Even the greatest artists screw up sometimes. Here are the most iconic duds from Dylan, the Stones and more
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Hot streaks can’t last forever. And if you’re a successful recording artist with a long career, the moment inevitably comes when fans and critics feel let down by a new album. This can be because a grand experiment didn’t pay off like you hoped, tastes shifted rapidly and you’re suddenly dismissed as a relic from the past, you made something so bold and innovative that its genius won’t be appreciated for years to come, or you simply dropped a dud due to some combination of physical and creative exhaustion, the unbearable stress of trying to top yourself, and perhaps the influence of certain chemical substances.
For truly great artists, a disappointing album can be merely a tiny speed bump on the road of a long, successful career. Bob Dylan has many albums one could safely call “disappointing,” and they did little but make the follow-ups all the more impressive and interesting. We could say the same for David Bowie, Madonna, Jay-Z, Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones, and other acts with careers that span several generations.
We have assembled a list of the 50 most disappointing albums in musical history. Some major caveats need to be made before various stan armies start making plans to firebomb our offices or unleash SWAT teams on our homes. We absolutely love some of these albums. An album can be seen as disappointing in the moment it came out, and be forever reappraised afterward. This largely has to do with timing and where the critical consensus is at a given moment. And an album that’s seen as a B+/A- is still disappointing if it follows a bunch of A/A+ albums.
Also, a disappointing album for a titanically talented act like Radiohead or U2 would be seen as a masterpiece if almost anyone else had released it. (We agonized over putting The King of Limbs and Songs of Innocence on here, but ultimately included them.) To see the other 48 albums on the list, keep scrolling. (And if you’re going to SWAT our houses for including your favorite act here, can you at least send them in the daytime? It’s a drag when they storm in during the dead of night. Also, The King of Limbs is friggin’ great. Keep your shit together, Radiohead army.)
2019
Chance the Rapper was still a high school student when he dropped his first mixtape in 2011. Before he knew it, he’d amassed over a half million downloads, a guest appearance on a Childish Gambino track, and a reputation as the most promising young rapper on the Chicago scene. His popularity grew exponentially over the next few years as he toured across the country and continued to drop acclaimed mixtapes like 2013’s Acid Rap and 2016’s Coloring Book. By 2017, he was able to headline Lollapalooza in front of 100,000 screaming fans in Chicago’s Grant Park, even though he had yet to release a single legit album. That moment finally came in June 2019, when he put out The Big Day, featuring guest appearances by John Legend, Death Cab for Cutie, Megan Thee Stallion, and Gucci Mane. The songs center around his romance with new wife Kristen Corley. After seven years of buildup, many critics were less than impressed. “It’s exultant, like his 2016 gospel-rap opus Coloring Book,” wrote Rolling Stone‘s Danny Schwartz in a three-star review, “but narrower in emotional scope.” We’re now over five years past the Big Day, and he’s yet to release his second record. He instead made the wise choice to return to one-off singles.
2011
Put down your pitchforks. Everybody calm down. We’re not suggesting The King of Limbs is anything short of a sensational record. We named it the fifth best album of 2011 as the year was wrapping up, and we stand by that all these years later. But it followed The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesia, Hail to the Thief, and In Rainbows. It’s one of the best 12-year runs in rock history, maybe even the very best one. Because of that, expectations for The King of Limbs were sky high. And standout tracks “Lotus Flower,” “Separator,” and “Bloom” did indeed deliver, but there’s simply too many tunes like “Feral” and “Morning Mr. Magpie” that underwhelm. In 2017, producer Nigel Godrich told us how the album came into being. “I was like, ‘OK, let’s do an experiment for two weeks where everyone has a turntable instead of playing the guitar or drums or whatever,’” he said. “’And that two-week experiment ended up being fucking six months. And that’s that record, the whole story of all of it.” It was a bold move, but it simply didn’t pay off quite like everyone hoped.
1971
Imagine you’re a Paul McCartney fan in December 1971. Over the past two years, you’ve been given Abbey Road, Let It Be, McCartney, and Ram. They’re all stellar albums, to put it mildly, and wildly unique. You hear he’s formed a new band called Wings. It’s his first group since the Beatles. You then head to the record store and pick up Wild Life. “Disappointment” doesn’t even begin to describe the experience of most fans in such a position. Recorded over just a few days in the summer of 1971, the album is a mixture of half-baked originals (“Dear Friend,” “Tomorrow”), a pointless cover (“Love Is Strange”), and reprises of songs (“Mumbo,” “Bip Bop”) that didn’t work the first time around, let alone the second. “McCartney is coming to terms with his own fluff — the overproduction sounds less cluttered this time — but it’s still fluff,” wrote Robert Christgau, “and not even goosedown. Maybe the thrill of leading his very own band has him distracted.” It didn’t take Wings long to figure out their strengths and give the world Band on the Run, but they got off to an extremely shaky start on Wild Life.
1987
When LL Cool J exploded onto the scene in 1985 with his debut LP, Radio, he had Rick Rubin behind the mixing desk, virtually no rappers on the scene who could compete with him, and incandescently great songs like “Rock the Bells,” “I Can’t Live Without My Radio,” and “You’ll Rock.” When he came back in 1987 with Bigger and Deffer, Rubin was AWOL, he was suddenly up against Public Enemy and Eric B. and Rakim, and he had few true standout songs besides “I’m Bad” and “I Need Love.” “Bigger and Deffer collapses under the sophomore strain,” wrote Mac Randall in the Rolling Stone Album Guide. “Busier and dumber might be closer to the truth.” Hip-hop careers were painfully short in these early days, and it briefly seemed like LL Cool J might join the likes of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and the Fat Boys on the sidelines, but his story was just getting started.
