Songs to Forget: Bad Tracks by Great Acts

By Keef Strang

"Thoughtful, funny, informative, entertaining and humanizing."  - Peter Aaron, author of If You Like the Ramones... and The Band FAQ; coauthor with Richie Ramone of I Know Better Now

"Author Keef Strang pulls gems and clunkers along with many more out of a musical dumpster for a closer look in this insightful, smart and funny book." - Richard Boch, author of The Mudd Club

In the world of popular music, where so many struggling outfits never make it big, it's reassuring to know that even legends can fall flat on their faces.

This is exactly what happens when Pink Floyd enlist a dog on vocals, Elvis begs to be put down, or Stevie Wonder sings in Latin.

Songs to Forget: Bad Tracks by Great Acts describes more than 150 genuine musical misdemeanors in a guide that travels from AC/DC to Frank Zappa and visits almost every point in between.

In no other single book are you likely to learn that The Pixies tried and failed to get on the Shrek 2 soundtrack, that Chubby Checker sang unintentionaly smutty lyrics in French, or that Smokey Robinson recorded a lament to a monster from outer space.

Along the way it's not just the bands and singers that enter the spotlight but also the shifting history of popular music and the fickle nature of a business which makes and breaks careers daily. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Keef Strang
• Release date: Apr 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386839705

Keef Strang

The rock writings of Keef Strang have been published in the US in Paraphilia magazine and in Italy by Distorsioni. Passionate about music, he spends hours  a day lying on his back listening to the rock riches hidden beneath the tip of the sonic iceberg. Under a pen name, he has had articles published by The Financial Times, Forbes and Gastronomica magazine. He has also read his poetry on BBC Radio and has had a short story included in a collection published by the police department of the Belgian city of Liege. Songs To Forget is his first book.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE INTRO - page 3

The fifties - page 10

Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, BB King, Elvis Presley, Smokey Robinson

The sixties - page 23

The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Booker T and The MGs, David Bowie, The Byrds, Captain Beefheart, Johnny Cash, Chubby Checker, Sam Cooke, Cream, The Crystals, Desmond Dekker, Bo Diddley, The Doors, The Drifters, Duane Eddy, The Everly Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, The Four Tops, Aretha Franklin, Billy Fury, Marvin Gaye, Astrud Gilberto, Jan and Dean, Johnny Kidd and The Pirates, The Kinks, Love, MC5, The Monkees, The Pretty Things, Louis Prima, ? and The Mysterians, Otis Redding, The Rolling Stones, The Seeds, The Shadows, Simon and Garfunkel, Slade, The Supremes, Them, The 13th Floor Elevators, The Troggs, Ike and Tina Turner, Gene Vincent, Mary Wells, Jackie Wilson, Stevie Wonder, Link Wray

The seventies - page 140

Chuck Berry, Big Star, Black Sabbath, James Brown, Tim Buckley, The Buzzcocks, Can, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Georgie Fame, Jimi Hendrix, The Hollies, Wanda Jackson, The Jam, Grace Jones, Led Zeppelin, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Pink Floyd, Prince Buster, Queen, The Righteous Brothers, The Sex Pistols,  Sly and The Family Stone, Dusty Springfield, Squeeze, Edwin Starr, The Stooges, T. Rex, The Temptations, Thin Lizzy, The Undertones, XTC

The eighties - page 218

AC/DC, The Animals, The Associates, Bauhaus, Blondie, The Clash, Leonard Cohen, The Damned, Depeche Mode, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Echo and The Bunnymen, Serge Gainsbourg, Hawkwind, The Human League, Kraftwerk, Jerry Lee Lewis, Madness, Van Morrison, Nirvana, The Pet Shop Boys, Wilson Pickett, The Ramones, Lou Reed, Roxy Music, Nina Simone, The Smiths, Soft Cell, The Stone Roses, The Stranglers, Talking Heads, Dionne Warwick, The Who, Neil Young

The nineties - page 295

The B52s, The Beautiful South, Beck, Blur, Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello, The Cure, Gregory Isaacs, Little Richard, Morissey, Motörhead, Prince, Pulp, REM, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Bruce Springsteen, The Teardrop Explodes, Teenage Fanclub, The Velvet Underground, Tom Waits

The year 2000 and beyond - page 342

The Beastie Boys, Bjork, Nick Cave, The Fall, Gorillaz, The Manic Street Preachers, New Order, The Pixies, Iggy Pop, Radiohead, The White Stripes

THE INTRO

THOUGH IT MIGHT BREAK the hearts of some fawning fans, it needs to be said that rock idols are only human. Just like us, they sometimes burn the toast. They have bills to pay. They argue, compromise and lose sleep in the same way millions of other people do. The only difference is that they’re famous and, in some cases, have recorded some amazing songs. However, when you take mere humans, usually at an impressionable age, factor in the manipulations of the music business, the strains of making it big or not making it all, and the cocktail of conflicts that can floor even the best acts, you increase the risks of certain tracks being light years from amazing. The result is the bad song by the great act.

