Warren Zevon. He had very bad OCD, depression, and a bunch of other mental and behavioral issues.
Curse you - I was going to mention Gesualdo. Apart from the cross-dressing, the murder (including an infant, whom he “rocked to death”) and the weird music, he’s famous for employing six men to beat him with sticks, which he needed in order to take a crap. Full on crazy.
I think Bjork is more than a little fruitloops but I still like her music.
Easy, the people who buy her that way are too young to remember the young Madonna.
I didn’t deny that he was a great musician (see thread title). But being highly successful does not mean that he’s mentally healthy.
Everything I’ve read about Richard Farina suggests he was really out there, but that was part of his charm.
I hadn’t realized he had died. That saddens me.
Yep, that’s who I came in to mention.
Look, there’s a difference between weird and insane. Prince may be weird, but he’s not undeniably insane. And to prove my contention, I hereby deny that Prince is insane.
Both Baez & Dylan have had fifty year careers in music. Hard to do if you’re insane.
First of all, I was the first to declare him undeniably insane, so you cannot deny his insanity without a 2/3 majority vote.
Secondly, to prove MY contention, I hereby admit that the man once decided to change his name to a symbol.
But wasn’t that due to the fight he was having with his record company? (Maybe somebody can provide the details.) If so, there was a definite method to his “madness.”
Phil Ochs spent the last few years of his life more or less incapacitated by mental illness.
Skip Spence, originally of Moby Grape, fell apart mentally, managing to record one solo LP, Oar, which is now considered a lost gem of psychedelia.
Rock tends to attract extreme personalities, and it can be hard to tell where eccentricity leaves off and insanity begins. Some who have trod that borderline include:
Brian Jones – certainly a mess psychologically and may have been clinically insane.
Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders – seems to have a great deal of difficulty functioning normally.
Arthur Lee of Love – possibly paranoid.
Jamie Muir (percussionist, was with King Crimson for one LP) and Davy Graham (British folk guitarist) – I would put them more on the “eccentric” side.
Another British folkie, Nick Drake, suffered from depression. (Of course, both James and Livingston Taylor have struggled with depression but have managed to have quite good careers anyway.)
Agree that most comments in the thread have an extremely low bar for insanity. Idiosyncratic artists (or people) need not be, and usually aren’t, crazy. Even one of the clearer examples, Roky Erickson, only sometimes wobbled over the line, as best I can tell. The rest of the time he was just… interesting… but smart and cool enough to deliberately mine his moments of crazy for art; “I think up demons for you.”
What’s undeniably insane there? Serial relationships? Waffling about sexuality? A shaved head? Sinéad is hardly unique in these aspects.
If someone is undeniably insane, that means that no one denies the person is insane. Therefore, if one person denies the insanity of the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince, then Prince’s insanity has been denied by one person, and therefore Prince is not undeniably insane. He may, in fact, be insane but he is no longer undeniably insane.