1997
Looking back all these years later, it’s clear that nothing Oasis released after (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? would do anything but disappoint masses of people. The hype reached such insane proportions by 1996 that people were pegging the Brit pop band as the new Beatles. Throw in millions of dollars, brutal infighting, and mountains of cocaine, and Be Here Now was inevitable. The reviews were initially fairly positive (sort of like Roger Ebert giving Star Wars: The Phantom Menace four stars), but the singles didn’t take off, copies started piling up in used record stores, and the sense grew that this was no masterpiece. In truth, “Stand by Me,” “D’You Know What I Mean?,” and “All Around the World” are great tunes, but there’s a lot of bloat. Most of the songs are simply too long, and they could have easily cut five or six of them. Meanwhile, Radiohead dropped a new album called OK Computer that same summer. The torch had been passed.
1990
As the title of his album suggests, George Michael had a bit of a chip on his shoulder when he released his follow-up to Faith. He’d been a teen idol for the greater part of a decade at this point, and he yearned to be taken seriously as an adult artist. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life singing “Monkey.” (In fact, he never sang it again after 1989.) To make this point as clear as possible, the video for “Freedom! ’90” shows his leather jacket, jukebox, and acoustic guitar from the Faith era explode into a ball of fire. Leadoff single “Praying for Time” shot to Number One out of habit, but quickly fell off the chart. “Freedom! ’90” was the only other song on the album to make an impact. Before the George Michael fan community goes insane on us here, let’s make clear that Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 isn’t a bad record. It’s just not the one most of his fans wanted at that moment. That’s why Faith sold 17 million more copies, and why Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 2 never happened.
1977
Aerosmith weren’t exactly casual drug users during their early days, but music still came first when they were crafting their first four albums. That changed in 1977 when work began on Draw the Line. “Everyone was gacked to the nines,” singer Steven Tyler said on the band’s Behind the Music episode. “[We were] as stoned as you could be. It was truly days full of night. It was just a matter of time before we all killed ourselves.” They somehow crafted two strong songs for Draw the Line — the title track and “Kings and Queens” — but the rest are just coke-fueled disasters. “Draw the Line is a truly horrendous record, chaotic to the point of malfunction and with an almost impenetrably dense sound adding to the confusion,” Rolling Stone’s Billy Altman wrote in a brutally negative review of the album. “It shows that these guys are not evil con men selling stolen or leftover goods to the youth of the nation. If they were, this record would have been a lot better than it is, since almost anyone can repeat a formula. Instead, Aerosmith sounds like a band just starting out — very much, in fact, like amateurs.” (For the record, this is wildly harsh, and Aerosmith would go on to release far worse records in the years to come. This is just the first time it was a genuine surprise that they were less than brilliant.)
2016
It may be slightly hard to remember now, but there was a time before he destroyed his name by going “death con 3 on Jewish people” when a new Kanye West record was a source of tremendous excitement. His run from The College Dropout in 2004 to Yeezus in 2013 represents the high water mark for hip-hop this century. And even though Yeezus was a step down from the pinnacle of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, no West album could be called a genuine disappointment until 2016’s The Life of Pablo. High points like “Ultralight Beam” and “Father Stretch My Hands” are up there with some of his best work, and “Real Friends” is a rare look at his vulnerable side (“When was the last time I remembered a birthday?/When was the last time I wasn’t in a hurry?”), but there’s simply too many undercooked tracks that don’t stand up to repeat listens. “It’s a labored-over opus that wishes it were a mixtape, trying hard to curate the vibe of a sprawling mess,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield, “and that’s because it’s made by an artist who feels like a mess and doesn’t care to hide it.” West would release significantly worse albums in the years to come, but none came with the sting of disappointment quite like The Life of Pablo.
2014
Let’s get something very important out of the way here: Songs of Innocence didn’t deserve even a tiny amount of the hate and mockery it absorbed back in 2014 when U2 made the inexplicably dunderhead decision to upload it for free to every iPhone on the planet. Had single “Every Breaking Wave” come out in 1992, it could have been a big hit. “Song for Someone” is a beautiful love song to Bono’s wife, and “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” is a heartfelt ode to the punk icon. And even if they made something as perfect as Achtung Baby or The Joshua Tree in 2014, many people would still have reacted with fury to the iPhone stunt. U2 can still play stadiums whenever they tour, but most young people have little use for them. The band’s grandiosity just turns them off. And unfortunately, Songs of Innocence just doesn’t come near the highs of U2’s best work. It was the wrong album at the wrong time, and it damaged their brand in huge ways, fairly or not. (We feel it was mostly unfair.) And it disappointed just about everyone besides the most faithful members of the U2 cult.
1989
Remember Terence Trent D’Arby? If not, take a listen to his singles “Wishing Well” and “Sign Your Name” from his debut LP, Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby, and you’ll be transported to 1987, when it briefly looked like D’Arby was a new supernova of talent, on par with Prince. The instant success went to his head in absurd ways, and he started comparing himself to the Beatles in the press. “There are people who make me feel like I’m the most arrogant person to ever walk the face of the planet earth because I’m passionate,” he told Rolling Stone. “When I feel things, I feel them passionately. And, for better or worse, what makes me the artist that I am — and the artist that I want to be — is that passion.” That passion didn’t serve him well when he entered the studio to craft his follow-up, Neither Fish nor Flesh. None of the singles connected, it peaked at Number 61 on the Billboard 200, and D’Arby’s brief moment of fame was over. “Unbeknownst to me, even then were forces, dark working to alter my blessed situation,” the artist, who now goes by the name Sananda Francesco Maitreya, wrote on his website. “They would succeed.This album is the one, of necessity, closest to my heart. This was my ‘fatwa’ project. This is the one where Orpheus descended into the Underground, and began his deepest meditation.”
