I have two cases where artists trashed songs of theirs that I really liked:
Eagles, Glen Frey, Song: On the Border. That’s my favorite Eagle’s song, and in a interview I heard recently Glen Frey talked for 10 minutes about how it didn’t work and didn’t turn out the way they intended.
Dire Straits, Marc Knopfler, Song: One World. This song was getting heavy radio play in my region in 1985 or so, and I really dug it. Then Marc Knopfler commented in an interview about how it was the worst song he’d ever written and regretted putting on the album.
Billy Joel wrote “Just the Way You Are” for his first wife, Elizabeth. Joel didn’t really like the song and almost excluded it from “The Stranger.” After his divorce, he stated that he now hates to play it live because of the bad memories associated with it.
While arguably not their “best” work, every member of KISS has stated how awful their Music From The Elder album was. They’re being much too hard on themselves. It wasn’t all that bad.
Trying (and, at the moment, failing) to find proof of these stories which I’ve heard more than once:
Don McLean and “American Pie”. The story is that, in the years just after the song’s release, McLean got tired of feeling like it was the only song of his that people knew, or wanted to hear. Allegedly, he walked off stage in the middle of a concert, when the audience kept yelling out for “American Pie!!”
Kristin Chenoweth and “Popular”. My understanding is that she just doesn’t think it’s a particularly good song (but it’s indelibly linked to her). Nonetheless, she seemed very happy to use it to lampoon Anthony Weiner a few weeks back.
Can I throw a slight curve? An artist who stopped playing his first-generation instrument? Eric Clapton became God playing a Les Paul through a Marshall. His Woman Tone - amongst guitar geeks, a signature, named sound - originated on a sunburst LP. He and Page are what led to 'bursts going for $300,000. He played other Gibsons, too.
He moved to Strats around 1970 - after having his mind blown by Hendrix, although claims no connection. Either way, he’s been a Strat guy ever since. He uses Gibsons occasionally, but 95% of the time plays Strats. The Onlone Old Clapton Purists howl about missing that tone, but Clapton really doesn’t care and says he simply prefers “working a bit” on a Strat and moved on.
Ignorance Fought. I didn’t know that. My entry is Rachmaninoff famously hating his piano Prelude in C#minor. Not his “best” work but probably (?) his most popular and recognizable.
I don’t know if “Incense and Peppermint” is the best work of Strawberry Alarm Clock but it is their best-known. They weren’t impressed by it at the recording session, so the lead vocal was done by a friend visiting the studio.
He also doesn’t much care for “Piano Man” (or so claimed that on “Inside the Actor’s Studio”) but figures he owes his audience what they want, rather than what he wants.
Little Anthony and the Imperials apparently really hated “Shimmy Shimmy Ko Ko Bop” because it was so racist. They needed the cash and did it and then regretted it.
The Cocteau Twins (Robin Guthrie mostly, I believe) hated their IMO brilliant and most popular album Treasure, even calling it “an abortion.” Fuck that. It’s still my favorite album by them.
Apparently, he’s had a change of heart. Only now when he begins “American Pie,” he’ll accidentally slip into the opening bars of Weird Al Yankovic’s parody “The Saga Begins.”
“Tell Mama” is probably one of Etta James’ two or three most popular songs, but she didn’t care for it:
“There are folks who think “Tell Mama” is the Golden Moment of the Golden Age of Soul; they rant and rave about the snappy horn chart and the deep-pocket guitar groove, about how I sang the shit out of it. I wish I could agree. Sure, the song made me money. It warmed Leonard Chess’s heart to see the thing cross over to the pop charts, where it lingered for a long while. You might even say it became a classic. But I have to confess that it was never a favorite of mine. Never liked it. Never liked singing it - not then, not now. I almost never perform it. It’s not that I don’t admire the chart and the songwriter. Clarence Carter… is great. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t like being cast in the role of the Great Earth Mother, the gal you come to for comfort and easy sex. Nothing was easy back then…”
Now, that’s what I’m talking about. I’ll be the judge of whether what you did is crap or not! Seriously.
But on a less personal note, there’s the story about how much Keith Richards, of the Rolling Stones, hated Satisfaction and thought of it as a joke and flew into a rage when the record company decided to make it a single.
That’s why he always opens with it now. He says that he just goes into a trance when he plays it, and that while he’s happy that the song gave him a career he might not have had otherwise, if he was going to have one song he’d never be able to get away from he wishes it hadn’ t been one that’s eight minutes long.
He also has it in his rider that if a poster or any sort of commercial mentions any of his songs on it, it has to list (I think) five of them. (It offers suggestions.)