THE WORST ROCK BAND EVER

This version of the "Worst Rock Band Ever" page was compiled from entries originally posted in real time on my blog, so the comments about "come back tomorrow" or "yesterday I wrote" are relics from that original presentation. You can read it all now in one fell swoop. Also, I received a lot of complaints about the original green background of this page, which worked fine on my main website for years, since all the articles were short, but caused eye-strain when stared at for as long as it took to read this lengthier page. So I've changed the color scheme, hopefully to make it a little bit easier on the eyes. Sorry if I've already blinded you. There are several other similar essays done around this time linked at the bottom of this page.

The Worst Rock Band Ever Competition (Part One):

Guitar World's article about the worst rock bands of 2003 (they picked LimpBizkit and Creed) got me to thinking . . . which band is the worst band in the history of rock and roll? Being a stats and numbers and research geek, I've developed a system for who qualifies and a process for then honing the qualifiers down into a sheer hard ball of ultimate badness. It'll probably take a week's worth of posts to type it all out here with explanations and what have you, so watch this space to see the worst of the worst pulled from under their rock and beaten to death with sticks.

First, setting the field. It seems that to qualify as a really significant atrocity, a band has to have had dramatic commercial success. Naming some obscure nonentity as the worst rock band of all time is pointless. If a band's badness hasn't been spread from coast to coast by the record industry, and then lapped up by the record buying rabble, then they really don't have a right to claim the all-time worst title, do they?

So how do we identity such bands and set the stage for the suck-fest? First, I went to the RIAA website (they're the folks who award gold and platinum records) and did a search for artists who have had at least one record sell over five million copies. There's a bunch of them. A surprisingly large number of them, in fact, well over 100. So, since this is a survey designed to assess the worst rock band ever, we first eliminate solo artists (with the exception of cases where a solo artist and a band are viewed as a single entity: Shania Twain doesn't qualify for the list, but Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers do, for example). Then we eliminate vocal groups (N'Sync, Boys II Men, etc.); if a group's members don't or didn't at some point provide the primary instrumentation for their music, then they really don't deserve scrutiny for all time worst band. It's kind of a gimme that groups backed by anonymous session musicians are gonna score higher on the suck scale. Finally, we eliminate groups who exist completely outside of the rock spectrum: if a group has never released a record that featured rock music as a basic part of their sound (Alabama, Mannheim Steamroller, etc.), then they don't belong in this competition either, since there's not really a fair apples-to-apples comparison to be made there.

After that process, there were 79 bands left on the list. I wanted to get to an even 64 teams, so they can be pitted against each other, head to head for suck content, which means that I needed to judge 15 of the qualifying bands as "bubble teams" who really don't belong in a competition for worst band ever, due to consistent critical success, influence on entire genres of music, etc. So in the first subjective cut, 15 bands were eliminated from consideration, judged (by me) as being the least likely to "win" the worst bands title. (After the Fact Note: The "bubble team" that gave me the most trouble was The Eagles . . . and with 20/20 hindsight, I probably should have let them into the field of 64, if for no other reason than for spawning Glenn Frey's solo career). The 15 so eliminated were:

AC/DC
The Beatles
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
The Doors
The Eagles
Earth, Wind and Fire
Fleetwood Mac
Led Zeppelin
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Bob Marley and the Wailers
Pink Floyd
Queen
The Rolling Stones
Sly and the Family Stone
U2

This leaves us with our field of 64. Now . . . to ensure that we have a decent blend of styles and genres as we get closer to our final atrocity selection, these 64 bands are broken into eight divisions, loosely by stylistic approach. Of course, it's not possible to exactly fit them all into clusters that make sense . . . but in the same way that Duke sometimes gets sent to the West Regional in the NCAA basketball tournament, some bands have to go into groupings that aren't quite right, just to get them spread out evenly. Within each group, we will sort the bands in alphabetical order, then look at them, head-to-head, to assess which group sucks more. That group will then advance to the next round to be pitted against another advancing group.

Here are the groupings:

Classic Rock (Pool A): Aerosmith vs. Bad Company, Boston vs. Foreigner, Genesis vs. Heart, Journey vs. Van Halen.

Classic Rock (Pool B): Bon Jovi vs. Dire Straits, Guns n' Roses vs. Steve Miller Band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers vs. R.E.O. Speedwagon, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band vs. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.

Punk/New Wave/Hardcore/Neopunk: Blink 182 vs. the Cars, Green Day vs.Korn, Limp Bizkit vs. Metallica, No Doubt vs. the Offspring.

Metal: Def Leppard vs. Motley Crue, Poison vs. Quiet Riot, Skid Row vs. StoneTemple Pilots, Soundgarden vs. Whitesnake.

Blues/Jam: Black Crowes vs. Blues Traveler, Counting Crows vs. DoobieBrothers, Dave Matthews Band vs. Santana, Spin Doctors vs. Z.Z. Top.

Soul/Funk/Rap: Beastie Boys vs. Bee Gees, INXS vs. Linkin Park, Prince and the Revolution vs. the Police,