a gun in hand, waving it around and demanding he be given his guitar back. If Durst had refused, things could have ended quite badly for him.
Phil Spector and the Ramones
Despite the Ramones being a successful punk band, they always struggled to break the mainstream and achieve global success. Phil Spector was brought in to change that, and while he gave them a commercially successful album, his perfectionist and controlling nature meant the process of making the album seemed to take away from the Ramones’ energetic and raw sound. He constantly tried to control the band, and things reached a breaking point when he pulled out a gun to ensure they acted appropriately.
“He levelled his gun at my heart and then motioned for me and the rest of the band to get back in the piano room,” recalled Dee Dee Ramone, “He only holstered his pistol when he felt secure that his bodyguards could take over. Then he sat down at his black concert piano and made us listen to him play and sing ‘Baby, I Love You’ until well after 4:30 in the morning.”
Nina Simone and her record label
Nina Simone was never afraid to make her voice heard. When it came to political injustices, she wrote heart-wrenching lyrics and delivered them in a deeply moving way. However, her willingness to speak openly wasn’t limited to within her music. On one occasion, when Simone felt she had been ripped off by the prying hands of the music industry, she burst into a meeting executives at her record label were having and started firing a gun.
In an interview, Simone admitted that she had gone into the room, fired the gun and demanded that the label give her the money that she was owed. She clearly had no regrets about her actions, either, as when she was finishing her story, she signed off, confirming, “Sorry I didn’t get him.”
