Bands Who Are Absolute Nightmares When On Tour

It's a poorly kept secret that rock stars and their bands don't exactly view themselves as normal people. To paraphrase Christopher Walken: Sure, they put their pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us, but once their pants are on they make hit records, rock auditoriums full of people, and dodge mountains of groupies who are all trying to get their pants off again. Just imagine being on tour: Everybody allowed to come into contact with you is there to cater to your every whim, thousands of people show up every night in different cities just to hear you rock, and you get paid obscene amounts of money for this. You could be the Dalai Lama, and that would still go to your head.

This is why, every time one of these artists have come to town, you can bet there was a healthy contingent of people — police, security guards, stagehands, etc. — who hoped against hope that that fleet of tour buses would just rumble on by. Many of them are older acts who engaged in the fine, sadly lost art of trashing hotel rooms, some place insane demands upon the venues and cities lucky enough to be blessed by their presence, and some can't seem to quit antagonizing their own fans — but all of these bands are absolute freaking nightmares on the road.

Even if you prefer new music to classic rock, you'd have to admit these older bands could really teach these young whippersnappers a thing or two about partying so hard that everything gets weird and possibly illegal. Take Jefferson Airplane, whose lead singer Grace Slick was a boozy force of nature (a. boozicane?) rivaled only by her onetime boyfriend Jim Morrison for sheer volume of consumption and subsequent extreme awkwardness. When she wasn't wantonly humping anything in her path — "I pretty much nailed anybody that was handy" — she was boozing, attempting to perform while boozing even more, or getting arrested for booze.

In 1978 alone she was arrested twice before the summer even began, then kicked off the sunny season by causing a riot after canceling a concert in Germany due to illness. She made it up to them the next night, however, by getting utterly plastered before even setting foot onstage and tearing into the locals over Germany's Nazi past. "Who won the war?!" she implored, as the crowd booed and threw things; she then adroitly tried to win them back over by shouting "Heil Hitler!" and giving Nazi salutes. This, of course, led to her dismissal from the band. Fortunately, though, she would rejoin the revamped Jefferson Starship three years later, in plenty of time to contribute to one of the worst songs anyone has ever heard: "We Built This City."

When Keith "The Loon" Moon was manning the skins for British rock band The Who, hospitality employees trembled at the mere mention of their name. This is because Moon, one of the greatest drummers of all time, is arguably less famous for that than he is for constantly destroying his accommodations as if a hotel room killed his father. Every one of his exploits sounds like a wild tall tale — but not according to the great Alice Cooper, who once said, "Everything you've ever heard about Keith Moon is true. And you've only heard a tenth of it."

For starters, there's the legendary incident on Moon's 21st birthday in which he drove a Lincoln Continental into the swimming pool of a Flint, Michigan, Holiday Inn. This was apparently not an isolated occurrence, as he also once drove a car straight through the floor-to-ceiling glass of a hotel lobby and up to the reception desk, then got out and calmly asked for his room key. A limo driver once reported that a panicked Moon asked him to turn around and return to the hotel they'd just left, saying he'd forgotten something — which was to hurl the TV out the window. ("I nearly forgot," he said upon returning.) He attempted to steal a hotel waterbed, which burst, so he was relocated to another suite — which he trashed. All this, plus a consistent fondness for the old cherry-bomb-in-the-toilet trick — and if Cooper is to be believed, this only scratches the surface.

Lil Wayne is a very popular rap guy, to be sure, but while Metallica insists that their security be unarmed, Wayne demands a phalanx of armed guards suitable for a head of state. His tour rider begins with the requirement of a two-vehicle police escort from the airport to the hotel, which will be joined by an additional squad of four armed, off-duty officers to accompany Wayne from the hotel to the venue, then back to the hotel, and anywhere else he might need to go. Sounds pretty secure, right? Not secure enough!

Ten more armed guards must patrol the backstage areas, and for international dates, an additional four-man armed security team must be available to Wayne 24 hours a day. For his off-venue accommodation, Wayne requires nothing less than the presidential suite of a five-star hotel, and obviously, copious amounts of food, booze, energy drinks, and towels — 10 white hand towels and 10 white full-size towels — must be present in his room upon arrival. It's a good thing Wayne is too huge to play smaller towns, or just popping out to McDonald's before the show might require him to commandeer their entire police force.

