The "bad guy" in the band: who are the other Mike Loves in music?

Stills is the Mike Love by far

― dollar rave club (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, May 28, 2014 5:44 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love csny btw

yeah i mean stills is pretty talented, but he was so full of shit and his weird hatred/jealousy/neediness towards neil young...his bullying behaviors, it's all there

Revive!

This article: http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/260-the-jesus-lizards-book-reviewed/

... seems to point to Wm. David Sims as the Mike Love of The Jesus Lizard. Or at least he and Duane Denison as the guys who wanted to "go professional" during the major-label period and the David Yow-Mac McNeilly axis as the creative weirdos.

From Mick Jagger to Mike Love: all hail the money-grabbing men of rock

Mike Love, naturally, is the ultimate Mike Love and he is widely despised for it: for being a bully, for forcing Brian Wilson into things he was unfit to do, for claiming credit for things he deserves no credit for, for turning the Beach Boys into his personal fiefdom. Well, faced with the incapacities of Brian and the wildness of Dennis Wilson – the man who, let’s not forget, brought Charles Manson into the Beach Boys’ camp – what was he meant to do? Love, as the Beach Boys might put it, kept the summer alive.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/low_concept/2010/11/please_allow_me_to_correct_a_few_things.html

Classic thread

http://www.furious.com/perfect/hounddogtaylor.html

This is a great interview from quite a few years back with Bruce Egnater about Hound Dog Taylor. This one is up there with the all time greats I think for hard band members.

PSF: How was he as a bandleader?

Whatever they (the Houserockers) had a show, they didn't rehearse. That was sort of a rule. They followed that rule very closely. They also followed the rule that you REALLY shouldn't perform unless you had a reasonable amount of alcohol. He set an example for that. In that regard, he was sort of an exemplary bandleader. His concept of the band was that he would get a gig, call up the other guys and tell them where to be and they'd get there on their own and get home on their own. When they were on the road, he bought a vehicle big enough for the three of them. I remember the time that he got mad at Ted and Brewer. Brewer called me from Ohio and said 'Hound Dog left us here. He went home.' I called Hound Dog and he was home and I asked him what happened. He told me 'I said I'd take 'em to the gig but I didn't say I'd bring 'em BACK from the gig.' As a bandleader, he made his own rules and they were very loose. Having a fistfight with somebody else in the band would fall within the band rules. That was acceptable and in fact, sometimes encouraged.

Off the bandstand, he could be very angry and vindictive, especially to the guys in the band. He had a very short temper. When people didn't see him, he'd attack them. I saw the guys on the band pull knives on each other at various times. But sometimes he'd also attack them as amusement. One time when we were driving across the country (I'd usually drive since I was the sober one), Ted was in the front with Brewer and Hound Dog in the back. Hound Dog woke up at 6 in the morning with a cigarette in his hand and slapped Ted in the back of the head and yelled 'wake up and argue!' They drove across the country once arguing whether WOPA was an AM or an FM station for about 700 miles (of course it was both).

They also liked to tease each other about having sex with each other's wives and girlfriends. I remember when Brewer said about one of Hound Dog's girlfriends 'yeah, I knew her when she was a whore on 43rd Street.' In fact, it was a remark like that, directed at Hound Dog about his wife that led him to shoot Brewer in 1975, luckily not fatally.

Ralf Hütter in Kraftwerk, maybe? Not that Bartos and Flur were "geniuses" per the OP but they certainly got edged out of the band while Ralf busied himself with endless archival projects.

Billy Corgan.

he pretty much did all the music and lyrics but it seems he was kind of a dictator and a dick to everyone in the band.

We already went through Billy 3 and a half years ago:

Billy Corgan doesn't fit, now that i think about it. You can't be the undisputed leader of a band and be a Mike Love. Need to be a pretender to the throne, more of a pre-torture Theon Greyjoy-type to be a Mike Love. Corgan's more of a Joffrey.