2006
Having high expectations for a new Meat Loaf album in 2006 might have seemed insane, but it was equally insane to be excited for a new Meat Loaf album in 1993, when he dropped Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell, and that was one of the best comeback albums in rock history. The initial buzz around Bat III was that Meat was once again working with Bat I and Bat II mastermind Jim Steinman. But it turned out Meat and Steinman were at legal odds over the Bat Out of Hell trademark. Steinman was also dealing with significant health issues at the time. This meant that Meat had to comb through the Steinman back catalog and pick everything from “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” to “In the Land of the Pig, the Butcher Is King,” which was written for a Batman musical that never got off the ground. The end result is a deeply unsatisfying effort unworthy of the Bat Out of Hell name.
1990
Run-D.M.C. were largely untouchable in the Eighties as they brought rap music from the streets of New York City to suburban households all across America thanks to MTV and hits like “It’s Tricky,” “King of Rock,” “My Adidas,” and “Walk This Way.” Their 1988 LP, Tougher Than Leather, was a clear comedown from the heights of 1986’s Raising Hell since new groups like Public Enemy had suddenly entered the scene, and Run-D.M.C. didn’t quite know how to react. But they didn’t release a genuine disappointment until 1990 when they attempted New Jack Swing with grittier, N.W.A-inspired lyrics that simply didn’t feel genuine coming from the formerly squeaky-clean trio. “Gratuitous obscenities abound on the record, and they sure don’t make Run-D.M.C.’s new tales of street violence and urban injustice any more convincing,” Rolling Stone’s Mark Coleman wrote in a two-star review. “Brandishing guns and bantering with racist cops, Run and D.M.C. may well be telling it like it is in 1990. But on most of Back From Hell they sound like actors playing out roles rather than artists dramatizing their own lives.”
1989
When the Sugarcubes emerged in 1988 with their debut LP, Life’s Too Good, they seemed like visitors from another planet to most Americans. The term “Icelandic alternative rock” was gibberish at a time when Poison, Paula Abdul, Phil Collins, and Steve Winwood ruled the airwaves. But the quirky six-piece led by future solo star Björk was so undeniable they wound up with a slot on Saturday Night Live, and some of the best reviews of the year. Just a year later, however, they flopped with the release of Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week! Singer Einar Örn Benediktsson was under the impression fans wanted to hear a lot more of him, and a lot less of Björk. (They didn’t.) There also wasn’t a single song that could compare to the majesty of “Birthday” from the first album. They carried on for one more album in 1992 until the inevitable happened and Björk went solo, never to look back.
1984
After the huge success of “Whip It” in 1980, Devo could have scaled up and become an arena band. They just needed a few more mainstream hits that could work on MTV. Instead, they leaned heavily into weirdness and saw their audience shrink considerably. But the weirdness was largely quite excellent on 1981’s New Traditionalists and 1982’s Oh, No! It’s Devo. The same cannot be said of 1984’s Shout, where they put their guitars aside, broke out a new Fairlight synthesizer and a drum machine, and crafted a devastatingly boring record that wraps up with a wildly unnecessary remake of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Are You Experienced.” Even today, Devo’s Jerry Casale says the record is “too painful to talk about.” And the reviews were uniformly negative. “While the herky-jerky push-and-pull between homemade electronics and cheap guitars was a large part of what made Devo’s first few albums so exciting,” wrote AllMusic’s Mark Deming, “Shout is so slick and glossy one could fry an egg on its surfaces, and that isn’t a good thing.”
1990
Against all odds, considering the mountains of cocaine they consumed and the civil wars they fought, Fleetwood Mac had a pretty good run in the Eighties. But they got the Nineties off to a horrid start with 1990’s Behind the Mask, the first album they made after Lindsey Buckingham left the band just before the Tango in the Night tour. Rick Vito and Billy Burnette were able to somewhat fill the void left behind on the road, but the studio was a very different story. The combined weight of their songwriting chops wasn’t equal to a single Buckingham. There isn’t a single song here that can stand up to “Big Love,” “Everywhere,” “Little Lies,” or “Gypsy.” There are a handful of originals by Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie, most notably “Save Me” and “Skies the Limit,” but it’s likely none of them would have gotten a nod of approval from Buckingham. His mere presence elevated everyone’s game. They were lost without him.
2008
The first sign of trouble came when word hit that Panic! at the Disco were dropping the exclamation mark. The Las Vegas emo group had just made one album at this point, 2005’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, and they were already looking for ways to shed their past and mature. The second worrisome sign came when the band started saying this record was inspired by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and psychedelic bands from the Sixties. In other words, they didn’t want to write anything remotely like their breakthrough hit, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies.” A group can get weird on their fourth or fifth record once they’ve already established a large, devoted audience. You can’t do that on album two. Leadoff single “Nine in the Afternoon” stalled out at Number 51 on the Hot 100, and the others didn’t even chart. By the time the dust settled, guitarist Ryan Ross and bassist Jon Walker left the band. The remaining members brought the exclamation mark back for the next album. Dropping it along with their signature sound was a pretty odd choice.
