The 10 worst decisions in rock history
From day one, rock and roll has always been a business. Even though it might look like a bunch of people having fun onstage and collecting a paycheck at the end of the day, many moving parts go into making the rock star lifestyle than flash and guitar licks. A lot of people have to make dire decisions to keep everything running, though, and these decisions made by revered artists like The Beatles and U2 made for musical disasters.
When talking about the biggest missteps in history, it usually comes down to an album or single that didn’t perform. While artists might be able to talk a big game, all it takes is a few humdrum records for fans to stop caring, either not liking where their favourite acts are going or complaining that it’s all the same thing over and over again.
Then again, a handful of shoddy decisions come down to the personnel involved with the band. Whether it was because of drug impairment or getting too comfortable in their position, musicians who took their crew and fellow bandmates for granted didn’t do them any favours, leading to critical members leaving or getting fired for no reason.
While not every one of these decisions seemed like a bad idea at the time, it wasn’t until the following few records that the group realised just how far they missed the mark, making for grave situations on the charts and their careers having to be put on life support for the foreseeable future. As much as artists might like to think that they are the most critical piece of the puzzle, their sense of business led them to become the laughingstock of the music business overnight.
The 10 worst decisions in rock history:
10. Letting Ice-T on a Black Sabbath record
Black Sabbath has been known as one of the scariest bands on the face of the Earth since their first record came out. For all the dark lyrics from Geezer Butler or the vocals of Ozzy Osbourne or Ronnie James Dio, the pitch-black tone of the music lay in the way Tony Iommi played guitar, going for broke on the most demented guitar riffs of all time. Sabbath was in for a few shake-ups throughout their career, though, and their idea to move towards hip-hop made for a musical mix made in Hell.
Coming at the tail end of the 1990s, Forbidden saw Iommi as the only original Sabbath member left standing in the band. He may have had rock legends like Cozy Powell on the record with him, but the choice to employ Body Count guitarist Ernie C as the primary producer didn’t work. Despite Body Count’s pedigree in metal circles, choosing to mix Sabbath’s record makes Iommi’s riffs feel muted, focusing more on the rhythm and pushing the guitars either too far back or so upfront it’s hard to hear anything else in the mix.
The biggest mistake comes with Ice-T showing up on ‘The Illusion of Power’, spitting with the same flow he uses in Body Count, albeit with a little more grit in his delivery. Compared to the likes of Osbourne or Dio, T’s flow is the orange juice and toothpaste combination that no metalhead was asking for. Nu-metal may have been the hottest thing in the world around the time of the album’s release, but even Iommi admitted years later that this approach was a big mistake.
9. The Sonics turning down Jimi Hendrix
As bands began reaching for new influences in the 1960s, it became a glorious age for garage rock. Compared to the bands that wanted nothing more than to put flowers in their hair, bands were coming from the mean streets of Detroit to lay waste to the rock landscape, from the MC5 to the early days of shock rocker Alice Cooper. Decades before the grunge movement was thought up, The Sonics brought their nervy approach to rock and roll out of Seattle and delivered it to the world.
Although the group had a modest hit at the time with ‘The Witch’, their profile remained dormant for most of their career, gaining more notoriety at the turn of the 1990s for being a precursor to alternative music. If their bandleader had paid attention to who was coming to their gigs, though, they could have nudged their way into rock history with the god of guitar players.
Among the group’s eager fans in the early days was a young Jimi Hendrix, who turned up to one of The Sonics’s gigs hoping to sit in with them on a few songs. Thinking it was just another overeager fan, the band turned him away and carried on with their set just before Hendrix headed over to England to turn the music world upside down with Are You Experienced. If things had played out differently, Hendrix would have added grunge forefather to his numerous musical accolades.
8. Making a trilogy – Green Day
When riding the wave of success, bands tend to think they are too big to fail. Although Green Day had found out what the term “irrelevance” meant for a handful of years after Dookie, American Idiot brought them back in the good graces of pop-punk fans, becoming one of the biggest names in the world for their political tirade against Bush’s America. Adding another opera to their belt with 21st Century Breakdown, the band got a little overeager when sculpting the follow-up.