The Beastie Boys went from frat boys of rap to beloved elder statesmen in an improbably short time. But during their tour in support of their 1986 debut Licensed to Ill, they were about as welcomed by the towns receiving them as a plague of locusts and caused nearly as many problems. These shows famously featured such family-friendly set decor as giant, inflatable dongs and scantily clad women writhing about in suspended steel cages, which went over about as well as you'd expect during the era of the PMRC. In advance of their Washington, D.C., date, the Washington Post ran an article that screamed, "BAN THE BEASTIE BOYS: Beware, parents! The Beastie Boys don't do concerts; they do orgies."

While this wasn't exactly the case, their raucous shows and throwback tendency to demolish hotel rooms drew the ire of law enforcement agencies across the country. After having run out of people to annoy in the U.S., the Beasties departed for the U.K. leg of the tour, where a Liverpool audience unaccustomed to such rowdiness took umbrage when the band started chucking beer bottles into the crowd. A riot broke out, Ad-Rock was arrested, and the whole ugly incident led to the Beasties being dropped from the Def Jam label. They responded to the setback by moving to Los Angeles, hooking up with the Dust Brothers, and producing one of rap's greatest masterpieces. So if you wanna kick-start your career, start a riot? Unless you're Axl Rose. Three is enough, Axl.

In 2016, the two female-led bands — Wax Idols and King Woman — opening for heavy metal pioneers Pentagram announced they were dropping out of the tour because of an "overload of bullsh*t" and because they'd been "treated really poorly and harassed in gross ways."

This particular tour started off badly, with front man Bobby Liebling failing to show up for the first performance and arriving two hours late for the next one. But that wasn't what finally made Wax Idols and King Woman pull out. Hether Fortune of Wax Idols told Noisey that some of the other women in her band were being subjected to "inappropriate comments" and "touching." From there it seemed to escalate to Liebling making "absurdly gross, inappropriate comments," and then getting on stage and making rape jokes in front of the crowd. It got bad enough that Fortune's female bandmates mostly just hid in their van and refused to associate with the members of Pentagram until they finally decided to back out of the last three performances.

Oh and finally, Liebling basically said the only reason he'd even decided to tour with two female-led bands was so he'd have "a lot of options with women," whatever that means. So yeah, Pentagram on tour is a gross, misogynistic, super-uncomfortable experience, and not just for the women in the audience.

Kid Rock has a reputation for bad behavior, and he knows it. In fact he's so self-aware about his inability to behave like an actual human being that TMZ says he once told a judge no one should be allowed to bring up his reputation as a "tough guy" or a "thug" in court, you know, lest that prejudice the jury into thinking he's a tough guy or a thug. Also, he doesn't think it's fair if opposing lawyers bring up his prior arrests.

In 2006, Rock and six members of the hip-hop group the Boo-Yaa Tribe allegedly beat up three guys outside the Hollywood nightclub Teddy's in Los Angeles. For that incident, a judge ordered Rock to pay $35,000, which is kind of a long way from the $15 million the victims were asking for, but celebrities don't have to be punished for their actions in the same way regular people do. Then in 2007, Kid Rock stopped at a Waffle House while on tour in Atlanta and got into a brawl with another Waffle House customer. For that indiscretion, he was ordered to pay $40,000 instead of the $2.9 million Rock said the plaintiff had originally asked for. So maybe the plaintiffs didn't get the millions they were hoping for but still, $35,000 and $40,000 are pretty decent-sized numbers ... until you realize that's really only worth a few dozen hotel television sets. 

Not all absolute nightmares involve trashing hotel rooms or getting really, really wasted or brawling with people you don't like. Some stars quietly become absolute nightmares out of the public eye, more or less.

To be fair, when the public starts calling you a "diva," you've kind of earned the right to act like a diva. And Mariah Carey, as everyone knows, is a diva. She's such a diva that she doesn't say a word to anyone on the day of a performance, lest she damage her voice on a particularly harsh consonant. She's such a diva that she once demanded that a record store redecorate their bathroom prior to hosting her for a one-hour performance, and she also smashed a tea set she'd been drinking from so no one else could come along and say, "Anyone want to buy this tea set that Mariah Carey once drank out of?" But nothing quite tops the demand she made when Westfield Shopping Center in London invited her to switch on their holiday lights. According to Marie Claire, the singer wanted to be surrounded by 100 white doves and 20 white kittens — a source said that the doves were a go, but they couldn't deliver on the kittens because of "health and safety." For the record, Carey later denied ever having made such a request. "Twenty cats is an absolute lie," she said. "I'm not a cat lady."