1976
Technical Ecstasy is far from Black Sabbath’s worst album. (That one would arrive two decades later when the fried remnants of the band united with Body Count guitarist Ernie C for Forbidden.) And it isn’t even the worst one of the original Ozzy Osbourne era. (That’s 1978’s turgid Never Say Die!) But it’s the first one where it was clear that the metal gods who gave the world masterpieces like Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality, and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in remarkably short order were running out of ideas and unable to adapt to a shifting musical climate. They were also snorting mountains of cocaine, distracted by legal and financial concerns, and unable to see that schmaltzy ballads “It’s Alright” and “She’s Gone” weren’t going to win over new fans enthralled by upstart punk groups like the Clash and the Sex Pistols. To get a sense of where it all went wrong, listen to “Rock and Roll Doctor,” which sounds like a lost Kiss song. “Gotta see my rock and roll doctor,” Osbourne sings. “I gotta see him, see him today/He’s gonna blow me away.” The album ends on a strong note with “Dirty Women,” but the rest is just filler that would never have made the cut for a Black Sabbath record just a couple of years earlier.
1994
The very instant that Public Enemy hit the scene in 1987, every rap group that came before them seemed hopelessly passé. And nobody could top them for the next few years as they dropped It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet. But they finally had real competition on their hands when N.W.A arrived, and a major self-inflicted wound when Professor Griff went public with antisemitic views that got him ejected from the group. They were slightly past their prime in 1991 when Apocalypse 91 … The Enemy Strikes Black came out, but it was still an extraordinary effort. They didn’t show any real decline until 1994 when Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age arrived, and Chuck D used it as a platform to blast gangsta rap. The critics weren’t impressed. “Muse Sick is not only a bad PE record but a bad hip-hop record — evidence that Chuck either quit early, abandoning the album a few evolutions short of its completion, or has lost his ear altogether,” Touré wrote in an infamously negative review in Rolling Stone. “And because Chuck, a man whose political power has always been a function of his aesthetic power, is the conscience of hip-hop, the failure of this album will cost him more than sales.”
1977
To be fair, anything Peter Frampton released after Frampton Comes Alive! was going to be seen as a disappointment. The 1976 concert album was one of the biggest records of the Seventies, and even Frampton himself grew tired of the songs. “I was dying to hear myself on the radio,” he told Rolling Stone in 2019, “and then it got to the point where I thought, ‘I wish they wouldn’t play me so much.’” As the mania began to subside, he headed into the studio to make a proper album. And even though the title track hit Number Two on the Billboard Hot 100, the rest of the album didn’t connect like Frampton Comes Alive! Making matters worse, he gave his critics plenty of ammo when he posed shirtless. Looking back in 2019, Frampton said he had only himself to blame. “[I’m In You] could have been a lot better had I been in a better mental state at that point,” he said, “but my head exploded just before we went in the studio.”
2010
In 2007, college buddies Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser dropped their psychedelic synth-pop opus Oracular Spectacular, featuring timeless songs like “Kids,” “Time to Pretend,” and “Electric Feel.” And for a minute, it felt like the musical gods had given us a new Depeche Mode. But instead of merely repeating the formula for the second MGMT album, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser turned away from accessible hooks and anything that resembled a single, doubled down on their weirdness, and made an art-rock album. “MGMT aren’t hitting the self-destruct button here,” wrote Pitchfork’s Scott Plagenhoef, “but the best-case scenario is that a cult, happy to shed the carpetbagger fans of OS, are willing to follow these guys around from idea to idea.” That’s exactly what happened, which means that Congratulations was probably the right move in the long run. It just caused them a lot of pain in the short run.
1995
In 1994, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Dave Navarro faced two problems that were the exact inverse of each other. He was a guitarist without a band after the dissolution of Jane’s Addiction. And they were a band without a guitarist after John Frusciante peaced out during the tour for their breakthrough album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. On paper, this was an alt-rock supergroup. But in reality, they had to live up to the legend of both bands. Anthony Kiedis was also deep in the throes of drug addictions, and sessions stretched out for months and months. A few standout songs did emerge like “Aeroplane,” but nothing that will make fans forget “Under the Bridge” or “Mountain Song.” “Navarro’s metallic guitar shredding should have added some weight to the Chili Peppers’ punk-inflected heavy-guitar funk, but tends to make it plodding,” wrote AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine. “One Hot Minute is as musically ambitious as Blood Sugar Sex Magik, but is even more unfocused, which means it provides the fewest thrills of any of the group’s albums.” For their next album, Californication, Fruscianate returned to the fold, and the entire One Hot Minute era has since been mercifully memory-holed.
1983
How do you follow up a run of albums like The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall? If you’re Pink Floyd leader Roger Waters, you fire keyboardist Richard Wright, insist on writing every song completely by yourself, even if David Gilmour helped you write a little tune called “Comfortably Numb” on the last record, and assemble yet another concept album about the evils of war and the loss of your father. And if this doesn’t piss off the band enough, you credit it as “a requiem for the post-war dream by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd,” basically demoting them all to the status of backing band. Now, all of this would be somewhat tolerable if the album stood up to his best work. But beyond a few songs like “The Gunner’s Dream,” it doesn’t come close. It just sounds like a bunch of outtakes from The Wall strung together.
1971
The Band were in a rough place when work started on Cahoots in 1971. Robbie Robertson was completely drained of new song ideas after pounding out Music From Big Pink, The Band, and Stage Fright in quick succession between 1968 and 1970, and many of his bandmates were quickly descending into drug addictions that would hobble their productivity for years to come. “Life is a Carnival” kicks the album off with a gem, and their spin on Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” shows that nobody was better at interpreting his music. But it takes a deep dive after that with misfires like “Shoot Out in Chinatown,” “Last of the Blacksmiths,” and “Volcano” that never would have made the cut on their prior albums. Reviews were very mixed, and they wouldn’t release another album of new material for four years.
