13 Classic Rock Songs That Were Once Banned From The Radio

In the not-too-distant past, when radio stations ruled the world of music, the people who controlled the airwaves held enormous sway over which songs would become hits and which would flop. That meant that program directors and their bosses could dictate whether to ban tracks that held the potential to offend viewers. That fate befell some songs that are now considered iconic, including Loretta Lynn's ode to reproductive freedom, "The Pill," and Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl," which was banned by some stations for the lyric, "Making love in the green grass." (Morrison had, ironically, changed the lyrics and title from "Brown-Skinned Girl" in order to avoid radio bans in America's segregated South.)

Glancing back into the annals of rock history demonstrates that there have actually been several songs that received the old heave-ho from censors, only to be embraced by fans and now considered classics. There's a Beatles favorite that may or may not have been about drugs, a sea shanty with lyrics so garbled that the FBI spent years investigating whether they were obscene, and a legendary instrumental that sounded dangerous to the establishment. Here's a look at five classic rock songs that were once banned from the radio.

"Louie Louie" was written and recorded by blues singer Richard Berry in 1957. A few years later, Berry's lament about a lovesick sailor desperate to get home and see his gal became a regional hit in the Pacific Northwest for Tacoma-based band The Wailers. In 1963, two other bands from that region recorded "Louie Louie," with competing versions released by Paul Revere & the Raiders and The Kingsmen. While the Raiders' version got the band signed to a record deal, The Kingsmen's single stirred up controversy due to parents' fears that its incomprehensibly sung lyrics were obscene. So scandalous was the song that Indiana's governor, Matthew Welsh, unofficially banned it from all radio stations throughout the state.

The controversy captured the attention of no less than FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who launched a federal investigation (one of many examples of music that triggered FBI investigations). Bureau agents were tasked with listening to the recording at various speeds in order to identify the supposedly filthy lyrics. The FCC also launched a probe, eventually dropping it when no profanity could be identified. The FBI ultimately came to the same conclusion, although the bureau's examination dragged on for two and a half years. All that investigating, utilizing the resources of the U.S. government, ultimately proved diddly squat. However, the notoriety wound up propelling the song to No. 2 on the Billboard charts as kids eagerly scooped up the notorious record that was so dirty it was investigated by the feds. 

Released in October 1965, "My Generation" represented a major evolutionary step for The Who, the four-piece London band that was previously known as The Detours and then The High Numbers. With its incendiary battle cry celebrating youth ("I hope I die before I get old"), Pete Townshend's powerful guitar riff has remained one of rock's most memorable. When the vocals kick in, frontman Roger Daltrey sings with an exaggerated stutter — most notably when he sings, "Why don't you all f-f-fade away," creating the brief anticipation of an f-bomb that never comes.

The song became an instant smash, even though the BBC initially refused to give the song any radio play — not because of the feigned swear word, but because officials were concerned Daltrey's stuttered vocals could offend stutterers. "But the BBC banned it," Townshend told Vulture. "I think the people who banned it were intelligent people. They were just being protective. He insisted that the intent wasn't to mock stutterers but to mimic teenage boys who'd popped so many amphetamines that they stuttered when they spoke. In any case, the ban didn't last long: When "My Generation" received heavy airplay on competing radio stations and the single flew off the shelves in record stores, BBC ultimately relented.

Daltrey — actually a stutterer himself — confirmed Townshend's recollection that the stuttering was intentional. "It was always in there, it was always suggested with the 'f-f-fade' but the rest of it was improvised," he told Uncut.

Among the many classics unveiled in The Beatles' trailblazing 1967 album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Featuring lyrics about "tangerine trees and marmalade skies" and a "girl with kaleidoscope eyes," the psychedelic imagery led to assumptions that the hidden meaning of the song was about an acid trip, as the main words in the song title form the acronym "LSD." That speculation was enough for BBC executives to ban the song from radio airplay, with an internal memo (via Oxford University Press) fretting the song "could encourage a permissive attitude to drug-taking."

The song's writer, John Lennon, claimed he'd been inspired by son Julian's drawing, which he'd titled "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." "I thought, that's beautiful, I immediately wrote a song about it," Lennon said during a 1971 appearance on "The Dick Cavett Show," insisting there was no connection with LSD. "It wasn't about that at all," he added.

More than three decades later, Lennon's assertion was refuted by Paul McCartney, who stated that "Lucy in the Sky" actually was about acid — and wasn't alone. "'Day Tripper,' that's one about acid. 'Lucy in the Sky,' that's pretty obvious," McCartney told the Daily Mirror in 2004 (via Today). "There's others that make subtle hints about drugs, but, you know, it's easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles' music."

"Lola" has remained one of the most memorable songs produced by The Kinks, and the group's only song to be banned by the BBC. In under three-and-a-half minutes, the 1970 classic tells the saga of a lovestruck guy who meets the titular Lola in a Soho bar, only to come to a surprising realization. "Well, I'm not dumb but I can't understand," frontman Ray Davies sings, "Why she walks like a woman and talks like a man."

Despite the controversial subject matter — Lola is either a male crossdresser or a transgender female — the song declaring, "Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world," wasn't actually controversial. "It didn't inspire that much outrage," rock critic Jim Farber told NBC News. "People were more flummoxed by it." 

In fact, the BBC's ban wasn't for edgy subject matter but over a lyric referencing Coca-Cola. "The BBC came down on the track like a bag of hammers, as they had a policy to ban anything that made commercial references," noted British college prof Carey Fleiner, author of "The Kinks: A Thoroughly English Phenomenon." Drastic measures were undertaken in order to get the record unbanned. "Famously, Ray had to fly back and forth from a Kinks tour in the USA to London and quickly re-record the lyrics and replace the drink with 'cherry cola' in order to get past the censors and to get the record out," Fleiner recalled.

Of all the songs to have been banned from radio, Link Wray's "Rumble" holds a unique distinction. Unlike songs banned for salty language, sexual innuendo, or controversial subject matter, "Rumble" was pulled from radio play in certain parts of the U.S. — including Boston, New York, and Detroit — despite being an instrumental that doesn't contain a single lyric. The issue wasn't what "Rumble" said, but how it sounded — and that sound was menacing. With Wray's deliberately distorted guitar and its provocative title (slang at that time for a street fight), "Rumble" generated fears it would incite violence. That teenagers who listened to its languid riff would immediately transform into juvenile delinquents and begin slashing each other with switchblades. According to E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt, it's not just the distortion of Wray's guitar but also the chord progression that makes the riff sound so dangerous. "It's the sexiest, toughest chord change in all of rock 'n' roll," Van Zandt declared in the documentary "Rumble."

Despite the ban, "Rumble" went on to crack Billboard's Top 20 while inspiring a generation of youngsters — including the likes of Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend — to pick up a guitar. When the single was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, Van Zandt joked about the rarified place the song holds in rock lore. "'Rumble' is the only instrumental in history to be banned for its lyrical content," he quipped when introducing the song.

Few country music artists have been as beloved as Loretta Lynn, yet even she was not immune to controversy when she issued a single extolling the virtues of the birth control pill. In her 1975 song "The Pill," the mother of six expounded on the pill's life-changing benefits, delivered in such lyrics as "This incubator is overused because you've kept it filled / But feeling good comes easy now since I've got the pill."

The underlying message was hardly racy and more feminism lite, yet the song still proved too much for conservative Nashville. When recounting the story of one of Loretta Lynn's banned songs, it's important to remember that about 60 country music radio stations outright refused to play it. Lynn herself felt the song was rather tame. "It isn't as dirty as some of my other songs. I wrote one the other day that is so dirty I have to close my eyes when I sing it," she told Time in 1975. "I had four kids before I was 18. If I had had the pill, I would've been popping it like popcorn."

Despite the radio ban — or possibly because of it — "The Pill" became one of her biggest hits, selling 15,000 copies a week at one point. The controversy also helped the single enter the pop charts, with "The Pill" hitting No. 70 on the Billboard Hot 100.

When XTC recorded "Dear God," the British band's label was so fearful of backlash that the song was deliberately left off the 1986 album "Skylarking" — not surprising for an atheist anthem that doesn't just question the existence of the Almighty but denies it altogether. "I can't believe in you," singer and songwriter Andy Partridge declares in the lyrics. "Dear God" was ultimately released as the B-side of the single "Grass" and wound up getting significant airplay on college radio. The song was included on subsequent pressings of the album, yet many commercial radio stations refused to play it. "Most programmers were afraid to put it on," Geffen Records' John Brodey told The New York Times. The controversy was hardly abated when a Florida radio station that did play it subsequently received a bomb threat, or when a high school student held a knife on the school's secretary, demanding she play "Dear God" on the P.A. system. 

Partridge admitted he couldn't wrap his head around what all the fuss was about. "People shouldn't be annoyed by this tiny little soap bubble of an idea, this 90th-hand idea that maybe there isn't an aging English actor wrapped in a sheet on a ball of cotton wool saying, 'I'm going to make you win the lottery this morning,'" he told the Times. "For Chrysler's sake, I'm just saying maybe there isn't a God — and these Christian, tolerant people want to chainsaw me.”

By 1981, Phil Collins was on a roll. Initially the drummer for prog-rockers Genesis, he became the band's lead singer after the departure of singer Peter Gabriel in 1975 and then released his first solo album in 1981. The LP's first single, "In the Air Tonight," cracked Billboard's Top 20, peaking at No. 19, and it permeated pop culture a few years later when used to devastating effect in the debut episode of "Miami Vice" in 1984.

Strangely enough, the song was banned from radio airplay — twice! The first ban occurred in 1991, when the BBC banned 67 songs from airplay in Britain due to fears they could be connected to the Persian Gulf War. In the case of "In the Air Tonight," the fear was that both the title and its atmospheric lyrics would remind listeners of the crisis in the Middle East (other songs on the banned list included Cutting Crew's "I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight," Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," and Eddy Grant's "Living in the Front Line"). The song's second ban occurred a decade later, when America's Clear Channel Communications banned 162 songs in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. This time, "In the Air Tonight" was banned due to concerns that any lyrics containing the word "air" could remind listeners of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Punk rock exploded in Britain with the 1977 release of the Sex Pistols' debut album, "Never Mind the Bollocks." In addition to the single "Anarchy in the UK" (previously released and included on the album), the subsequent single ruffled enough feathers to be banned by the BBC.

The lyrics of that single, "God Save the Queen," took a dim view of Queen Elizabeth II. "God save the Queen / The fascist regime /... / She ain't no human being," sings frontman Johnny Rotten. Released (not coincidentally) to coincide with her silver jubilee, the single was decried by BBC Radio 2 controller Charles McLelland as being in "gross bad taste." Retailer Woolworths refused to stock the single, while Member of Parliament Marcus Lipton sniffed, "If pop music is going to be used to destroy our established institutions, then it ought to be destroyed first."

The ban simply drew even more attention to the single — just as Sex Pistols' manager and mastermind Malcolm McLaren had hoped. In 2007, the erstwhile Johnny Rotten, John Lydon, looked back at the outrage the song generated in a post on his website. "There are not many songs — written over baked beans at the breakfast table — that went on to divide a nation and force a change in popular culture," he wrote.

The first single from British band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, "Relax," instantly generated controversy in the group's native Britain. While BBC Radio 1 host Mike Read played the chart-climbing hit for listeners on his show, he casually began scanning the record's sleeve and reading the lyrics. He was appalled at what he'd read and lifted the needle before the song had finished playing. Branding the song "obscene," he vowed that he'd never play it again. The BBC followed suit, refusing to play the song on any of its radio or TV shows. 

As it happened, the BBC's ban made "Relax" forbidden fruit and provided Frankie Goes to Hollywood with an outrageous degree of publicity — which the band exploited expertly. Within weeks, the song topped the U.K. charts, remaining in the No. 1 spot for four consecutive weeks. The BBC finally relented and returned "Relax" to its airwaves. That became a watershed moment for Britain's public broadcaster, which had a long and dubious history of banning certain songs for often flimsy reasons. "It was the time when Radio 1 realized this couldn't go on anymore because they ended up looking so ridiculous," Martin Cloonan, author of "Banned! Censorship of Popular Music in Britain, 1967-1992," told BBC News.

A single on The Everly Brothers' 1958 debut album, "Wake Up Little Susie" tells the story of a teenage couple who fall asleep while watching a movie (presumably at a drive-in). As the lyrics tell listeners, the unnamed narrator awakens at 4 a.m. and frantically wakes up girlfriend Susie while panicking about being "in trouble deep" due to the wrong impression people — particularly their parents — will draw from their staying out all night together. As Don and Phil Everly sing, "Our goose is cooked / Our reputation is shot." 

Despite the clarity of the lyrics — which make it evident there had been no hanky-panky, just two sleepy teenagers and a boring movie — the song rankled some high-ranking church officials in Boston. In fact, the Archdiocese of Boston advised all radio stations in Boston to take "Wake Up Little Susie" off its playlists, which they promptly did. When exploring the untold truth of The Everly Brothers, it's clear they weren't expecting such an extreme reaction to the song — they didn't think it was even a little scandalous. "They called and said it had been banned in Boston, and I said, 'What?'" Phil Everly recalled in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. "I was naive in those days. To me, they just fell asleep at a movie. Everybody else took it like some big deal ... Today you say that innocent little song was banned in Boston, and somebody's going to ask you, 'Where were people's heads?'"

A single from The Beach Boys' landmark 1966 album "Pet Sounds," "God Only Knows" took pop music in bold new directions. "We were taking some real chances with it," Tony Asher, who co-wrote the song with Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson, wrote in the liner notes for a "Pet Sounds" reissue, via Far Out. "First of all, the lyric opens by saying, 'I may not always love you,' which is a very unusual way to start a love song."

However, an even bigger issue proved to be the song's use of the word "God." That led some radio stations in the conservative U.S. South to ban the song — even though the word was used in a non-secular way and wasn't at all blasphemous. However, the album came out weeks after John Lennon's remark about The Beatles being "bigger than Jesus" led to a backlash that saw Beatles albums and merch being burned to a crisp.

Ultimately, those bans did little to dull the legacy of a song that's now considered to be a masterpiece — and remains a touchstone for Paul McCartney. "I just think it's a great song — melody, harmonies, words, you know," he enthused during an appearance on "The Ronnie Wood Show." "It's a great song, I love it, you know, it's my favorite Beach Boys song."

The success of the 1978 movie musical "Grease" took actress and singer Olivia Newton-John to the top of the charts, with "Summer Nights," "Hopelessly Devoted to You," and "You're the One That I Want" all cracking Billboard's Top 10. She followed that up with the film "Xanadu," a critical and commercial bomb that nevertheless yielded the hit "Magic," which spent four weeks at No. 1. That all paved the way for "Physical," which hit the charts in November 1981.

Boasting a video tied to the early-1980s aerobics craze, the song's suggestive lyrics raised eyebrows, with Newton-John declaring, "There's nothin' left to talk about / Unless it's horizontally," before launching into the catchy chorus of "Let's get physical." In some markets, the song was deemed to be too suggestive for radio airplay, and it wound up being banned in parts of Utah. "Once the words sank in it caused an uncomfortableness among listeners," Jim Sumpter, program director of Provo's KFMY-FM, said in a newspaper interview, adding, "In the middle of a rating book we couldn't afford to play it."

"One station tells me they won't play it because of the lyrics," MCA Records' Pat Pipolo explained. "In the Bible belt, a station says the lyrics are too pubescent. ... Any station not playing 'Physical' is only hurting themselves and depriving its listeners." Ultimately, those bands didn't prevent the song from rocketing to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Top 100, a spot that "Physical" held for a wildly impressive 10 weeks.