Let's face it, rock stars don't always see themselves as normal people.
They travel from city to city, followed by adoring crowds and laying out extravagant
demands to practically everyone they meet.
And some of these stars can be absolute nightmares.
These are the very worst musicians to tour with.
To be fair, when the public accepts you as a diva, that usually means you've kind of
earned the right to act like one.
And everyone knows that Mariah Carey is a diva.
She's such a diva, in fact, that she won't say a word to anyone on the day of a performance,
lest she damage her voice on a particularly harsh consonant.
She's also 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 smashed a tea set she'd been drinking
from so no one could sell it afterwards.
But nothing quite tops the demand she made when Westfield Shopping Center in London invited
her to switch on their holiday lights.
During that performance, the singer wanted to be surrounded by 100 white doves and 20
white kittens, according to Marie Claire, a source said that the doves were a go, but
they couldn't deliver on the kittens for health and safety reasons.
For the record, Carey later denied ever having made such a request.
She explained:
"Twenty cats is an absolute lie.
I'm not a cat lady."
Chris Robinson is the lead singer of the Black Crowes, and remember that information, because
it might just save your life.
In 1991, during a trip to a local 7-Eleven, Robinson overheard a fellow customer point
out to their friend that the lead singer of the Black Crowes was in the store.
The friend, confused, asked who the Black Crowes were.
Horrified, Robinson turned around, and told the friend that she'd know who the Black Crowes
were if she didn't eat so many Twinkies.
The encounter ended with Robinson spitting on her, followed later on by an assault charge.
Robinson got off pretty easy, though: he paid $53 in court costs, got six months of probation,
and the assault charge was later dismissed.
Coheed and Cambria are a pretty big name in the world of rock, but not so big that their
bass player doesn't have to go around robbing pharmacies before a concert.
In 2011, Coheed and Cambria's bassist Michael Todd was arrested for demanding prescription
painkillers from a Walgreens in Massachusetts.
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, because, 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.
Sadly for Todd and happily for Walgreens, someone spotted him getting into the cab,
and he was arrested shortly afterward.
Coheed and Cambria immediately 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.
The meaning behind those words soon became clear, and Todd was kicked out of the band.
But, as Coheed drummer Josh Eppard told Rock the Walls:
"I think anybody who got a call from a friend that did something that crazy.
You just worry.
I'm just really worried about Mike."
But his misfortunes didn't end there, and the ex-bassist was also sentenced to one year
of house arrest and three years of probation.
Cardi B and her husband Offset are a knockout duo onstage, and offstage, too, though that's
more in the literal sense of the term.
Because during their downtime, the couple have a weird taste for getting into brawls
at strip clubs.
In early 2020, for example, the pair performed at the Fontainebleau in Miami and afterward
visited a strip club called "Booby Trap On The River," where some fellow patrons were
clearly in a festive mood.
Unfortunately for those folks, Cardi B got caught in the crossfire of a freshly opened
champagne bottle.
Naturally, Offset took a swing at the champagne-wielding offender.
The couple left before police arrived, which was probably wise, because it wasn't the first
strip club brawl Cardi B has been involved in, she was indicted on 14 charges for a 2018
brawl, including two felony counts of attempted assault with intent to cause serious physical
injury.
Video of that earlier brawl showed her tossing an ice bucket at a bartender whom she suspected
was having an affair with Offset.
There were also some flying chairs involved.
Standard stuff, mostly.
The charges were upgraded from misdemeanors to felonies after Cardi B refused a plea deal.
As of 2020, the case is still ongoing, but Cardi's defense attorney seems pretty sure
it will never go to court, although, when asked, he did dodge a question about whether
or not his client might settle the case beforehand.
In 2015, Afroman was performing in Mississippi, when a female fan somehow managed to wander
onto the stage.
Now, she did kind of get into Afroman's personal space, which is kind of a no-no to most people,
but the singer's reaction was still way out of line.
Having come face-to-face with this on-stage fan, Afroman decided to punch her.
And he didn't hold back, either.
The blow was a full-on haymaker, which knocked the woman off her feet.
It was so bad, 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.
Aerosmith may not have invented the whole idea of rock stars trashing hotels, but they
definitely turned it into an art form.
In fact, Aerosmith didn't even trash hotels on a whim, they were premeditated hotel trashers.
They knew they were going to destroy things on tour, so they brought along tools to help
make it more fun.
