Most of us regular humans make mistakes on pretty small scales, like leaving our house keys at work or forgetting to order fries in the drive-through. When rock stars screw up, they do it in epic, spectacular ways, with consequences that are often catastrophic.
In this list, we look back at the long history of rock stars’ fuckups and call out the 50 biggest ones. To be clear, we limited this largely to professional decisions that impacted careers. Many rock stars have done horribly destructive things when it comes to drugs or their treatment of women, but that’s a whole other list. (To hear Rolling Stone podcast version of this list, press play above, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.)
David Geffen sues Neil Young for not sounding like Neil Young - 1983
When David Geffen signed Neil Young to a record deal in the early Eighties, he presumed he’d keep pumping out crowd-pleasing albums along the lines of Rust Never Sleeps and Comes a Time for the foreseeable future.
He started recording songs with a vocoder that distorted the sound of his own voice in an attempt to convey what it’s like communicating with a loved one that can’t comprehend language. The result was the Trans, an experimental LP that had more in common with Kraftwerk than anything Young had done up to that point in his career.
It sold very poorly, but an undeterred Young kept releasing genre albums like the rockabilly-inspired Everybody’s Rockin’ and the country collection Old Ways. This enraged Geffen to the point that he actually filed a lawsuit against Young for making “unrepresentative” music. It led to a ridiculous legal battle that Geffen later acknowledged was a heinous mistake. If you sign Neil Young, you just gotta let him be Neil Young.
Decca Records passes on signing the Beatles 1962
The decision by Decca records to turn down the Beatles after an audition in January 1962 has been written about so many times that it’s hard to separate myth from fact. Beatles manager Brian Epstein said he was told by Decca head Dick Rowe that “guitar groups are on their way out,” but Rowe insisted this was a complete fabrication. What’s known for sure is that the Beatles put down 15 songs on tape for Decca on Jan. 1, 1962 — and that Decca rejected the fledgling group. The label signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead. This was obviously an enormous blunder that cost Decca countless millions, but let’s be happy it happened, since it put the Beatles on a course that led them to George Martin and all the music they made together.
Bob Dylan releases ‘Self-Portrait’ - 1970
By the end of the Sixties, Bob Dylan was so annoyed by a media that treated him as the “voice of a generation” and a fan base that saw him as a messiah that he decided to do something drastic. “I said, ‘Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me,’” he told Rolling Stone in 1984. “I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to.” This led to Self Portrait, a double album of mainly cover songs he glooped up with strings, choirs, and horns. Greil Marcus spoke for many critics when he opened up his Rolling Stone review with the words, “What is this shit?” “The whole idea backfired,” Dylan said. “Because the album went out there, and the people said, ‘This ain’t what we want,’ and they got more resentful.”
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