Kevin DuBrow of Quiet Riot. In the “Behind the Music” show on the band, one of its members said they succeeded in doing the impossible: uniting the disparate heavy metal community by DuBrow getting them to all hate Quiet Riot.
Among musicians several generations ago Ethel Merman and Al Jolson were abrasive.
That is the exact opposite of my experience. I have seen Jojo perform maybe a dozen times and have chatted with him before or after the show at most of them. He’s a bit of a strange guy but I have found him to be nice, charming and to genuinely enjoy talking to fans. I have never seen him be anything close to a jerk at his shows.
John Lennon wasn’t a nice guy, for most of his life, by his own admission. He was, I am given to understand, getting better later on, but…that arc was truncated, rather forcefully, not long after his 40th birthday.
Even an introvert can learn to graciously smile, shake hands, and offer a fan thanks and well wishes. Being one myself I know this to be true – not to say that I have any “fans,” as such. You might not come off as an engaging personality, but you aren’t doomed to come off as a “real jerk” just because you’re an introvert.
Axl Rose is a complete dick. Back in the GnR days he took every one for granted from the fans to his band mates.
He would ( and still does) make people wait for him, he thought it was cool to have 15 000 people ‘fans’ wait two hours for him to come on and perform. If they were scheduled to play at 8PM they’d come on at 10PM. Then there would be no guarantee he would finish the set any percieved slight would end with him walking off stage or assualting some one in the audience because he didn’t like what they were doing.
The guy is a total narcissist, hid band mates walked on eggshells around him to get things done. He eventually forced the rest of them into him being the official member and owner of GnR turning the rest of the members into hired hands basically.
What they should of done is got together and kick him out of the band.
He also reduced royalties for Steven the drummer at the time to the lowest paid member because as he put it, its drumming any one can do it. He’s basically a spoiled little shit that throws a tantrum if he doesn’t get his way.
He also threatened to beat up Courtney Love backstage at an awards show.
The list goes on.
EODM recount their very short tour with them and why they told him to go pound sand.
Crosby left/was kicked out of the Byrds while they were working on The Notorious Byrd Brothers. When the LP came out it featured a photo of the remaining members looking out of the windows of a stable; looking out of the last window was a horse. Crosby felt that they had done that as a swipe at him. Roger McGuinn denied it, saying “If we’d wanted the horse to represent Crosby we’d have turned it around.”
I’ll second that. Jo Jo has always seemed gracious to the audience at the 4-5 shows of his that I’ve seen.
However, he does piss off many of his fans off because of his refusal to play old favorites at concerts. He never plays Roadrunner live, to my knowledge, and that’s just sad because it’s really one of the top 10 greatest rock ‘n’ roll songs of all time, IMHO.
I saw him in mid-May during his latest tour, and about halfway through the set he mentioned between songs that he’s obsessed with staying fresh, and said that’s the reason he doesn’t play the old favorites. And there was a bit of an apologetic tone to his voice.
But anyway, I was pleasantly surprised that in his concert before the latest one in May, he did actually play Pablo Picasso, albeit with a somewhat modified arrangement.
I realize that this post is entering hijack territory, so let me say that, um, Steve Tyler’s ex-wife sure thinks he’s a jerk.
Missed editing window, so Ill clarify. By ex-wife, I meant Bebe Buell, who is not an ex-wife, but an ex-girlfriend.
I think he blew hot and cold. Nowadays it seems fashionable to focus on his assholish side, probably in reaction to his being practically canonized in the years following his death.
Even Charlie Watts, who has always seemed to me to be quite the gentleman, said that “Brian Jones was not an easy person to like.”
Be that as it may, I’ve also read that Charlie and Bill felt sorry for Jones as Mick and Keith grew more openly contemptous of him (perhaps with good reason), and as it become increasingly obvious that he was circling the drain.
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Well, we’ve all seen the “woman from the audience” video, a wonderfully generous and warm Paul Simon episode.
Nevertheless, he’s carried a bad reputation for a very long time.
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Edit: has anyone mentioned Chuck Berry yet?
Oh, good one. And if there’s anyone I would have expected from his music to be a cheerful and charming guy…!
John Bonham’s visits to LA in the early 70s were the closest thing to terrorism that the rock scene there had seen since Charles Manson. A bully and rapist by many accounts; you can’t read a history of the LA rock scene without coming upon one or more “Bonzo the Terrible” stories.
As I have heard it, Eddie was only an asshole when drunk. When he was sober he was a good guy.
I have heard that drunk or sober, Michael Anthony was a good guy.
Van Morrison was mentioned by the OP, and a coworker of mine saw him live a couple of years ago and said he was such a jerk it changed how she felt about him as an artist. She didn’t meet him or anything, she said he was just being a huge jerk on stage and kept stopping to yell at the band or complain about things. She said at one point he halted the show to insist that the backup singers be moved to a different part of the stage, for no apparent reason.
I’m surprised I’m the first to mention Morrissey. He’s got a grating, gripey, smug, pretentious thing going, and the term “unpleasant” always seems to apply. Not “bad” or “stupid” or “evil”…just “unpleasant.”
I can’t believe nobody men… never mind.
How about Ike Turner and Phil Spector? Their records speak for themselves.
This one kind of surprised me, so I did some Googling. There doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence that Jackson Browne beat Darryl Hannah, and some reasonably convincing arguments that he didn’t, at least on the occasion that the police were called. (The tl;dr version of the argument is that LA has a zero tolerance policy towards domestic abuse from which celebrities are not exempt, and JB was never charged or even investigated.)
Do you have any proof that this really took place, or is this just one of those things that “everyone knows”?
A friend of mine frequents a message board for acoustic guitarists. Some time ago, a few people started harping about Jackson having beaten Darryl, and none other than David Lindley himself came aboard to rather angrily debunk the stories.
As I remember what my friend told me, one of Lindley’s points was that Browne is not a physically unimposing person, while Ms. Hannah was at that time in superb athletic shape and well-trained in martial arts. Had Browne ever thrown a punch at her, “she would have kicked his ass.”
Or so my friend said David said.
Disclosure: I’m a huge fan of Lindley’s but I have no interest whatever in Jackson Browne’s music or personal life.
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Another one:
Although I have enormous respect for what he did musically, I would never have wanted to be in a room with Frank Zappa. Arrogant and egotistical beyond all compute.
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