Coheed and Cambria is a pretty big name (well, big enough to open for grunge legends Soundgarden, anyway), but not so big that their bass player doesn't have to go around robbing pharmacies before a concert. According to MTV, in 2011, Coheed and Cambria's bassist Michael Todd was arrested for demanding prescription painkillers from a Massachusetts Walgreens. He showed the pharmacist a note he'd written on his cell phone, which said he had a bomb and needed painkillers. The pharmacist gave Todd six bottles of OxyContin because even though he probably didn't actually have a bomb, well, you never know. 

After the robbery, Todd took a cab back to the Comcast Center, where Coheed and Cambria was about to open for Soundgarden, because calling a limo would have been way too obvious. Anyway, sadly for Todd and happily for Walgreens, someone spotted him getting into the cab, and he was arrested shortly afterward.  

Coheed and Cambria distanced themselves from their bandmate's behavior, declaring their intention to continue the tour without him and promising to "address the situation with Michael" at the end of the tour. "Addressing the situation," by the way, meant kicking him out of the band. That's not where Todd's misfortunes ended, though. He also got one year of house arrest and three years of probation because all's fair in love and being a famous white dude who robbed a drugstore.

One of the things that tends to happen to you when you become a famous musician is that you, you know, gain fans. Fans, in case you require a definition, are those people who are responsible for you being famous, and they also contribute to your bank account by buying your albums and going to your concerts.

In 2015, Afroman was performing in Biloxi, Mississippi, when a female fan somehow managed to wander onto the stage. Now, she did kind of get into Afroman's personal space, but his reaction was a little disproportionate to the offense — he punched her, and it wasn't even ... are you ready ... because he got high. Har har. According to TMZ, Afroman didn't hold back, either. The blow was a haymaker, and it knocked the poor woman down. It was bad enough, in fact, that the police showed up, escorted Afroman offstage, and charged him with assault. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to anger management classes in lieu of jail time. He also reportedly settled a lawsuit out of court.

Now, granted, if you're a fan, you should probably stay off the stage because if you're not part of the act, you're going to mess up the vibe of the people who belong there. On the other hand, when you're famous, you should be nice to your fans, and that usually means not punching them, because that's what you pay your security guys to do.

The Ramones' hatred for each other was well-known, and there's just no way they would have ever gotten as far as they did if they hadn't learned how to work together onstage. Offstage, though, let's just say it was a whole lot of awkward.

According to Rolling Stone, the Ramones were always either fighting or not speaking to each other. In fact, Joey and Johnny Ramone — who weren't actually related, in case you were unaware — didn't speak to each other for most of the 22 years the band performed together. And when Johnny was speaking, he was shouting and sometimes hitting people.

Johnny liked to be in control, to the point where he'd fine his bandmates — like literal fines — if they showed up late to practice. Johnny was abusive to his girlfriend, too, and bandmates could often hear the sound of her body getting thrown into the wall of their hotel room. "Dee Dee [Ramone] was terrified of Johnny," band manager Danny Fields once said, "because Johnny would punch him in the face ... it would always be after the show, about something like, 'You did a B-major when you should have done a C-minor.' I'd stand outside the dressing room. Inside you'd hear glass shattering and bodies slamming into walls." Now imagine that for a couple of decades. These were clearly not guys you'd want to meet backstage.

Justin Bieber became a star at the tender age of "self-centered immature brat," and not much has changed. So really, it's not Bieber's fault he's obnoxious, though that doesn't make most of us hate him any less.

According to The New Yorker, Bieber's on-tour behavior is so consistently appalling that he's been banned from performing anywhere in China. The official reason was "to maintain order in the Chinese market and purify the Chinese performance environment," which the Chinese did not think could be done if they allowed "badly behaved entertainers" to cross their borders. So what did Bieber do to bring down the wrath of the Chinese government? Well, during one visit, he had his bodyguards carry him up the Great Wall of China. In a similar vein, on a visit to Tokyo, he took selfies in front of the Yasukuni Shrine, which exists to honor the war dead, not to inflate the ego of some dumb kid who for some reason is also famous.

There was also the thing with the monkey — in 2013, the singer tried to bring a young capuchin monkey into Germany but failed to produce proof that the animal had been vaccinated. Customs officials seized the monkey and told Bieber he'd have to pay to retrieve it, but Bieber decided he didn't actually want the monkey anymore. It was eventually sent to live in a zoo. So Bieber is both obnoxious and an animal abandoner.

A very easy-to-define line exists between good dog owners and people whose dog ownership should be limited to T-shirts with pictures of dogs on them, and that comes down to poop. Good dog owners clean up their dog's poop. Lousy dog owners don't.

