Many rock stars have earned hefty sums during their careers, and a lot of them have also
lost hefty sums during their careers.
The rock 'n' roll lifestyle doesn't tend to breed paragons of financial responsibility,
so let's take a look at some rock stars who are surprisingly poor.
With his monthly residency at Madison Square Garden and scores of hit songs, it's not like
Billy Joel wallows in poverty.
Still, even a wealthy entertainer feels it when someone embezzles him out of tens of
millions of dollars.
This is exactly what happened to Joel, courtesy of his former manager Frank Weber.
The ridiculous numbers involved were revealed in 1989, when Joel sued Weber for a whopping
$90 million.
$30 million of that was compensatory damage for money Weber had allegedly squandered,
and $60 million was punitive damages for the multiple ways Weber had reportedly defrauded
According to the lawsuit, Weber had given huge loans to his own enterprises in Joel's
name, lost over $10 million on various investments, and even mortgaged the singer's copyrights
without bothering to mention it.
All the while, he was pulling strings to make the papers that Joel received massively misleading.
And while he was doing all this, he was also happily raking in $20 million of Joel's money
in commissions.
Joel's quest for comeuppance didn't exactly go well, as Weber cunningly filed for bankruptcy
and the case was ultimately settled out of court.
This notably wasn't even the first time the Weber family had hurt the singer.
In 1982, Joel had a painful divorce from Weber's sister Elizabeth, who ironically also used
to manage Joel, who would later exclaim,
"I hooked up with the Borgias!"
Despite being one of country music's most popular and longest-tenured artists, Willie
Nelson has surprisingly little to show for himself.
Many of his difficulties stem from his issues with the IRS, which hit him with a ridiculous
$16.6 million bill in 1990.
While Nelson's lawyer negotiated it down to a "mere" $6 million, it didn't make the sum
any more affordable for the artist.
Things eventually escalated to a point at which the IRS confiscated basically everything
Nelson owned in 1990, and the poor country star had to spend years in tax debt limbo.
At one point, he even released an album called The IRS Tapes: Who'll Buy My Memories? in
an effort to raise money to pay his tax bill.
"This is a collection of songs that is very special to me, and I hope you'll enjoy listening
to them as much as I enjoyed playing them for you."
Despite those efforts to pay back his taxes, Nelson wasn't fully in the clear.
As Texas Monthly reported in 1991, his finances were somewhat rocky even without the IRS calling
to collect.
The country legend had a habit of keeping a huge entourage and distributing his cash
readily to hangers-on, sometimes to the point that he himself had little left.
Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, is one of the premier indie music success
stories of the late nineties and early 2000s.
By the 2010s, she was a revered artist that managed to sell out venues wherever she went
on tour.
That's the kind of career that not only makes people assume a musician has financial security,
but also root for her to have it.
After all, isn't it nice when an indie rocker can secure such a huge slice of the success
pie?
So imagine everyone's surprise when Marshall canceled her 2012 European tour due to the
fact that she had gone bankrupt.
To be fair, she had some perfectly good reasons for her unfortunate financial situation.
She has a history of addiction, psychotic breaks, and mental health issues.
Some of these have led to hospitalization, which have necessitated wallet-hurting tour
cancellations.
In 2012, she had spent most of her savings on producing her hit album, Sun, when she
was struck down by angioedema, a nasty immune disorder that swells up the face, tongue,
and throat and is potentially life-threatening.
Fortunately, she recovered, and she seems to be doing a lot better these days.
It's probably fair to say that Ron Isley of the Isley Brothers isn't the greatest taxpayer
on earth.
In 2006, he was charged with five counts of tax evasion and one count of "willful failure
to file a tax return," which netted him three years and one month behind bars, along with
$3.1 million in back taxes.
This was the last straw in a history of IRS troubles, to the point that the judge called
him a, quote, "serial tax avoider."
Isley's history with money is certainly less than exemplary.
He first filed for bankruptcy in 1984, and the second time came in 1997, when the IRS
had enough with his antics and seized a bunch of his property, including cars and a yacht.
In 2001, the singer was discharged from bankruptcy, but he promptly failed to file his tax returns
for the past four years and cheated on his return for 2002.
Fortunately, his 2006 prison sentence taught him his lesson and put him back on the straight
and narrow.
That is, if one ignores that he was still fighting the IRS in 2013, and his earliest
tax return troubles go all the way back to 1971.
At least he's consistent.
Brooklyn-bred indie rock band Grizzly Bear first broke big around 2006.
According to a 2012 interview with Vulture, they went from playing at diners for handfuls
of people to opening for Radiohead, having their music featured in Super Bowl ads, and
being praised by Jay-Z.
Still, years of indie prestige, sold-out venues, and critical acclaim didn't make the band
super-rich.
In fact, according to singer Ed Droste, they're pretty far from any kind of wealth at all.
The band members still live in the same places they did pre-fame, and some of them don't
even have health insurance.
While Droste admits they're getting by, he told Vulture the fact that no one's buying
records anymore makes bands appear bigger than they actually are.
He also noted that even the seemingly lucrative act of licensing a song will only bring the
band members a small amount of financial security.
As Droste put it, it might make them go,
"Yay, I don't have to pay rent for two months."
Grizzly Bear generates most of its revenue from touring, but after agents, managers,
tour staff, venues, Ticketmaster, and others have taken their share, the band members'
bank accounts are apparently nothing to write home about.
To make things easier on their wallet, they cut costs by only sleeping in hotels occasionally
and generally treating the whole operation as a risky small business.
Sly Stone and his group the Family Stone were a mainstay of the late sixties and early seventies
music scene, and songs like "Dance to the Music" and "Everyday People" remain pop culture
touchstones to this day.
So it's easy to think that Stone, as the frontman and primary songwriter of the group, would
be rolling in the same kind of cash many other superstars of the era do.
Alas, instead, in 2011 he was rolling in his camper van, which he also lived in.
But if you go back to 2007, Stone was still living the kind of life you'd expect from
a star of his caliber.
He had a huge house, multiple cars, and a vineyard in Napa Valley.
However, it appears that the combination of a hefty drug habit and some financial difficulties,
including a $50 million lawsuit against his former manager, eventually left him in a bad
place.
While Stone himself claimed to enjoy the transient van life, that may have just been him trying
to put a positive spin on his circumstances.
Luckily, his finances have somewhat improved thanks to the Music Modernization Act, which
dragged copyright law kicking and screaming into the modern age.
In the process, it netted Stone some surely welcome streaming royalties.
Conor Oberst, who is best known as the founder of the indie band Bright Eyes, told W Magazine
in 2017 that he recently moved to Omaha, Nebraska because he couldn't afford New York City rents
anymore.
One of the reasons he can't make ends meet in the Big Apple probably has something to
do with the time he fell victim to a strange and hurtful online hoax.
Oberst's reputation took a serious hit in 2013, when an anonymous woman claimed online
that he had assaulted her.
That accusation went viral on the internet and eventually spread to mainstream media.
Oberst's representatives released a statement, and a back-and-forth over whether the artist
was guilty or not started raging.
Five months into the incident, Oberst sued the commenter, who had deleted her initial
post, for libel.
Two months later, she admitted that she had made the whole thing up for attention.
Still, the story was already out there on the internet, and tons of people were now
seeing Oberst's name in conjunction with a nasty accusation.
From his time in The Partridge Family to his status as a major pop star, David Cassidy's
lengthy career and permanently smiling face always made it seem that he was enjoying a
financially secure life.
Unfortunately, that couldn't be further from the truth.
Before his death in 2017, he was living with dementia while also dealing with the burden
of financial problems.
In 2015, People Magazine reported that he filed for bankruptcy and that his accumulated
debts ran as high as $10 million.
Meanwhile, his heirs received only roughly $150,000 in assets and assorted music memorabilia.
One possible reason for Cassidy's surprisingly low net worth may be that the dementia he
claimed he was fighting was not, in fact, dementia at all.
He had a history of alcoholism and had three DUI arrests in his final years, and in 2018,
a documentary that aired on A&E revealed that prior to his death, Cassidy confessed that
the dementia was actually all about alcohol.
He had been drinking and quietly suffering from a liver disease while his family thought
he was clean.
Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver frontman Scott Weiland was notorious for his struggles
with addiction.
His longtime demons finally got the best of him when he died of an accidental overdose
of cocaine, MDA, and ethanol in December 2015.
As such tragedies tend to do, this prompted a look into the late singer's finances, which
weren't exactly in great shape either.
Since his death, Weiland's estate has been bringing in an average annual royalty income
of almost $265,000.
Overall, the total value of his estate was reportedly $1.6 million, according to court
documents filed in 2018.
That doesn't sound too bad, but there are some significant bills to pay.
Weiland reportedly owed $645,000 to City National Bank and $700,000 to a "significant federal
creditor," which makes the net worth of his estate less than a year's worth of royalties.
As such, it appears that his kids didn't exactly become millionaires overnight.
In 2018, a judge ruled that the estate must pay the two children of Weiland and his ex-wife
Mary an allowance of $4,000 per month until they turn 18.
Considering that the children were already 15 and 17 at the time of the ruling, they're
not exactly set for life.
Legendary Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister roamed the earth's venues nigh-constantly
from the seventies to his death in 2015.
He's indisputably one of the greatest rock stars of all time.
As his band's sole consistent member and their main songwriter, he should by all accounts
have been rolling in countless millions.
Or so you'd think.
According to Metal Insider, the total worth of Kilmister's estate at the time of his death
was originally assumed to be around $8.3 million.
However, it eventually turned out to be $648,000, which is certainly nothing to scoff at, but
it does seem like a pretty insignificant sum for so many decades of sheer rock 'n' roll.
Of course, it's not like Kilmister didn't have opportunities to spend what he earned
over the years.
He was known for his excesses, from his decades-long speed and alcohol habits to his extensive
collection of German war memorabilia.
In some ways, his relative lack of wealth isn't surprising at all, considering how much
he was living up the rock star lifestyle.
"Without drugs, would there be a Motörhead?"
“Oh yeah there would be, yeah, some sort of-”
“Would it be the same?”
"No, probably wouldn't be called Motörhead cause that's slang for 'speed freak.'"
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