Announcing that they would be running through a trilogy of albums entitled Uno, Dos, and Tre, Green Day gave their audience over two hours’ worth of music across three projects over a few months. Even though decent punk rock is rarely a bad thing, the band started to lose quality control along the way, making for songs that went nowhere, like ‘A Little Boy Named Train’ or experimenting with styles they had no business working in, like ‘Nightlife’.
Whereas most fans would claim that a good album could be made if the trilogy was concentrated into a single record, it still would be far from the heights the band had been hoping for, offering up merely decent punk rock that would have made an excellent American Idiot B-side. Green Day were never a band to back down from an ambitious project, but it was probably an omen in the documentary Cuatro when fans pleaded with them to play their old songs instead.
7. Prince’s Warner Bros fiasco – Prince
Prince was never one to play by anyone else’s rules. Throughout his career, his artistry was too bountiful to be contained to any one sound, merging genres like rock, R&B and funk while also making huge hits for artists as varied as The Bangles, Morris Day and The Time. While each of those artists fell under the Warner Bros umbrella, ‘The Purple One’ had a few too many bones to pick with his higher-ups about what he could do.
Though any label would be fine with an artist delivering quality material from one album to the next, Prince’s need to release as much music as possible felt like too much at once in Warner Bros’ eyes. Feeling like he was being sold like a commodity rather than an artist, Prince cut off ties with his label in the early 1990s, changing his name to a symbol to distance his new music from anything that had to do with his business concerns.
Although Prince would find a way to make peace with his legacy later, years would pass before ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’ could reclaim control of his music, becoming super-protective over copyright and ensuring that none of his songs fell into the wrong hands. The approach may have seemed like overkill for casual fans, but when a label jerks someone around this much, it’s hard to blame Prince for not wanting to see his songs sold like meat again.
6. Heroin invades 1990s Seattle
Drugs have always been a common thread throughout each decade of rock and roll. From the use of psychedelic head trips throughout the 1960s to the abundance of cocaine running through Studio 54 at the height of the disco craze, everything circles back to the narcotics being used when enjoying a specific type of music. Although drugs and art don’t go hand-in-hand everywhere, the Seattle grunge scene turned to tragedy when heroin started to run rampant.
Rock legends like John Lennon and Keith Richards had fallen prey to the needle in their time, and the first casualty in Seattle came when Mother Love Bone singer Andy Wood died of a heroin overdose in 1990. While the surviving members of his band would form the basis of Pearl Jam, the mainstream media didn’t see the full extent of heroin use until Kurt Cobain came along, being candid about using the drug to soothe his undiagnosed stomach problems.
While heroin wouldn’t claim Cobain’s life, it further complicated it until his death, having enough of the drug in his body for a fatal dose when he was found dead in his home of a shotgun wound. Even after trying to clean up, Alice in Chains’s Layne Staley would fall prey to heroin, as his body withered away until he died in 2002. Despite the claim that drugs help fuel the creative fire for artists, the allure of heroin also managed to claim the most fruitful creative people of the alternative revolution.
5. Teaming up with Apple – U2
U2 tends to be a band fairly easy to hate. Even though there’s nothing wrong with being outspoken about one’s ideals, the way Bono decides to talk about the world’s problems is enough to make supporters of his cause wince a little bit. Although Bono might mean well whenever he tries to support political causes or charity events, there should have been a couple of red flags when the band decided to team up with Apple for their album Songs of Innocence.
While the idea of an artist partnering with a specific streaming site is nothing new, the band’s decision to randomly shove their new album onto every Apple device in the world was nothing short of disastrous. Since most Apple users had been given a brand new U2 album without asking for it, most felt like they were being spoon-fed an album for no reason, with a handful of customers complaining that they were having difficulty getting the new songs out of their iTunes library.
That didn’t seem to matter to U2, with the album already being a huge success weeks before the album had been thrust onto the public. Giving away an album for free seems like a good idea when artists like Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails do it. Still, a band of U2’s calibre commandeering everyone’s iTunes feels like Big Brother taking control of what should be listened to.
4. Taking Off the Make-up – Kiss
At the dawn of the 1970s, it felt like rock was starting to get a bit neutered. Although Led Zeppelin was still riding high off their first wave of success, the sounds of singer-songwriters clogging up the charts cast a dark shadow over what was supposed to be the beginning of hard rock and heavy metal. Whereas Alice Cooper lay on the fringes of rock society, Kiss rose to the top by turning their shows into a non-stop rock circus.