1995
It’s tempting to believe that Van Halen didn’t succumb to mediocrity until Sammy Hagar left and Gary Cherone took over as lead singer. But that narrative requires erasing their 1995 LP, Balance, from history. Unfortunately, the deeply disappointing followup to 1991’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge does indeed exist. There’s nothing here that even remotely compares to the highs of “Poundcake” and “Right Now” from the prior album. We instead get the twin cheeseball love songs “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You” and “Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do)” along with “Amsterdam,” a tribute to the city where Hagar is free to openly smoke weed. (Sample lyric: “Got a pocket full of money/Got me a long night ahead/Quick stop by the Bulldog/Score me some Panama Red.”) And the album kicks off with actual monk chants. The whole thing is just all over the place, and sad evidence that Eddie Van Halen was out of ideas.
1974
Rod Stewart has released so much shoddy work over the years that it’s easy to forget his first four solo albums (An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down, Gasoline Alley, Every Picture Tells a Story, Never a Dull Moment) were all undeniably brilliant. And when you factor in his work in the Faces at the same exact time, it was safe to presume any new Rod release you picked up at the record store was going to rise to the level of what came before. That expectation ended forever with the release of Smiler in 1974. With the lone exceptions of a tender cover of Bob Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” and a rollicking rendition of “Sweet Little Rock and Roller,” nothing works on Smiler. The nadir is a cover of the Elton John super deep cut “Let Me Be Your Car” that is just as dumb as it sounds. Let’s not even talk about his decision to rework Carole King’s “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman” as “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Man.” Stewart would release far worse albums than Smiler throughout his long career, but never one as wildly disappointing.
1974
It’s hard to blame George Harrison for not exactly being at the top of his game on 1974’s Dark Horse. He was suffering from laryngitis, a growing addiction to cocaine and booze, and he had a very narrow time frame to finish the album before the start of his ill-fated inaugural solo tour. There was also the tiny matter that his best friend, Eric Clapton, had just run off with his wife, Pattie Boyd, after telling the world he couldn’t live without her on a little song called “Layla.” He attempted to poke fun at the situation by reworking “Bye Bye Love” at the session while Clapton and Boyd looked on (“I hope she’s happy/Old Clapper too”), but the result is just a cringe-fest. Things don’t get much better on woefully undercooked songs like “So Sad,” “Far East Man,” and “Ding Dong, Ding Dong.” This all came just a year after the brilliance of Living in the Material World, and it kicked off a long period of decline for Harrison that didn’t really pick up until Jeff Lynne entered his life over a decade later.
1986
After a decade in the musical wilderness, John Fogerty reemerged with Centerfield in 1985 and won over a new generation of fans thanks to the baseball-themed title track and the Creedence-y “The Old Man Down the Road.” Just one year later, he lost many of those fans when he dropped Eye of the Zombie. The production screams mid-Eighties, and there isn’t a single memorable song or hook on the entire thing. “Eye of the Zombie bears every mark of being a rush job from this notorious rock & roll perfectionist,” Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote for AllMusic. “Track for track, it’s a misfire of staggering proportions.” Fogerty promoted the album with a tour where he didn’t do a single CCR song, meaning fans had to sit through Eye of the Zombie duds like “Soda Pop” and “Wasn’t That a Woman” all night. The whole project was a debacle that caused Fogerty to take another complete decade off from the business of making records.
1996
Sometime in early 1996, Michael Nesmith heard the Friends theme song and had a brainstorm. “He had the idea it sounded exactly like Headquarters,” Peter Tork told Rolling Stone in 2016. “He just caught a charge and wanted to see it through, so he asked me and Micky [Dolenz] to come jam with him. It was the first time we’d played together like that since 1969.” The trio eventually pulled Davy Jones into the mix and recorded Justus. As the title suggests, everything on the album was created by just the four members of the Monkees. Fans were thrilled with the idea of hearing a Headquarters for the Nineties. Sadly, they simply didn’t have great songs like they did back then. The album was a complete dud, and Nesmith lost interest in the project after a quickie U.K. tour. It would be another 20 years before he decided to participate in another Monkees record, which wound up being the brilliant Good Times! It erased the unfortunate memory of Justus.
1989
It seemed like a pairing that couldn’t fail. This was the greatest songwriter of his generation backed by one of the most beloved bands in American history, just as they were riding a massive comeback wave thanks to their unexpected hit “Touch of Grey.” But Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead simply didn’t gel when they toured together in 1987. This was Bob at the absolute nadir of his career, and playing a painfully plodding, nine-minute version of “Joey” with the Dead wasn’t going to fix anything. Dylanologists insist the tour was slightly better than the seven songs selected for this package, which is a relief. It’s hard to imagine anything worse. “Despite the presence of the Dead, the album is an all-too-typical late-Eighties Dylan album,” Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote in a review, “fascinating for the expectations it raises and frustrating in the ways it keeps missing the mark.”
1994
The Stone Roses are one of the great “what if” stories in rock history. What if the U.K. alt-rock quartet toured America hard after the release of their flawless 1989 self-titled debut instead of completely ignoring it? What if they kept their egos in check, laid off the drugs, and managed to remain friends? What if they didn’t wait five-and-a-half years to release their second album? What if that album was even a quarter as strong as their first record? They could have been just as big as Oasis or even Radiohead had they stayed on their original path and kept writing signs on par with “I Am the Resurrection” or “I Wanna Be Adored.” Instead, they were cocky enough to name their second LP “Second Coming” as if they were literally Jesus. By the time it hit, Brit pop was in full swing, and they didn’t have a single song on the album strong enough to make anyone put down their Blur or Oasis albums and give it more than a single listen. They broke up not long afterward.
1986
In the three-year gap between Frontiers and Raised on Radio, Journey frontman Steve Perry became a solo star thanks to “Oh, Sherrie” and “Foolish Heart.” He used his newfound fame to push bassist Ross Valory and drummer Steve Smith out of the band. He wanted to modernize their sound by bringing in session pros, but the remaining trio simply didn’t have songs like “Faithfully” or “Open Arms” ready to go. Leadoff single “Be Good to Yourself” had some of the old Journey magic, and “It Could Have Been You” is a hidden gem, but the rest of the album falls fairly flat. Perry’s heart simply wasn’t in music anymore, Journey or otherwise, and he largely vanished from the scene in the decade that followed.
1976
Patti Smith’s 1975 debut LP, Horses, was a triumph by every possible measurement besides commercial success. It didn’t generate anything resembling a mainstream hit, and it stalled out at Number 47 on the Billboard 200 despite rapturous reviews and its massive influence in the rock world. For the follow-up, Smith (and her label) wanted a hit. That’s why she picked Aerosmith/Cheap Trick producer Jack Douglas to oversee the sessions. But it’s simply not in her blood to write a song like “I Want You to Want Me” or “Walk This Way.” That’s why she gave Douglas avant-garde works like the 10-minute title track, which never goes near the heights of “Land,” its companion song on Horses. “Pissing in a River” is one of the best songs in Smith’s catalog, but the rest of the album is underwhelming in the extreme. “Smith seems to lack the direction necessary to live up to her own best ideas — the song-poem structure of the first album wasn’t completely effective, but here there’s no structure at all,” Dave Marsh wrote in Rolling Stone. “Even her lyric writing, the most captivating and polished part of her work, seems depersonalized — there’s nothing as moving as ‘Redondo Beach’ or ‘Kimberly’ on this album. And if there were, one would hardly be able to hear it in Jack Douglas’ overpowering mix.”
1995
Duran Duran were as dead as disco when the Nineties started, but they rocketed back to relevance in 1993 thanks to “Ordinary World” and “Come Undone” from 1993’s The Wedding Album. This was a moment to head back into the studio and craft another album of originals and capitalize on the unexpected momentum. It was not a moment to record a covers album where everything from Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” and Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives” to Public Enemy’s “911 Is a Joke” and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “White Lines” received the Duran Duran treatment. Nobody wanted to hear Duran Duran try their hand at hip-hop. The project was just woefully misguided from beginning to end, and it prematurely ended their comeback.
1973
Long before reunions of major rock were commonplace, the original Byrds came back together to see if they could recapture the magic of the early days. It was 1973 and they’d all gone in dramatically different directions in the seven years since they’d all been together, with only David Crosby becoming a genuine superstar thanks to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Roger McGuinn, meanwhile, had led many lineups of the Byrds, and he was ready to bring the saga back to where it started. This all made sense on paper, but all five of them were still focused relentlessly on their solo work and other outside projects. The album was slapped together over the course of just a few weeks, and most everyone later admitted they held back their best songs. The result is a meandering album spotlighted by a couple of decent Neil Young covers (“Cowgirl in the Sand,” “See the Sky About to Rain”), one Joni Mitchell song (“For Free”), and a smattering of originals that didn’t make anyone forget about “Eight Miles High” or “So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star.” “I am obliged to comment on the most disappointing and one of the dullest albums of the year, Byrds,” Jon Landau wrote in a brutal Rolling Stone pan. “At their best, they were once my favorite white American rock & roll band, but not only isn’t this their best — it is barely them.”
1987
As the title suggests, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were burned out by 1987. They’d been recording and touring for about a dozen years straight by this point, and were in desperate need of a break. But they trudged back into the studio without longtime producer Jimmy Iovine and churned out this sub-par album. Leadoff single “Jammin’ Me” is a strong effort (despite the insanely outdated references to Vanessa Redgrave and Joe Piscopo) co-written by Bob Dylan, but the album falls off a cliff after that. Songs like “All Mixed Up” and “Runaway Trains” aren’t horrid, but they simply don’t meet Petty’s usual standards. And none of them are helped by cheeseball late-Eighties production. Very few of these songs besides “Jammin’ Me” were ever played live again after the Eighties, and none of them appeared on 1993’s Greatest Hits. The album wasn’t a total loss, though. It persuaded Petty to make a big change the next time out. The result was Full Moon Fever, the most successful album of his long career.
1978
Elton John’s undisputed golden period ran from 1970’s Elton John to 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. (One could argue there’s a fair number of weak tracks on 1974’s Caribou, but it’s still a strong album overall.) There was a clear dip in quality on 1975’s Blue Moves and 1976’s Rock of the Westies, but the bottom didn’t fall out until A Single Man in 1978. It’s the first album without lyricist Bernie Taupin. And with all apologies to John’s new collaborator Gary Osborne, he’s no Bernie. He doesn’t even come close. Making matters worse, John was in a deep depression and hopelessly addicted to cocaine. The songs suffered greatly as a result, with the lone exception being the shimmering instrumental “Song for Guy.” The rest is just instantly forgettable fluff. “A Single Man demonstrates just how thin the line really is between disposable radio pop and elevator music,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden in a vicious pan, “and suggests that for all of Elton John’s public whining about not being taken seriously, the only thing that’s ever mattered to him is that the hits keep coming. May they not.”