For example, a chainsaw was standard tour equipment for the band, while extra-long extension
cords weren't just for the stage, they were nice to have on hand in case the band wanted
the television to explode when it hit the pool.
But as bad as chucking live TVs in pools is, it doesn't come close to the incident in June
1976 when Steven Tyler and Joey Kramer set off fireworks in their hotel room in Nebraska.
It appears they had been trying to launch the fireworks out of the window, though that's
not really much better.
Honestly, it's pretty surprising that any hotels were still taking the band in by the
time the end of the '70s rolled around.
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, however, things were a whole lot worse.
"If you apologise then I'll drop the whole thing."
"I'll do it, but you say it first."
"Well, we'll both say it at the count of four."
"We did that already and it didn't work."
"So we'll do it again."
The Ramones were always fighting, and if they weren't, they usually refused to speak to
each other at all.
In fact, Joey and Johnny Ramone didn't talk to each other for most of the 22 years the
band performed together.
And when Johnny was speaking, he was shouting.
Johnny liked to be in control, to the point where he'd fine his bandmates if they showed
up late to practice.
Far worse, however, was that Johnny was abusive to his girlfriend, and his bandmates could
often hear him throwing her into the wall of their hotel room.
Johnny's abusive streak also reached the band itself.
Band manager Danny Fields once said:
"Dee Dee [Ramone] was terrified of Johnny, 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."
Tragically, all this went on for decades.
Justin Bieber became a star at the tender age of way-too-young, and quickly cemented
his reputation as a self-centered brat.
And not much has changed, either.
In fact, Bieber's on-tour behavior is so consistently appalling that he's been banned from performing
anywhere in China.
The official reason was, apparently, "to maintain order in the Chinese market and purify the
Chinese performance environment," which the Chinese government believed was marred by
badly behaved entertainers entering the country.
Although the exact reasons behind Bieber's ban from China aren't clear, the government
probably weren't impressed by the time he had his bodyguards carry him up the Great
Wall of China.
In a similar vein, on a visit to Tokyo, he once took selfies in front of the Yasukuni
Shrine, which exists to honor the war dead, and constitutes hallowed ground in Japan.
He also filmed a video in Iceland in 2015, in which he ran around doing a whole bunch
of things you really shouldn't do in Iceland, such as rolling on protected moss and swimming
in dangerous lagoons.
And then there was 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.
Talk about dodging a bullet.
Even before the Chili Peppers were big, they were treating women the way generations of
misogynistic rock stars have always treated women, like roadside attractions, only less
deserving of respect.
In 2016, Julie Farman, who worked for Epic Records back when the Chili Peppers were rising
stars, blogged about how she'd once been cornered in a storage room by two band members who
declared their intention to make her the filling in a, quote, "sexy sandwich."
That's just one of their offenses, though.
In 1990, singer Anthony Kiedis was convicted of sexual battery and indecent exposure for
his behavior after a show in Washington DC.
Jurors recommended a $1,000 fine for each charge, which, frankly, isn't going to be
much trouble for a world-famous rock star.
Then, during a 1990 taping of Club MTV Dance, the Red Hot Chili Peppers trashed the stage
and groped a bikini-clad audience member.
After that incident, police arrested bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith and charged them
with lascivious behavior, battery, and disorderly conduct.
They were found guilty, and their fines were donated to a crisis fund.
Flea later whined that authorities had tried to make an example of him.
As if that's a bad thing, somehow.
A very easy-to-define line exists between good dog owners and bad dog owners, and that
line is whether they're willing to clean up after their pets or not.
Britney Spears falls very much into the latter category.
Now, if Britney Spears really didn't want to potty train her lap dogs, and really, really
didn't want to clean up after them, it seems like she could have just hired someone to
do it for her.
But it takes a special kind of diva to let your dogs go to the bathroom all over your
hotel room, and then expect housekeeping to clean it up, after.
And that's exactly what happened with Spears, and it's not the only reason why the Los Angeles
Four Seasons Hotel isn't super-fond of the singer, since she also flagrantly defied their
"no smoking" rule.
She evidently takes her star privilege pretty seriously, even to the point of harassing
fellow hotel patrons.
In 2007, Spears was kicked out of the Chateau Marmont because of her behavior in the hotel
restaurant.
Did she send her steak back 27 times?
No.
Did she loudly berate her server because there was too much ice in her drink?
Nope.
Instead, she, uh...smeared food all over her face, much to the shock and disgust of the
restaurant's other patrons.
The Rolling Stones were at their peak during the golden years of hotel trashing, so you
won't be surprised to hear that they played along with people's expectations of them to
a tee.
The band's after-hours antics were so depraved, in fact, that Robert Frank's tour documentary
covering their 1972 trip to the United States was actually suppressed by the Rolling Stones
themselves, who evidently realized they'd crossed so far over the line that maybe they
shouldn't actually broadcast it to the public.
Among other things, the film shows groupies stripping on an airplane, various band members
engaging in drug use, and, of course, the destruction of at least one hotel room.
And although the band all had a part in this, it's Keith Richards who is most known for
his love of mayhem.
"Do you live very much at night?
I mean, it's almost midnight now."
"Yeah.
Seems to work out that way."
Still, but by the time the band was well into their third decade, he'd mellowed a bit from
drugs and girls...to shepherd's pie.
When Richards showed up before a show on the 1989 Steel Wheels tour, he discovered that
someone else had eaten the shepherd's pie that had been laid out for the band, alongside
some other standard British pub fare.
Richards was so upset that the concert had to be delayed until someone could procure
another one.
Delinquent to diva: that's the Keith Richards trajectory.
Like Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez before her, Demi Lovato got her start with Disney.
But 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.
Lovato had been on tour with the Jonas Brothers when the dancer, named Alex Welch, says the
star became suspicious that one of her many dancers had, quote, "told on" her.
Evidently, Lovato had gotten in trouble with her managers for her bad offstage behavior.
Lovato called all of her dancers together, threatened them, and then seemed to independently
conclude that it was Welch.
Welch remembers:
"And she walks up and punches me and literally walked away."
Lovato later admitted she'd been partying a little too hard, and she was already in
trouble for trashing a hotel room.
Someone in her entourage had then 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.
Fortunately, the incident ended after the first punch.
Courtney Love spent many of her days surrounded by her own messes, years after she sort of
fell out of the spotlight, her daughter said she was pretty much existing on drugs like
Xanax, Adderall, and Abilify, and that her house was such a disaster that a family cat
died after getting trapped in a mountain of junk.
But Love didn't willfully trash hotels the way other rock stars did.
Rather, she just didn't care what kind of state she left them in.
According to Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge:
"The Courtney Love hotel room was a particular kind of disaster.
She brings like two or three giant suitcases full of clothes, and somehow all those suitcases
would get opened and everything would get spread out all over the hotel room.
And then it's all coated in cosmetics and baby powder, it's just a tornado of clothes
and makeup."
Other accounts of Love's hotel rooms paint an even grosser picture.
In 2009, staff at the Inn at Irving Place in Manhattan found used hypodermic needles
and feminine products basically everywhere, except the trash can, that is.
A source said at the time:
"She caused so much damage in eight hours and wreaked so much havoc.
It was actually kind of funny."
Most band's problems can be distilled down to one common denominator: ego.
And while not every musician is a superstar, a lot of them think they are, which was exactly
the problem with Swiss rock band Krokus back in the '80s, when they were touring with Def
Leppard.
Reports say that the band members were so arrogant that they repeatedly ignored basic
instructions from Def Leppard's people about seemingly insignificant things, like what
part of the stage the band should set up on.
The tension got so bad that Krokus' manager punched Def Leppard's drummer, which is not
usually something you do when you're interested in preserving a professional relationship.
Unsurprisingly, Krokus got booted from the tour after that one.
On top of that, the band also had a feud going with AC/DC.
In 1981, they were left out of the UK's Monsters of Rock festival, and though the reason was
never made explicit, the rumor was that AC/DC asked for their exclusion.
We may never know why, exactly, but there's some speculation that AC/DC were insulted
that Krokus frontman Marc Storace didn't want to try out for the band after the death of
Bon Scott.
Maybe it was just because AC/DC just didn't want those arrogant wannabes getting in their
way.
Either/or.
Poor Megadeth must have been pretty excited about landing the opportunity to go on the
road with Aerosmith in 1993, until they were dumped ceremoniously from the tour.
So what happened?
Well, it seems that Megadeth were just too whiny for Aerosmith to handle.
Just three shows into the 24-date tour, Aerosmith announced that Megadeth was out, and the metal
band 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.
An unnamed spokesperson said that Dave Mustaine, lead singer of Megadeth, was annoying as hell.
The source said:
"He would piss and moan and whine.
What he was really upset about was [Aerosmith] weren't hanging out with him."
And that was the end of that.
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