Sometimes getting booted out of a world famous band can lead to
feelings of frustration and shame, leading the ousted musician to spiral even further.
Let's take a look at the rock stars who fell into tragedy after getting fired from the band.
In 1981, during a taping of the BBC comedy Radio Active, Philip Pope famously quipped,
"Maybe Ringo Starr wasn't the best drummer in the world. Alright,
maybe he wasn't the best drummer in the Beatles."
And while Starr joined the legendary band in 1962,
whatever happened to the Beatles' original drummer, Pete Best? According to AARP,
when firing Best, the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein reportedly told the drummer,
"I don't know how to tell you this, but the boys want you out and it's
already been arranged that Ringo will start with the group this Saturday."
Best told AARP in 2010:
"The golden apple was within my grasp and it was taken away from me."
Best went on to add that the severity of the situation left him weeping.
It's no wonder that Best was an emotional wreck. After all, that same year,
the Beatles signed a recording contract with EMI — and the rest was history.
Remarkably, Best still doesn't have a clue why he was sacked from the Beatles.
As he explained to AARP, allegedly Paul McCartney is the only person who has
a reason for it — but the pair have never discussed it. As for Best, after an attempt
to kill himself in the mid-60s, he appears to have finally found peace. The ex-Beatle
has a family which now includes grandkids, and formed his own act: The Pete Best Band.
Rhythm guitarist Brian Jones was a founding member of the Rolling Stones. In fact,
he was the one that came up with their name. In 1962, 18-year-olds Mick Jagger and Keith
Richards came across Jones one night at a London performance, and eventually formed the band along
with Dick Taylor, Ian Stewart, and Mick Avory. As the group's former bassist, Bill Wyman, reflected
to Daily News, Jones was "very influential" during the band's formative years yet "slowly lost it."
"But I'm not really sort of satisfied either artistically or personally."
As Wyman explained,
"[He] just kind of wasted it and blew it all away."
At the time, Jones had a crippling drug addiction and was showing up to recording sessions
"incoherent and unable to play." By early June 1969, he was officially sacked from
the Rolling Stones, meeting his demise less than a month later. According to Rolling Stone,
the co-founder of the band was found dead on July 3,
1969, after being pulled unconscious out of the pool at his home. The coroner ruled the death:
"Drowning by immersion in fresh water associated with severe liver disfunction
caused by fatty degeneration and ingestion of alcohol and drugs."
The tragic event has remained a mystery among fans in the years since,
with some even alleging Jones' death wasn't an accident.
Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland may have had more than one firing from the
iconic band. Per Fuse, Weiland exited STP twice under "acrimonious terms,"
yet it's his ejection in 2013 that seemed to be the most tragic,
as he claimed he found out from the press. Weiland wrote in a statement at the time,
"Not sure how I can be 'terminated' from a band that I founded,
fronted, and co-wrote many of its biggest hits."
Weiland's firing shouldn't have come as a surprise. After all,
the problematic singer had a history of drug use and mental health concerns.
Along with his "well-documented" heroin addiction of the '90s, the final 10 months of the singer's
life included going through two cancer diagnoses of his parents, the death of a friend, along with
severe financial troubles, estrangement from his children, and "mental illness."
Weiland died in his RV on December 3, 2015, from an accidental drug overdose. He was 48.
As STP guitarist Dean DeLeo recalled to Billboard of hearing the news,
"It was a feeling I had never experienced. My heart dropped.
It felt like a part of me fell out."
It turns out, Weiland had lost touch with members of the band a few years prior.
Sadly, STP faced another tragedy in 2017 when Weiland's replacement,
Chester Bennington, apparently took his own life.
Ah, Motown, the record label that churned out legendary stars,
and created one of the most influential sounds of the 20th Century. Although the company graced
the world with the sounds of iconic acts such as Diana Ross and The Supremes, The Jackson 5,
and Marvin Gaye, to name a few, it was also home to real-life tragedies of its musicians.
David Ruffin of The Temptations is no exception.
Ruffin joined The Temptations in 1963 as a replacement for Eldridge Bryant,
taking the lead on celebrated tracks such as "My Girl" and "I Wish It Would Rain."
From there, The Temptations' success only grew, and they quickly became Motown's most
successful male group, rivaling the glory of their female counterparts, The Supremes.
Unfortunately, fame only went to Ruffin's head,
and he began feeling bothered by a lack of preferential treatment for himself — at
one point even demanding that the band be renamed "David Ruffin and the Temptations."
That, coupled with his incessant cocaine use, led to his ejection from the band in 1968.
Ruffin's solo career was nowhere near as successful as his time with The Temptations was,
and, according to the Associated Press, his "career was plagued by drug problems"
and arrests, eventually leading to his tragic death in 1991 due to an apparent drug overdose.
Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett was one of the key members of Pink Floyd,
having joined the band early in their careers in the mid-1960s. Acting as the band's guitarist,
Barrett defined their sound, also becoming the main writer for their 1967 debut album,
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. According to Biography, as brilliant and as innovative as
Barrett was, the sounds he was creating were coming to him by way of taking LSD,
and because of his incessant drug use, Barrett was already "losing his tenuous grasp on reality."
In January 1968, Pink Floyd began avoiding Barrett by playing concerts behind his back.