Now, if Britney Spears really didn't want to potty train her lap dogs and really, really didn't want to clean up after her not-potty-trained lapdogs, it seems like she could have just hired someone to do it for her, because it takes a special kind of donkey butt to let your dogs poop all over your hotel room and then expect housekeeping to clean it up. That's not the only reason why the Los Angeles Four Seasons Hotel isn't super-fond of Britney – she was also flagrantly defying their "no smoking" rule.

Spears evidently takes her star privilege pretty seriously, to the point where harassing fellow hotel patrons isn't outside of the realm of behaviors she isn't embarrassed about. In 2007, per the New York Post, she was kicked out of the Chateau Marmont because of her odd behavior in the hotel restaurant. Did she send her filet mignon back 27 times? No. Did she loudly berate her server because there was too much ice in her drink? Nope. She smeared food all over her face, to the disgust of the restaurant's other patrons. If nothing else, Spears can at least claim to be one of the grossest of the world's superstars.

Like Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez before her, Demi Lovato got her start with Disney. Yes, wholesome Disney, which is known for producing only the most wholesome stars. Well, Lovato may have let fame go to her head at way too young an age, because only a few years after the release of Disney's Camp Rock, she made the news for punching one of her backup dancers in the face.

According to Narcity, Lovato was on tour with the Jonas Brothers when punchee Alex Welch says the star became suspicious that one of her many dancers had "told on" her. Evidently, Lovato had gotten in trouble with her managers for her bad offstage behavior. Lovato called all her dancers together, threatened them, and then seemed to independently conclude that it was Welch. "And she walks up and punches me and literally walked away," Welch remembered.

Lovato later admitted she'd been partying and was already in trouble for (you guessed it) trashing the hotel. Someone in her entourage told hotel management that Lovato was taking Adderall, and Lovato was so enraged that she got one of the tour managers to tell her who had ratted her out — by convincing him that she just wanted to thank the kind soul who had clearly only talked out of love and concern: "I remember thinking, 'I'm about to beat this b*tch up.'" Fortunately, the incident ended after the first punch.

Sometimes the nightmare isn't the way the band behaves — it's the way their fans behave. In 2000, Pearl Jam was playing at Denmark's Roskilde Festival when the mosh pit got out of control. Now, if you've ever been in a mosh pit, you've almost certainly had the thought, "I'm gonna die," because mosh pits can be terrifying. But in general, moshers come out of the experience with nothing more than a few bruises and maybe a bloody nose. Not at this show, though.

According to Rolling Stone, eight people suffocated in the mosh pit, and a ninth died in the hospital the following day. Up until that point, it was the second deadliest rock concert in history — The Who's 1979 Cincinnati Riverfront concert, where 11 people died in a stampede, still held the first place record. (Since then, several horrific nightclub fires have toppled both concerts combined, claiming 100+ lives).

The Roskilde Festival was a tragedy, but it wasn't a surprise — Crowd Management Strategies says mosh pits were responsible for at least 10,000 injuries between 1998 and 2008, and they're a staple at Pearl Jam concerts. In 1998, a writer described a Pearl Jam concert in Greenville, South Carolina, where fans were crowd-surfing and climbing barricades to get into the mosh pit. A writer in Missoula, Montana, described a similar scene in 1995. So as fun as a Pearl Jam concert is, the mosh pits do seem a little nightmarish.

After all those years of wild parties and trashed hotels, today's Aerosmith just wants to spend their downtime eating Subway sandwiches and watching TV. Or maybe they just don't really want to hang out with Megadeth.

Poor Megadeth. They must have been really excited about the opportunity to tour with Aerosmith in 1993 — until they were dumped. So what happened? Did Megadeth bore Aerosmith's fans? Did they show up to shows late? Were they too wasted to play? Nope. According to Entertainment Weekly, they were whiny.

Just three shows into the 24-date tour, Aerosmith announced that Megadeth was out, and Jackyl was in. Megadeth's official statement on the subject was that they'd left the tour because of "artistic restrictions," but the word from Aerosmith was a little different. "With Megadeth we thought we had a hard-rockin' animal," guitarist Joe Perry said, "that would lubricate the first 10 rows and get the audience ready for us." As it turns out, that was actually the kinder version of the story. An unnamed spokesperson said that Dave Mustaine, lead singer of Megadeth, was just annoying. "He would piss and moan and whine," said the source. "What he was really upset about was [Aerosmith] weren't hanging out with him." So in other words, touring with Megadeth is like being stuck in a room with that one annoying kid from high school who is hoping to get noticed by the cool kids. How the mighty have fallen.