I’m listening to Free’s “Fire And Water” and thought of Paul Rodgers strange and short stint with Queen as successor to Freddie Mercury. He was the wrong choice, he’s a blues singer while Freddie worked much more operatically, and since Queen weren’t much of a blues band anyway, it was a mismatch. They soon quit.
The other example I thought of is the band Audioslave, a band that rose from the ashes of two of my favorite bands of the nineties. The singer and songwriter of Soundgarden, a singer gifted with some of the greatest pipes of the business, combined with the instrumental section of one of the most groundbreaking rock bands of the time, Rage Against The Machine. I had seen both bands live in their heyday (RATM twice) and they both blew me away, so I was very excited to hear Audioslave’s eponymous album…It was a complete disappointment, it totally sucked, I only listened two or three times to it and never again. I heard that they even made a second album some years later, but I didn’t care.
So what examples do you have when the combination of singer/band was a mismatch?
How much of that was Cherone’s vocals and how much of it was Eddie hired an inexperienced friend to produce, so nobody had the clout to say “Eddie, great riffs, but none of these damn songs need to be over 5 1/2 minutes long. Trim the fat, damn it!!” Every freaking song on that album (not counting the instrumental snippets the shortest one is 5:26), even the good-ish ones, wore out its welcome with at least another 2-3 minutes to go.
I agree with Michael Anthony, who played bass on only 3 tracks, that it should have just been an Eddie Van Halen solo album.
Extreme had a great guitar player (Nuno Bettencourt). If you’ve ever seen Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, that music in this scene is coming out of him (well, the guitar part at least).
Anthony Kiedis is a terrible singer. That was fine when Red Hot Chili Peppers were just a dumb L.A. funk band, but over the years as they built a fan base the rest of the band got much better and he still sucked.
In contrast, after breaking up with Rodgers they recruited Adam Lambert to sing for them, and he’s a damn near perfect match for their style. I saw that incarnation of Queen live in 2017 and it was an amazing show.
Ian Gillan in Black Sabbath. His lyrics tend to be tongue-in-cheek about goofy subjects like getting really drunk and they just weren’t a good match for a band that’s supposed to be dark and serious. I guess Ian agrees because a few years later he said in an interview that he was good friends with the other members but they just weren’t musically compatible.
It’s the fate for many bands, they can play the meanest hard rock, but all the general public knows is THE ballad. And the company only wants more of that…
This is more of what they played. Too much late Hair Band antiseptic hard rock for me but there is no denying their talent. Gary Cherone has a very good voice and Nuno is a great guitar player.
Sometime around 2002 or 2003, my grandmother was driving me home from work late at night, and she had a right-wing talk show on the radio. The host was talking about how conservatives were being “silenced” by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and he got a call-in from a guy who said he was a rock & roll singer whose bandmates had constantly given him shit and eventually run him out of the band because he was a Republican.
The host asked the caller what the name of his band was and if anyone had heard of it, and he said it was a group called Van Halen. Turned out the caller was Gary Cherone.
Ever since then I’ve had absolutely zero interest in listening to any of his music, because calling a radio talk show at 11 PM to complain that Van Halen was mean to you because you’re a Republican is objectively one of the most pathetic things I can imagine a human being doing.
When Audioslave was coming together, I remember reading how Chris Cornell was absolutely against writing political lyrics. That certainly raised an eyebrow, although in retrospect it was probably the only move the other three members could make if they wanted to stand any chance, however unlikely, of not being compared to Rage.
Well–I like Rage (less so now that Zach has really embraced his douchiness), and I like Soundgarden, and I like Audioslave. So there. Doesn’t remind Me among others are great songs. Was SG better? Yes, but top 1% musicians doing their thing? I think it worked. I think the same thing about Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer. Creative people doing very different things.
It wasn’t because of the fans. I’m pretty sure it came down to Dio being an arrogant, insufferable prick. Besides, the band had a revolving door for vocalists for years after Dio, before Ozzy came back.
How was Sabbath with Ian Gillan? I’ve never bothered to listen to any post-Ozzy album because Sabbath’s original albums with Ozzy were so good, but Gillan in his prime could sing rings around Ozzy (and Dio too), while I think that Ozzy was just the perfect singer for the band.
First band I thought of was the “supergroup” called The Firm. Paul Rodgers, an exceptional vocalist, paired with Jimmy Page, Chris Slade and Tony Franklin. What’s not to love? The music, that’s what. Mediocre offerings for two albums, then gone.
Tony Iommi has been the only constant member of Black Sabbath through the band’s entire history and registered the US trademark solely in his name in 2000, but Osbourne sued in 2009 and now they split the rights to the name 50/50:
