The 15 Most Overrated Bands in the History of Rock ‘n Roll

As most of you who know me are probably well aware, there’s nothing like hippies to fill me with bile: none of the other groups I tend to have knee-jerk contempt for, not Black nationalists, right wing talk show hosts, Islamic fundamentalists, White Sox fans, or even Southern rock aficionados can get me riled up like this lame ass, self-absorbed generational clot of losers.

In that vein, I noticed the following blurb in this morning’s Chicago Tribune: Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, has now gone public, some 49 years after penning the tune, to state that “Puff the Magic Dragon” has nothing to do with the joys of smoking marijuana. First, what kind of idiots does he take us for? Puff the magic dragon frolics in a magic land with his friend Jackie Paper. The allusions are so obvious, the images so trite, that the meaning of the song is not even really up for debate. The symbolism is so ham-handed that it doesn’t even warrant the word “clever”, until you add the qualifier that it might be clever “for a stoned out hippy.” Even if Yarrow’s lame denial is true, why tell everyone now, almost half a century after having written the tune and decades after even a vague notion of controversy has long sense faded away? My only guess is that Yarrow is looking for some free publicity, trying to make up for the fact that a Peter, Paul and Mary concert was inexplicably left off public television’s recent pledge week programming.

After reading Yarrow’s comment, I immediately went off fuming into my study, and I almost added Peter, Paul and Mary to my list of overrated rock bands. But circumspection won the day, as I realized PP and M are not even vaguely rock ‘n roll, and I decided that it was time to put this list to bed, as my net is being cast too wide.

So, here it is. I guess I should adjust the title to say, “15 of the Most Overrated Rock ‘n roll bands of All Time,” as I’m sure this list is not comprehensive, and I look forward to reading other potential additions. But this is a start, done in alphabetical order:

7 Seconds: This band almost didn’t make the list, simply because 7 Seconds is pretty insignificant and, at first glance, seemingly UNDERappreciated. But someone has to stand for all that generic hardcore from the 1980’s that seemed like a fresh break at the time but who’s light has steadily dimmed with time. As melodic as Schoenberg, as catchy as a test pattern for the Emergency Broadcast Network, 7 Seconds is as likely a culprit as any from that sorry era to be singled out. The fact that they recently toured and have had a bit of a revival in hardcore circles doesn’t help. Hey, these guys, along with most of the horde of tuneless 20-year olds they rode in with back in the day, belong back in the dustbin of history.

Bob Dylan: It’s not like Dylan isn’t an OK poet. And it’s kind of cool how he tours the world with his band, in cultural incognito, ignoring the machinations of the record industry and corporate media. And yes, this choice is technically for a single guy, and not a band. But a lot of folks act like a sheet of Dylan’s lyrics is hallowed ground, while the opaque cultural and political paeans that he’s famous for, written to inspire a generational “fuck yeah” amongst his fans, strike me as both culturally and musically flaccid. How much hot air can a hippy blow out his ass? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

The Eagles: These guys aren’t really even rock ‘n roll, but they sell a whole lot of albums and concert tickets to folks who think of them as rock ‘n roll. Pretentious, egotistic, and puerile, and those are their good points. Why can’t someone make them go away?

Happy Mondays: After watching the otherwise fine “24 Hour Party People” devote the final 45-minutes to this band, I did some research, and found that they were quite popular back in their native England and still hold a fair amount of street cred amongst the rave set in both the U.S. and overseas. Maybe I’m just missing something here, but all the Happy Mondays songs that I’ve ever heard struck me as dull, uninspired, 2nd tier at best, the workmanlike performance of a bunch of tuneless, soulless and, most damning of all, groove-less chumps. And then, while doing a little historical research on the history of Cabaret Metro, I realized that Happy Mondays were the horrible opening band I caught at that club one night on the Pixies’ Doolittle tour. I was tripping on ‘shrooms at the time, and the Happy Mondays were so bad, almost evil in their mundanity (the mundane being the dull edge of evil), that I retreated to a back hallway and was softly banging my head against the wall, muttering “No…. no…. no”, trying to retroactively will the cosmos to change its mind and not allow such an insipid band to exist. Luckily, the Happy Mondays were just the opening act and soon enough got off the stage. God, these guys are truly awful.

KISS: A circus act, not a music group.