1980
Between the first Buffalo Springfield record in 1967 and Rust Never Sleeps in 1979, Neil Young had one of the greatest runs of sustained brilliance in the history of rock. And then the Eighties came. It’s a bit unfair to razz Young over his output at the start of the decade, considering the vast majority of his time was spent caring for his son Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy. That explains why he slapped Hawks & Doves together in a matter of days, and relied heavily on Seventies outtakes. It’s those songs (“Little Wing,” “Captain Kennedy,” “This Old Homestead,” “Lost in Space”) that prevent Hawks & Doves from being a total fiasco. But the originals on side two are not only lifeless, they’re also oddly conservative and jingoistic, reflecting his brief support of Ronald Reagan. The album hit days before the 1980 election, and it was forgotten almost instantly.
1982
If Blondie broke up in 1981 instead of 1982, they would have left behind an absolutely pristine catalog. But they pushed forward that one extra year and gave the world The Hunter out of contractual obligation. It’s clear from the start that their heart isn’t into this overproduced mess of a record. “Island of Lost Souls” is a pathetic attempt to craft another “The Tide Is High,” and their Beatles tribute “English Boys” is simply an embarrassment. “The austere, foreboding tone of this record suggests that Blondie has forgotten how to have a good time, and how to make one,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Parke Puterbaugh. “The Hunter is an album of icy, otherworldly moods for moderns, a looking glass trained upon our own peculiar, self-consuming social mores. At the least, it’ll have you wondering just how far an erstwhile New Wave pop group can row itself away from the mainstream before it finds itself out of the current altogether.”
1983
AC/DC had a lot of reasons to be cocky in 1983. They’d not only survived the death of frontman Bon Scott in 1980, but they’d somehow grown even more popular thanks to new vocalist Brian Johnson. His first two albums at the helm were the mega-sellers Back in Black and For Those About to Rock (We Salute You), which were both produced by Mutt Lange. For the third Johnson album, they ditched Lange and decided to produce it themselves. This may have worked if they had another set of strong songs, but they simply did not. They were also dealing with guitarist Malcolm Young’s growing drinking problem and conflicts with drummer Phil Rudd, who was fired before the LP was finished. The result of this is a deeply uneven album. “AC/DC’s music has always been simple, but here it sounds underdeveloped and unmemorable,” wrote AllMusic’s Steve Huey. “As perhaps indicated by the record’s idiotic original title, the utterly generic I Like to Rock, AC/DC seemed to be running out of ideas at an alarming rate.”
1972
The Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records or make it out of the club scene, but their four albums with Lou Reed at the helm are various shades of perfect. And when he reemerged after a brief wilderness period with his solo debut in 1972, fans had every reason to expect something brilliant. But what they got was a bunch of warmed-over Velvet Underground outtakes where Reed was inexplicably joined by Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman of Yes along with Elton John guitarist Caleb Quaye. These are very talented musicians in their own right, but ludicrously wrong for this particular assignment. When you toss in the LP’s horrid production choices, you get an album that even hardcore Reed aficionados don’t bother to defend. Thankfully, VU superfan David Bowie entered the picture shortly after this album flopped and helped him craft Transformer. It’s basically considered his first solo album at this point. He’s been given a mulligan for the actual debut.
2001
At the height of the teen-pop era, when acts like ‘NSync and Backstreet Boys were crafting dance-pop songs straight out of the Michael Jackson playbook, the man himself returned after a six-year absence to try and reclaim his throne with Invincible. It was the product of $30 million, five years, and an absurd number of songwriters and producers. But it still just sounded like an AI was tasked with churning out Michael Jackson songs. There wasn’t a moment on the album that sounded every remotely fresh or original. In that sense, it was the opposite of Thriller. “There’s no joy or humor in it, no sense of release,” Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times. “Trying to make songs that will blanket the media universe again, pop that lives up to his past fame, Mr. Jackson is unwilling to get too personal but unable to escape his scars and ambitions.” To make matters worse, the first single dropped just weeks before 9/11. When the album came out in October, not many people felt like dancing.
1973
Before you progheads have a conniption fit, let’s be very clear: Tales From Topographic Oceans isn’t a terrible album. There are very fine moments on it, especially album closer “Ritual (Nous Sommes du Soleil).” But it followed The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge. These are three of the best albums in prog history. Yes took a big step backward with the sprawling, unfocused Tales From Topographic Oceans. If you think we’re overstating it, let’s hear from Rick Wakeman himself. “The trouble is Tales had a lot of good melodies and a not lot of good songs,” he told Rolling Stone in 2019. “[After the tour] I called a meeting and said, ‘I’m really sorry, guys, but if this is the direction we’re going in, I can’t be a part of this.’”
1973
“If I had one musical hero, it would have to be Stevie Wonder,” Barack Obama told Rolling Stone in 2008. “When I was at that point where you start getting involved in music, Stevie had that run with Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Innervisions, and then Songs in the Key of Life. Those are as brilliant a set of five albums as we’ve ever seen.” Obama stopped with Songs in the Key of Life for good reason. The follow-up was Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants,” which is the soundtrack to a documentary based on a book that claims plants are sentient and can communicate with each other and humans. We’ll avoid the veracity of all that and focus on the music here. Leadoff single “Send One Your Love” has the old Stevie magic, but a more typical song is “Venus’ Flytrap and the Bug” where Wonder scat-sings over cheeseball synth sounds and then explains to a child how a venus flytrap eats insects. Many of the tracks are instrumentals coupled with nature sound effects, and the whole thing feels remarkably tossed off and a complete waste of his talents.