Power is one of the keys to the birth of an awful lot of these cringe-inducing cuts. When bands fall under the power of record labels, managers and promoters they’re faced with packs of people baying for more songs to make them more money. While a debut album can take a while to emerge, if it’s a success music business momentum takes over. The pressure to deliver a second set of songs that keep the cash tills ringing can stretch creative elements to breaking point. This was perhaps most true in the sixties when acts had to put out a single every couple of months, release at the very least an album or two a year and in between tour to promote their output, often being driven between gigs in the back of a rusty van.

The Beatles show how the strain told, especially as they had to add world tours and films to the schedule. John Lennon admitted that some tunes were just reeled off to meet deadlines. One of his own songs he singled out for attack was ‘It's Only Love’ which featured on the Help! Album. Talking to the wonderfully named Hit Parader magazine in 1972, he admitted it was the only one of his songs he truly hated.  Another of his tunes, ‘Cry Baby Cry’, got even rougher treatment with Lennon denying that he even wrote it.

With power comes money, and cash is indeed at the root of many sub-standard tracks by big names. Despite all the talk of artistic ambition and lofty missions while getting your rocks off, music is after all just another way to earn a living. Success or failure both bring money to the fore and put acts under the cosh in one way or another. When Lennon spoke of writing songs to order, he had been sucked into a whirlpool of commitments that were out of the band’s control. The Beatles and genius producer George Martin were so good that even their throwaway songs are worth a listen, but other very decent outfits had to keep making money for their keepers at the cost of their own quality.

At the other end of the spectrum, lack of success may also increase those sleepless nights and result in quick-fix solutions. With record bosses on a band’s back looking to get a return on monies spent, principles can go out the window. A quick cover version could be the cure. Or maybe a piece of fluff that will float up into the best sellers. December’s round the corner, why not release a Christmas song? In such circumstances, the potential for duff tracks from desperate sources is depressingly strong.

However, economic clout has the power to work the other way too. If a band or a singer becomes so big that they can do pretty much whatever they please the results can be just as painful. Once you’ve earned the right to take eons recording your next album, inspiration and spontaneity can go up in smoke: a creeping mood of malaise seeping into the studio. Touted as the best band on the planet, REM fell headlong into this trap when working on 2004 album, Around The Sun. In 2008, the group’s guitarist, Peter Buck, told the Baltimore Sun about the lack of inspiration that can strike musicians shut up for months together and tired of the whole damn thing. According to Buck, the songs were unlistenable due to the fact that they were the sound of musicians bored with their own material.

A band as big as REM not only earn the right to spend a lifetime producing what will never be remembered as their best output, they can also sin through experimentation. Ironically, an act that’s earned commercial spurs can get the freedom to play the avant garde card and produce material that alienates all those who bought their stuff before. Longing to take risks, bored with success, aching to prove that they’re ‘serious’ artists, they go left field arty and produce something few would listen to if the act hadn’t already sold lorry loads of songs. Even if this may cleanse some groups and act as a way of venting pent up creative frustrations, such musical tangents are seldom worth the price of admission.

Like them or loathe them, few could argue against The Pet Shop Boys being a group versed in pop perfection. However, when they decided to break free as serious artists, they gave the world the bad track that is The Sound Of The Atom Splitting: a title gleaned from an art house film’s dialogue, a theme of nuclear destruction and a debate between a fascist and a pampered liberal set to the sound of an act raiding the electronic effects cupboard like hungry amateurs. 

Even when a group is already labeled ‘out there’, experimentation that has borne fruit in the past can go depressingly rotten. Choosing not to heed WC Fields’s advice about never working with animals or children, Pink Floyd pushed back their established ‘far out’ frontiers by having a dog ‘sing’ with them. The result was awful and made worse still by the band reproducing the thing live in the archly pretentious setting of Pompeii.

While major artists can get away with using costly studio time to dabble in self-indulgent experiments, lesser acts can still find ways to express their unbridled creativity at the expense of listeners. When 45s ruled the airwaves, it was the B-side that gave such freedom. Record labels wanted an A-side that would sell: the B-side was only there because the A-side hit single needed a flip side so it could exist. On some B-sides, acts made bold statements that blew the A-sides out of the water. On others, they used the grooves to record something that would otherwise never have deserved to see the light of day.

The Troggs, the stomping sixties band who left behind them the US number one Wild Thing, sadly grew to become expert at such weak B-sides. Barely having enough musical ability to record A-sides, they used the freedom of the flip side to record tosh like philosophical 1967 ode, ‘As I Ride By.’ It just confirms that the band should have stuck to the down and dirty.

Just a psychedelic year later, super group Cream served up ‘Pressed Rat And Warthog’ as further proof of how B-sides can be plain bad. On the flip of the ‘Anyone For Tennis’ single, the song is a sad stab at Lewis Carrol nonsense, full of bad puns and non-whimsical attempts at whimsy.  

With the advent of CDs, the bad B-side was reborn as the bad bonus track and those buying music still suffered.

Money, power, egos and artistic angst create enough problems without throwing into the mix the classic unholy trinity of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll all washed down with way too much alcohol. Things can swiftly get out of hand and quality dive rather than simply dip when rock musicians have a 24-7 access to excess.

One of the most sobering of these tales concerns UK band The Happy Mondays who in 1990 had sauntered off with NME Awards for best band and best album. Just two years later, they decamped to Barbados to record new long player Yes Please! Going to the Caribbean was supposed to keep the group’s creative nucleus off heroin: they got hooked on crack cocaine instead. They even sold the studio’s furniture to fund the habit. The master tapes were a disaster, the album was panned and record label, Factory, went bankrupt. So much of Yes Please! is so bad that it’s not even any fun trying to write about one track as the group’s worst.

Despite the all-out anarchy of some of these descents into dire music, several twisted patterns do tend to emerge. Many bad songs crop up at the start of a fine act’s career when they are still feeling their way. Then there are the ill-advised comebacks that reach for the heights of past glories and instead crash and burn taking a big chunk of reputation with them. Tribute records, preying on the public’s maudlin fascination with dead popstars, can provoke tears for all the wrong reasons, while musical crimes committed in the name of religion just support the theory that the devil has all the best tunes.

Here then are over 150 songs which do great acts no favors. They were not always easy to find and some bands or singers even refused to throw up a truly bad track. This explains why there’s no entry for Joy Division or for Bob Marley, with or without his Wailers. Other bands many would class as ‘great’ don’t get a look in simply because they seem to have produced such a glut of bad tracks that the exercise becomes worthless. That means no room for Genesis, Kiss, Madonna, Oasis, Simple Minds, UB40 and so many others.

The crimes against popular music that remain embrace a massive range of styles, from rock ‘n’ roll’s first stirrings to the 21st century. As would be expected from the rock decade to end all rock decades, it’s the sixties that provide the biggest batch of badness. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s this decade that includes the ultimate bad track by a great act. The under par songs from the new century, while being light years in terms of style and technology from rock’s formative period, are just as bad as what came before and often for the same reasons. 

THE FIFTIES

ONE OF THE ETERNAL rock ‘n’ roll debates surrounds the date when the whole thing kicked off in earnest. For some well-informed observers of all things rock, 1951 song, ‘Rocket 88’ by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (who were in fact Jackie Brenston and the band Ike Turner knocked about with before discovering the money-spinning Tina Turner) is the starting point. However, for those not versed in obscure US rhythm and blues of the very early fifties, where it all began was when a certain pelvis began doing its thing.

Elvis Aaron Presley may not have been the first rock ‘n’ roll singer, yet it was his impact that really broke the music across the States. He was young. He was white. He could sing. He could move. He ticked all the boxes needed to become a teen phenomenon and a social threat. Indeed, before Elvis really got the rock ‘n’ roll ball rolling teenagers were almost non-existent. The 13 to 19 year-old record-buying, music-listening public in the US of the early fifties bought records their parents approved of and listened to music with zero menace. Before ‘Rock Around The Clock’ exploded onto the airwaves in 1955, the tunes most played on American radio had been the likes of ‘Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White’ by Pérez Prado and his Orchestra or ‘The Ballad Of Davy Crockett’ by Bill Hayes. Pérez had also got to number one in the UK that same year: a year when others to top the British charts included Rosemary Clooney (‘Mambo Italiano’), Slim Whitman (‘Rose Marie’) and ragtime piano peddler Winifred Atwell (‘Let’s Have Another Party’). In 1956, Elvis spent 25 weeks at the top of the US charts.