By April of that year, the band officially announced that Barrett was out of the band.
Barrett tried going the solo route, yet heartbreakingly told Rolling Stone in 1971,
quote, "I'm disappearing." In the same interview, Barrett went on to add:
"I'm sorry I can't speak very coherently. It's rather difficult to think of anybody
being really interested in me. But you know [...] I am totally together."
As another piece by Rolling Stone reveals, it was shortly after that interview that the creative
genius truly disappeared from the music world. Barrett wound up back in Cambridge, England,
where he was originally from, and chose to go by his birth name again. He took on painting
but mostly remained out of the public's eye before dying from pancreatic cancer in 2006.
Tony McCarroll didn't join the Manchester-based Oasis after the band was already recording
music — he was there from the start. McCarroll was Oasis's original drummer,
and present for the band's highly successful debut album, 1994's Definitely Maybe. So, what happened?
Spoiler alert: lead guitarist and vocalist Noel Gallagher wasn't exactly easy to deal with.
According to Irish Examiner, the singer would regularly make snide jabs aimed at McCarroll's
drumming, with the latter suddenly finding himself "blanked" out of the band in 1995.
Confused, McCarroll tried seeking out his bandmates at local pubs,
looking for any sort of reason for why they suddenly sacked him.
However, nobody was willing to say anything.
The musician ended up moving across the pond, and as he told Manchester Evening News, he,
quote, "got drunk for three whole years." McCarroll eventually decided to lawyer up.
In 1999, he ultimately accepted a settlement of £550,000, which translates to roughly $760,000,
in exchange for giving up any future royalties on the Oasis tracks he worked on. In 2019 interview
with Manchester Evening News, McCarroll had this to say about the whole situation:
"If you're asking when I got back to normality [...] maybe I'm not normal.
You're reminded every [...] day of Oasis."
Fleetwood Mac has had a revolving door of members throughout the years. As the
Observer wisely points out, the band already had three distinct groupings before bringing
on Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in 1975 — with only bassist John McVie and drummer Mick
Fleetwood remaining from 1967. Along with McVie and Fleetwood were Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer,
and Danny Kirwan, with the latter joining in 1968. Sadly, he only lasted four years.
As revealed by the Independent, Kirwan was a clutch contributor for the band's early sound,
making contributions to the lyrics, vocals and instrumentation on their 1969 album
Then Play On. Unfortunately, behind the scenes,
the guitarist was struggling — in particular because the band's lineup began changing, and he
found himself carrying the weight of songwriting responsibilities. After one particularly vicious
argument with new recruit Bob Welch — coupled with his heavy drinking — Kirwan was fired.
The songwriter attempted going solo, and would go on to release three albums. However,
none of Kirwan's solo work compared to his success with Fleetwood Mac. His former band lost touch
with him until 1993 when the Missing Persons Bureau finally located him at a London hostel.
At the time, he told the Independent he had lived at the hostel for four years. Tragically,
Kirwan died in June 2018, still homeless and living in a hostel at the age of 68.
While some may view the songs of Journey as cheesy '80s ballads,
there's no denying their impact. As Rolling Stone so succinctly puts it,
Journey "basically invented the power ballad." And with Steve Perry fronting the band with his iconic
voice, the San Francisco-based group produced some of the most well-known songs on the planet.
Journey was first formed in 1973, achieving little success until hiring Perry in 1977. With a
plethora of hits, tours, and eight multi-platinum albums, Journey was everywhere — yet Perry grew
exhausted. He left the band in 1987 on his own accord. Perry then released two solo records,
and would eventually go on to reunite with his old friends in the mid-1990s.
"It was a dream come true to be in Journey, you know."
Per Rolling Stone, after a hike in Hawaii, the singer found out he
had a degenerative bone condition that would require hip-replacement surgery,
and flip-flopped with when exactly he would have that done. Ultimately,
the band grew impatient and booted Perry out of the group, replacing him with soundalike Steve
Augeri. What followed for the former frontman was utter and complete "loneliness." With most of his
family members dead, Perry visited their graves and wept. Perry told Rolling Stone,
"I used to think that if I became a performer and everybody loved me,
that I wouldn't have to go through these things. But guess what? There's nowhere to run."
Steven Adler's road to recovery from his heroin addiction wasn't easy. The former Guns N' Roses
drummer was famously fired from the hard rock band in the early '90s after a series of questionable
behaviors, including taking a stumble into his drum kit during one performance. The main incident
that gave Adler the boot, however, was during the 1990 recording of their song, "Civil War."
As Adler himself recalled to Ash Avildsen and Booboo Stewart on Mom It's Not Devil's Music!,
he one day decided he was going to stop using heroin, cold turkey, yet didn't realize that:
"If you do heroin and then you stop doing it, you get violently sick."
Although he begged his manager and bandmates to hold off on recording the track,
they still forced the drummer to come in, and he kept ruining the session due to his health.
Ultimately, due to that session, Adler was out of the group. Since his ejection,
things haven't exactly been easy for Adler. The drummer appeared on Celebrity Rehab with
Dr. Drew in both season 2 and season 5, and in 2019, TMZ reported that the
former Guns N' Roses drummer was taken to the hospital after accidentally stabbing himself.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please call the Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Administration's 24/7 National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.