Jane’s Addiction: Personally, I hold a soft spot for this band. Perry Farrell lived across the street from me in a communal house of musicians and assorted other freaks and weirdoes back in the mid-80’s, and I kind of liked the guy. I even briefly dated the infamous Jane, the inspiration for the band’s name. But now that its wave has long since crashed, its clear that this band wrote little of lasting significance. Even its two most famous songs are really not much: “Jane Says” is in essence a single riff played over and over on the acoustic guitar, the kind of jam someone might come up with over the campfire; “Been Caught Stealing” benefited from its fun topic and light-hearted music video, which got into heavy rotation on MTV, but centers around a rather unmemorable attempt at white funk, a minor league stab to swing like the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Misfits: A circus punk act, and only marginally a music group. They wrote a couple of catchy choruses, and I loved it when my 5-year old nephew would sing, “Mommy, can I go out and kill tonight?” to piss off his mom. But those are pretty meager virtues for a band whose logo is still seen on at least 25% of the leather jackets worn by hardcore kids, or at least the ones in Chicago, to this day.

New York Dolls: They couldn’t play their instruments, or write good songs, or sing well. They weren’t attractive, even in their salad days. I can see why they gave so many others the courage to get up on stage and try their best, but enough of the hero worship of these vacant, riff-challenged, nincompoops.

Ted Nugent: Speaking of nincompoops. But I won’t damn “the Nuge” for his political broadsides, because rock ‘n roll shouldn’t be politically correct in the first place. However, the man was never much of a songwriter, and he has tried living off the same handful of tired riffs for the past thirty years. “Dog Eat Dog” and “Free for All” are competent rockers, they make the lengthy B-list of songs that I don’t mind hearing when my neighbor across the alley blasts the Loop-FM as a soundtrack as he and his buddies plow through a case of beer in his garage, but the rest of Nuge’s catalog is utterly forgettable, and sometimes even a dumbshit can stumble on a decent riff or two before succumbing to permanent mental torpitude.

Oasis: Another English band with all of the trappings and none of the riffs for rock success. Then again, America had Huey Lewis and the News, which had neither.

Pink Floyd: The anti-Cyndi Laupers of rock, these boys just don’t know how to have fun. I really don’t understand the huge popularity of this band. You can’t dance to them, they aren’t much to look at, and their lyrics are almost uniformly sophomoric. I guess it’s a testament to the fact that a lot of white people like to get stoned, sit very still, and take their inner thoughts way too seriously.

Polyphonic Spree: More concept than music group. It is essentially a one-man show, and not a good one at that. On stage, I feel like I am watching some sad loner trying to channel his private Meatloaf, a persona best kept locked within the privacy of his own basement. I’ll give the man credit: it took a lot of chutzpah to ask 20-odd “musicians” to join him in this project. The fact that he can recruit half a dozen relatively attractive young women to be his background “singers”, who seem to spend more time in a choreographed tossing around of their hair than in actually singing, tells me that the life of a coffee barista in the greater Dallas area must be even more pathetic than I had previously imagined.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: It’s not like these guys are bad. Some of their better riffs have a nice groove. My first problem with the band is that if the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn’t exist, the record industry would have had to create them, and that, in essence, is what it did, taking a band with a lot more perspiration than inspiration and promoting them as the dick-waving white boys who were ready to party. As rock or funk or whatever, most of their hits are merely workmanlike. And I have a real problem with the near deification of their recent work. Songs like “Californication” are just lame retreads of better songs that they wrote a decade or more ago. It is high time for this band to disappear back into the Malibu hills and live off their sundry royalty checks.

Henry Rollins: I’ve already given a tirade or two in earlier blogs on how much I can’t stand this man, and I won’t repeat them here, but why can’t this first-rate jagoff get a real job? He just won’t go away: second-rate singer, third-rate songwriter, fourth-rate poet, incompetent interviewer. What’s next? My bet is that we’ll find him on the cooking channel, presenting his recipe for deluxe mac and cheese or scrumptious pot brownies, entertaining us with long winded stories about how he wishes he could show Rachael Ray his cock.

Sonic Youth: I am a bit conflicted about this one, as there are a number of folks I respect who really like this band. But I just don’t get it. Sonic Youth has always been a follower, the ultimate musical dilettantes, dabbling in whatever was the latest hip thing to arrive in their Manhattan neighborhood, be it crunching barr chords, hip hop, or apocalyptic noise. None of their stuff sounds very original to me, even with all of their pretentious guitar tunings, and none of them can really sing. Most damning, they gave one of the worst performances for a major act that I have ever seen when they opened for Public Enemy at the Aragon circa 1989, jacking away on their guitars for over an hour, offering the audience 75 minutes of undistinguished sludge.