The challenge then, when looking for bad records by great rock acts of the fifties, is to find the slush amongst the gold in just the last four or five years of the decade. Thankfully, for the hunter of awful songs the pioneers weren’t always at the top of their game. For many of them, the dreadful track in question came much later in their careers when quality standards slipped dramatically. For others though the early years weren’t all chockfull of classic recordings.

Often it’s when the tempo slows that things go belly up. Elvis, like many of his white rock ‘n’ roll brethren was also partial to the tear-jerking ballad. Sometimes, it was religion that supplied the subject matter for such sickly sweet offerings, at other moments it was the family, the pet, the best friend: anything able to tug at the heartstrings in under three minutes.

Other bad songs tapped into popular teen culture for their themes. So it was that the fifties’ wave of films starring monsters from outer space inspired the fifties’ wave of records where aliens got top billing. Mostly striving for laughs, not all of these records had the success of Sheb Wooley’s ‘Purple People Eater’. They just didn’t deserve it.

By the end of the decade, those rock ‘n’ roll pioneers had been tamed. Presley was fast turning into a family act and would soon have any rebel tendencies ironed out during military service. Jerry Lee Lewis had committed commercial suicide by marrying the 13-year old daughter of his cousin. Chuck Berry had already been in and out of jail, but was arrested in 1959 on charges of trying to get a 14-year old girl across state lines so he could do something less than innocent with her. It was more dramatic still for Buddy Holly: he was dead.

Eddie Cochran

SOMETIMES A BAD SONG can become worse still due to bad timing. You can’t get much worse timing than putting on tape a track about a real life crash that killed at least one rock 'n' roll great and then the year after dying yourself when your taxi hits a tree.

In 1959, when it first saw the light of day, ‘Three Stars’ was already a maudlin, archly sentimental and lyrically tacky tribute to the early deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper in a plane. The original by Tommy Dee and Carol Kay achieved gold disc status in a mourning USA before Eddie Cochran decided to record his own version of the song. His death a year later meant it stayed on the shelf until 1966.

Better known as the man who recorded timeless teen anthems like ‘C’mon Everybody’, ‘Something Else’ and ‘Summertime Blues’, Eddie was not averse to the odd slow number as proved by his posthumous UK number one, Three Steps To Heaven.  However, ‘Three Stars’ is a ballad too far.

Death is naturally a tricky subject for a pop song. When it’s fictional as in the melodramatic ‘Leader Of The Pack’ or ‘Seasons In The Sun’ it is perhaps a little easier to tackle. However, when the track in question sets out to dissect a disaster plucked from the headlines you can very quickly be on very soft ground. This is where Cochran finds himself.

Much of that sinking feeling comes from ‘Three Stars’' words which are devoid of inspiration in some places and devoid of tact in others. To a standard, sub-country, strummed guitar tune, Cochran begins by telling us in pseudo-religious speak that from now on heaven will have three new stars. He then relates Richie Valens’s career swapping his singing voice for what is supposed to be an earnest spoken delivery. It risks bringing the listener to tears for all the wrong reasons.

After a brief interlude when he sings that we’re going to miss Richie and that everybody sends their love, he then reverts back to heartfelt chat mode to recount Buddy’s passing in the same plane crash. Then it’s the turn of The Big Bopper, an overweight DJ who immediately gets dealt the worst lyrical hand.

Somehow, Eddie manages to describe the big Bopper as ‘stout’ and keep a straight face. It’s a laughable line. Just as the whole song is packed with euphemisms that allow it to talk about death without ever mentioning the dreaded word itself, so it refuses to call The Big Bopper fat.

Once we’ve been talked through the stout one wearing his Stetson hat in heaven, we get one more reminder that everybody’s going to miss them and sends them their love before Eddie signs off. Apparently, Holly and Valens were friends which should have made this recording poignant, but it just doesn’t happen.

What did happen is that Eddie Cochran went to the UK on tour in 1960 and came back in a coffin. In a morbidly ironic twist, his death prompted tribute songs just as the demise of Buddy, Richie and The Bopper had given birth to Three Stars.

Buddy Holly

LOGICALLY, THE SHORTER the career the more difficult it is to find a bad song for the artist concerned. This should be even more of a challenge when the person we’re talking about is a certified rock ‘n’ roll legend.

Dead at just 22, Buddy Holly easily earns his place in the pantheon of the greats thanks to a batch of revved-up rockers and some tear-inducing slower numbers. However, even before his plane plummeted and cut short his output he’d recorded at least one song that is not the type reputations are built on.