Clad in horrifying make-up, every great Kiss concert felt like a fantastic spectacle, from Gene Simmons breathing fire midway through the show to Ace Frehley playing the guitar so well that the inside would begin to shoot rockets. Once the band lost a few personnel, though, their decision to take the make-up off at the dawn of the 1980s made them indistinguishable from any run-of-the-mill hair metal band of the era.
It also didn’t help that the music took a major downslide, from Paul Stanley desperately trying to find every double entendre he could come up with to Simmons writing the bare minimum so he could focus on his desire to become a film star. Kiss will never be on the level of serious artists like Bob Dylan, but their choosing to take the make-up off robbed them of one of the few things that made them interesting.
3. Hiring Hell’s Angels – The Rolling Stones
Every great music festival put on since 1969 has tried to recreate what Woodstock did. Descending on a field in the middle of New York, the image of a hippy utopia was brought to life over just a few days, featuring phenomenal performances and major cultural events like Jimi Hendrix playing his iconic rendition of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. While Altamont was shaping up to be the West Coast answer to the psychedelic spectacle, things went wrong the minute the Hell’s Angels became involved.
When putting together security for the day, The Rolling Stones enlisted the notorious biker gang to run interference for them during their performance. Being paid in beer and a chance to sit on the stage during the performance, things started going wrong the minute the band began their performance, with the “security” brutally assaulting members of the crowd.
During a performance of the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, things were stopped when fans tried to rush the stage, leading to concertgoer Meredith Hunter being stabbed to death after allegedly flashing a gun in sight of one of the Angels. Whereas Woodstock may have felt like a world of peace may have been attainable, the aftermath of Altamont was a firm reminder that the idea of a utopia on Earth would never happen.
2. Getting involved with Charles Manson – The Beach Boys
In the midst of the British Invasion, there was no other American act that could compete with The Beach Boys. Although The Beatles and The Rolling Stones may have gotten the accolades in England, Brian Wilson’s songs about surfing and driving cars made for teenage symphonies whenever they came over the radio. Every band member did have their strengths, but Dennis Wilson got a bit too out of line when he started cavorting with a future mass murderer.
Trying to follow the model The Beatles made with Apple Records, The Beach Boys were scouting out their own bright new talent to foster. Although nothing would come of most of the acts, Charles Manson had become friendly with Dennis, even writing the song that would become ‘Never Learn Not To Love’ on the group’s album 20/20. While Manson did have musical talent at the time, it didn’t take long before he fell out of favour with the band and turned to violence.
As Dennis tried to distance himself from the rest of ‘The Family’, Manson would make various threats towards the Beach Boy, even having ‘Family’ members show up to his house on numerous occasions as a way to intimidate him. While Manson would be convicted of his heinous crimes after the fact, Dennis remained spooked his entire life, eventually passing away after accidentally drowning in the mid-1980s. Regardless of how every member of The Beach Boys might come off these days, letting Manson come anywhere close to them is still one of the spookiest chapters in rock history.
1. Hiring Allen Klein – The Beatles
The beginning of the end of The Beatles began the minute that Brian Epstein passed away. Although Epstein had no hand in the music the Fab Four created, his business sense had made them one of the biggest acts in the world, giving them the freedom to experiment in the studio on albums like Rubber Soul and Revolver. As the band slowly tried to figure out what to do, their idea not to manage themselves led them to work with one of the most despicable men in the music industry.
Formerly a business tycoon known for working his magic with The Rolling Stones, The Beatles eventually settled with Allen Klein as their manager, much to the annoyance of Paul McCartney. Since Macca never agreed with most of Klein’s business ideals, their various meetings drove a wedge between everyone in the group, leading to McCartney formally announcing the band’s breakup in an interview included with his debut solo album.
While the rest of The Beatles would continue to be sued by McCartney for the next few years, their business dealings would grow even more sour, with Klein looking to serve the bottom line, making as much money as he could without caring for the well-being of anyone in the group. The Beatles were already at a creative impasse by the end of The White Album, but if Klein hadn’t turned them all against each other, they could have easily taken a break and regrouped for more albums later down the line.
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