― brio, Thursday, May 22, 2014 2:13 PM (three years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same goes for David Byrne & Greg Ginn.

now, was he the Mike Love of Zwan? Absolutely

also Lars Ulrich should definitely be added to the (v short) list of people that fit all criteria of being a Mike Love: relative asshole, fame & credit hog, businessman, questionable musicianship.

such a classic thread
anyway, i finally found another Mike Love:

http://www.mikelovemusic.com/

I was really enjoying that Mick letter until I realised it was fictional

The keyboard player and bassist in Soul Coughing, if M Doughty is to believed.

Dolores Cranberry?

Phil Lesh

Phil Lesh

Peter Hook

Can a manager count? If so, Bernie Rhodes

In Springsteen's recent memoir he mentions that one of the E Street Band once came to him and asked for a raise, and Springsteen told him, "If you can find someone else in your position making more than you do, I'll pay you that much, but I'll save you the time because there isn't anyone." That struck me as indicative as this kind of behavior. (He doesn't say who it was, but I suspect his name rhymes with Shmary Shmallent.)

i.e. the guy asking for the raise was practicing "bad guy" behavior, not Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuce

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DL84W9sV4AArG8T.jpg

he may be a notorious punisher, but Mustaine doesn't fit the criteria for a Mike Love in Metallica or Megadeth. in the former, he wasn't the taskmaster/businessman, and in the latter, he's the primary creative force.

i.e. the guy asking for the raise was practicing "bad guy" behavior, not Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuce

asking for a raise is bad guy behavior?

(also, i once tried to rent a manhattan apartment owned by a man whose name rhymes with shmary shmallent but he wanted way too much $$ for it. probably, i can now assume, because he hadn't gotten that raise.)

Peter Hook is a great one, if from an alternate universe where Brian Wilson had kept the band name. I think Stamos may actually be the drummer for Peter Hook & the Light.

Gene Simmons

Andrew Ridgley of Wham!

Andy Taylor in Duran Duran

Simmons been discussed upthread. Some talk about how Paul Stanley was actually the Mike Love of KISS.

Ralf Hütter in Kraftwerk, maybe? Not that Bartos and Flur were "geniuses" per the OP but they certainly got edged out of the band while Ralf busied himself with endless archival projects.

― heaven parker (anagram), Thursday, October 12, 2017 6:57 AM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I disagree. Bartos had quite a fair bit of creative input, particularly on the last three albums he worked on.

If one posits core Mike Loveness as "takes over the band from its originating genius and subverts it to his or her own ends," then I can't agree with choices like Tina Weymouth.

Mould, Robertson, Byrne, Corgan, etc. may be dicks - but none yanked an existing band away from its original inspiring spirit.

Gilmour fits, but Gilmour is also awesome in ways that Mike Love can never be. Stevie too, perhaps, even if you love her inordinately (as I do).

Has there ever been a Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame speech as cantankerous as Mike Love's?

xp I encourage everyone to read this relatively short thread to avoid repeating stuff that was already covered in 2014. also just bc it's a great read, this thread rules. We've already gone through why Corgan, Mould, Byrne, Robertson, etc. don't qualify.

tony banks?

Yes!

"Oh shit, Gabriel is singing over my bit! Let's bury his vocal in the mix!"

gotta be the breadhead of the band with a name like banks amirite?

His solo project was called Bankstatement!

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03058/genesis_3058306b.jpg

That pic must have been taken during the filming of the Genesis documentary that came out a couple years back. Safe to say judging by body language, Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel do not exchange Christmas cards.

Man, all Banks did in that documentary was complain. It was like Noel Redding being bitter that people paid more attention to Hendrix than to him.

Yes, he came across a total dick in what was all most certainly the most boring rockumentary of all time.

Banks was talking shit about everyone while they were sitting there and they were looking at each other like "WTF" it's so great it's up there with Some Kind of Monster for me

love peter gabriel's look these days

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/91/1a/ee/911aeeb253fab87272590b0124ee4e59.jpg

How about Dave Rowntree who played drums in Blur?

There’s a couple of videos and stories of him being obnoxious to everyone.

Here he is bullying my man Nardwuar:

https://youtu.be/AkNvk2MgiCc

jfc how much of a dick do you have to be to hate on nardwuar

Actually Nardwuar seems like a good litmus test to see which band members are cool and which ones are dicks.