No need to trawl through the over-dubbed releases of studio outtakes that came after his death. In 1958, at the height if his fame, Buddy released the very logically titled album Buddy Holly which featured classics like ‘Rave On’ and ‘Peggy Sue’. It also featured ‘Valley Of Tears’, a number penned by Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew. It’s not a classic.

Buddy’s early sound, before he veered into lushly orchestrated tearjerkers, was based on his ringing Fender Stratocaster and excited hiccup vocals. What better way to ensure a track misfires than to get rid of both?

‘Valley Of Tears’ gives pride of place to the Hammond Organ. True, a subtle guitar gets things going, but after just a few seconds it’s the organ’s cheesy, anti-rock ‘n’ roll sound that dominates the track. It conjures up the sort of pap played at fifties ice rinks or on cinema Wurlitzers.

While the all-conquering organ whirls, the rest of the musicians lay down a gentle, country and western rhythm that evokes the clip-clop of horseshoes and the rolling movement of a drowsing cowboy in his saddle. Over this, Buddy sings. It’s not one of his best vocal outings. He even sounds off-key now and again, his voice sort of trailing off at the end of a line as if he’s ashamed to be singing the thing.

Then, at the 50-second mark, Buddy hushes and the organ really goes for it. It’s solo time. It may only last 20 seconds or so but it’s tacky and just so downright middle class and middle-aged that it kills stone dead any slim chance the track had of redeeming itself.

When Buddy comes back, with the organ swirling around him, he still sounds less than inspired. The diction is too crisp and proper; the singing lacks any emotion: he appears either to be on autopilot or totally uninterested. The guitar’s back for a brief descent down the scales and at two minutes 10 seconds it’s all over.

‘Valley Of Tears’: for crying out loud!

BB King

BLUES: MISERY OR BITTER-sweet melancholy, originally one singer, one guitar and a lament. Gospel: joyful praise, clapping choirs and community-binding. While the two genres can share certain roots they aren’t exactly on the same wavelength when it comes to form, content and much more. All this means that when one of the greatest blues guitarists locks away his six-string and begins preaching it might not be good news for modern man.

Few would argue that BB King was not among the great blues guitarists and yet, after just a decade of what would be a career of more than 50 years, he laid down a batch of tracks for which his guitar, Lucille, stayed in its carrying case. While King had a more than decent singing voice, ditching his guitar prowess was just plain stupid.

What is even more stupid is not just to dump Lucille, but also to make the now guitar-free song a traditional spiritual. Maybe only the Good Lord himself knows the real reason why somebody who was not a music business novice thought that just such an approach would be an inspired move.

Released in 1959, BB King’s guitar allergic gospel album included his version of ‘Ole Time Religion’, a classic congregational foot-stomper written back in the 1870s and a staple of the black spiritual songbook. While King was black, a decent singer and perhaps even a God-fearing man, his take on the tune, and indeed the whole gospel trip, should never have been allowed to happen.

It starts with handclaps that we can just imagine coming from the massed ranks of a choir that wear brightly colored matching gowns tailored to look like garish tents. Then a few seconds in an organ strikes up so that the feeling of being on a church pew is cranked up a little more. That organ is the sum total of all the instruments on the track.

BB begins to sing the repetitive call and response lyrics: him calling and the tent-clad choir responding, sometimes with an echo of BB’s line, sometimes with a few ‘hallelujahs’. The words might be moving for a clapboard chapel full of believers, but without that context they’re just monotonous.

After telling us that that that ole time religion is good enough for him, he goes on to sing that it was also good for his old mother, for the Hebrew children and for Paul and Simon. Each set of people for whom that ole time religion was nothing but good gets a verse and BB tops them off with two more verses that confirm (once again) that that ole time religion is good enough for him. That’s six times the same verse with a few variations in just a minute or so. It’s grinding down the listener.

Maybe because of this the singing stops now and the organ takes center stage with handclaps still in support. Its moment in the spotlight lasts a measly ten seconds and then BB’s back again with his verses: seven of them. They confirm that his mother found ole time religion good for her as did the Hebrew children. When it’s not being good for someone else it’s BB who’s asking that we give him that ole time religion for himself. The song fades after two minutes 20 seconds with him still crying out for some.

Apparently, King’s first influence was gospel. Him going back to it is enough to give anyone the blues.

Elvis Presley

MOST COMMENTATORS AGREE that once Elvis got into uniform the game was up. There's a consensus that from his scene-bursting debut in 1955 until he became a GI, went to Germany and met the future Mrs Presley, he was brilliant. There are two Graceland-size problems with this convenient