1967
Taken on its own, Smiley Smile is a charmingly odd low-fi experiment that stands out as one of the best Beach Boys albums in their vast catalog. But this was the followup to Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations.” Brian Wilson was determined to top those twin masterpieces by creating a “teenage symphony to God” known as Smile. But he was dealing with severe mental health problems at the time, and he ultimately abandoned the project. His bandmates simply took Wilson’s songs and quickly created quickie versions at his home studio that lack the lush, subversive brilliance of the originals. In some ways, it’s like looking at a Polaroid of the Mona Lisa. That said, Smiley Smile is still a wonderful musical experience since the underlying songs are so strong. But it’s a pale facsimile of the real deal, as fans learned when the original Smile tapes slowly leaked out as bootlegs before Wilson finally finished the project in 2004. “We hit a bunt,” said Carl Wilson, “instead of a grand slam.”
1992
At the dawn of the Nineties, Bruce Springsteen fired the E Street Band, moved to Los Angeles, and had his first child with wife Patti Scialfa. He also began recording songs with session pros like drummer Jeff Porcaro and bassist Randy Jackson that reflected his newfound domestic bliss. Some of them were quite excellent, like “Human Touch” and “Real World,” but others were among the worst he’d ever deemed worthy of release, like “Man’s Job” and “The Long Goodbye.” And the production was painfully dated all around. He released Human Touch on the same day as Lucky Town, a slightly superior album, and received the worst reviews of his career. The albums initially sold well, but there were stacks of them in used CD shops just a few months later. For the first time in his career, he whiffed. When he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, he acknowledged it with typical frankness. “Now my dad, he passed away this year, but I’ve gotta thank him because — what would I conceivably have written about without him?” he said. “I mean, you can imagine that if everything had gone great between us, we would have had disaster. I would have written just happy songs — and I tried it in the early ’90s, and it didn’t work. The public didn’t like it.”
2008
In hindsight, it was slightly crazy to expect anything spectacular from Guns N’ Roses by the time Chinese Democracy hit shelves in November 2008. By this point, the band had just been Axl Rose and hired hands for over a decade. Their 1999 song “Oh My God” from the End of Days soundtrack was profoundly unexciting, and we’d all read the reports of the endless, ludicrously costly Chinese Democracy sessions. But we still hoped that Axl had spent all those years chipping away at his masterpiece and the end result would prove all the doubters wrong. That did not happen. Despite a handful of strong songs like “Better,” “There Was a Time,” and “Prostitute,” the album is ludicrously overcooked. The partially reunited band breathed new life into many of them on the reunion tour about a decade later, but Chinese Democracy itself remains a deep disappointment. And the sad fact they’ve offered up nothing new since it came out short of warmed-over Chinese Democracy outtakes is even more disappointing.
1984
After the huge success of Let’s Dance in 1983 and the 13-year streak of near perfection prior to that album, it felt like David Bowie was incapable of creating a bad record. He proved that theory wrong just a year later by dropping the turgid Tonight. Leadoff single “Blue Jean” has some charm, and “Loving the Alien” is vintage extraterrestrial Bowie, but the rest is shockingly inept, even his duet with Tina Turner on the 1977 Iggy Pop tune “Tonight.” Things reach rock bottom with a pointless remake of “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys. Bizarrely, there’s very few new Bowie originals, and a glut of old Iggy tunes that were in no need of modernizing for the Eighties. The whole album just feels oddly rushed. The fiasco destroyed nearly all the momentum he gained from Let’s Dance. It would be a long, long time before he regained it.
1970
Not long after hearing Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait for the first time, Rolling Stone critic Greil Marcus penned the most famous lede to a review in the history of rock criticism: “What is this shit?” He was responding to an odd hodgepodge of covers, live cuts, and originals gooped up with strings and background singers that make up the album. In 1984, the notoriously unreliable Dylan claimed he made it bad on purpose to alienate his fans and earn him some peace. “I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to,” he said. “They’ll see it, and they’ll listen, and they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s go on to the next person.’” The 2018 box set Another Self Portrait proved he actually recorded a lot of great music at this time, leading to a slight reassessment of the original album. But compared to Dylan’s Sixties output that preceded it, Self Portrait was still a massive disappointment.
1967
Near the height of the psychedelic movement, months after the Beatles stunned the world with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Rolling Stones dropped Their Satanic Majesties Request. It’s a wildly ambitious album where they utilize mellotrons, strings, and African rhythms in a failed attempt to out-psychedelic their competitors. There are very strong moments like “She’s a Rainbow,” but also painfully mawkish ones like album opener “Sing This All Together” that fade from memory seconds after they end. The album has some passionate defenders, but no serious fan argues it’s even a fraction as brilliant as the group’s early singles or the work that followed over the next decade. “It’s not very good,” Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone in 1995. “It’s a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There’s two good songs on it: ‘She’s a Rainbow’ and “2000 Light Years From Home.’ The rest of them are nonsense…. I think we were just taking too much acid.”
1972
When John Lennon moved to New York City in 1971, he immersed himself in the anti-war movement and befriended counter-culture radicals like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. It didn’t take long for the Nixon administration to try and deport him. While he fought to remain in the country, he penned songs like “Attica State,” “John Sinclair,” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” that reflected the combustible politics of the moment. But they were half-assed, at best, and seemed dated almost instantly. Listening to Some Time in New York City today, it’s almost impossible to believe his prior two albums were Plastic Ono Band and Imagine. Both of those albums are timeless masterpieces. Some Time in New York City is as disposable as the newspapers on the cover. He bounced back with Mind Games in 1973, leaving Some Time in New York City little more than an unfortunate time capsule from a troubled time.
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