Artists you love with quirks you hate

...yea, definitely...I know it's a nitpick type of thing because I'm such a huge lifetime fan so it seems overly obvious.

 

Oh love that, one of the greatest vocal performances ever. Passionate and painful and scary.

 

Wow, very surprised I’m the first to mention Michael Jackson. Shamone, people! Hee hee!

 

On Appetite, he filibusters.. . . he always has to have the last word in the song. and say some little comment as the music ends, like the comment at the end of Brownstone.

 

Jimmy Page is a world class procrastinator.

 

Roger Waters because he's always going on about Israel.

 

Stevie Nicks endless in-concert biographical patter in the lead in to Gypsy that is longer than the song itself
Ringo Starr 'Peace and Love'! Okay. We get it. (I love Barbara Bach too!)
Randy Newman has been using the same schtick for 20 years introducing certain songs - fine if you have never seen him but very tiresome otherwise
Bono gets political. Yeah and we see how the Walk On / cardboard masks of Aung San Suu Kyi on the 360 Tour very badly backfired and distance had to be made. Just don't get involved! Much easier!
Ian Anderson. Please?

 

yalsa? There's some Looney Tunes guitar after that, isn't there?

 

Mick Jagger, fake American accent as in "Dear Doctor" or his falsetto as in "Fool To Cry." Terrible!

 

I think there are lots of examples that spring to mind especially when you see the band live a few times.

Rush get my vote for the most - over rehearsed and mind blowingly creaky un spontaneous between song dialogue - midsong smiles and guitar dance routines - and robotic interaction with Neil (in fact its a delight when something goes wrong and Alex has to pull something out of the hat) - still love them to death though.

Have to agree with McCartneys facial expressions - though Im not that big a fan so he doesnt count.

 

"It's great to be here. It's great to be anywhere."

~Keith Richards every time at every concert for the last 20 years (you do the math) as he is about to break into his set of songs in the middle of the show and the way he acts as if it was an off the cuff remark.

Still love him but enough with the joke already! I can practically feel Mick wincing on the inside every time he hears it.

 

Every time KISS did the choreographed 'dancing/head bobbing' thing in the early days seen here for practically the entire final minute of the song from 2:43 on. It makes me nuts!!

 

But do you love John more?

Here's someone else who expresses a beef with Sir Paul and his quirks:

Per McCartney part 8: the insecure, paranoid loser : Todd Alcott

"I can’t find the reference for this, it’s in one of these books I have but I can’t find it, so maybe I have the details wrong, but this is one of the things that drives me completely crazy about McCartney and, after everything else is sorted out, my feelings about his music, the shape of his career, his professionalism, his lack of inspiration, etc, after all that is sorted out, this is the thing that still gets to me.

The story, as I remember it, is that McCartney is in a hotel lounge, and the pianist is playing standards. The pianist takes a break and McCartney goes over to look at the guy’s piano. The pianist has been playing from a standard “fake book,” (maybe this one), and McCartney, amused, flips it open to see what songs are in it. When he comes to “Yesterday,” he is chagrined to find it credited solely to John Lennon.

This ruins his day.

He calls up the publisher of the fake book and learns that, due to space restrictions, they only credit the first songwriter listed on any given song. It’s nothing personal, they do it I guess with Lieber and Stoller, Gershwin and Gershwin, Holland, Dozier and Holland too.

This throws McCartney into a terror. Not being listed as the co-composer of “Yesterday” in this hotel-pianist’s fake book shakes McCartney to his core. It doesn’t matter to him that he’s listed as the co-composer of “Yesterday” every time it appears on a Beatles or McCartney record, or in any of the other of hundreds of incidents when someone has published a recording of it, it doesn’t matter that anyone with a passing interest in popular music knows that “Yesterday” is McCartney’s song, that the Beatles didn’t even play on it, it doesn’t matter that no song could be more obviously a McCartney song than “Yesterday,” it doesn’t matter that McCartney’s gigantic royalties don’t observe what is printed in a hotel-lounge-pianist’s fake book — this thing lists it as a Lennon song and that freaks the ever-loving **** out of McCartney.

Feeling the harsh wind of posterity breathing down his neck, McCartney launches a massive offense to claim his share of the Beatles story. Lennon’s murder in 1980, he feels, has given Lennon an unfair advantage in the “genius” sweepstakes — people, McCartney feels, are under the impression that the Beatles were “John Lennon’s band” and that Paul was somehow just puttering around in the background, playing bass or something. Maybe he feels that people equate him with John Paul Jones or John Entwhistle or — gasp — Bill Wyman.

(There are some legitimate causes for this paranoia — in McCartney’s mind, anyway. John Lennon was inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame many years before McCartney and McCartney, I’m told, was appalled when Andrew Lloyd Webber got a knighthood before he did.)

How serious is this problem? Here’s how serious. McCartney enlists the help of pal-from-the-old-days Barry Miles to write Many Years From Now, which goes through the Beatles’ career, incident by incident, album by album, song by song, line by line, for 720 pages. If this was a passing problem, I would guess that McCartney might devote an afternoon or two to making some inquiries and then rest assured that his place in music history was secure. But to go on for 720 pages about who thought up the haircuts and who thought up the collarless suits and who’s idea it was to grow mustaches and who thought of putting the orchestral climax into “A Day in the Life” and who came up with the melody for “In My Life” and who introduced who to Yoko Ono and who was out doing research while someone else was lying around his suburban mansion getting high, my God. Don’t get me wrong, I love hearing these stories and what’s more, I trust McCartney’s memory — I think he’s telling the truth. What’s more, I think the book serves a valuable purpose, delineating how these cornerstones of popular culture were designed and built. But when page 1 has McCartney saying “I loved John, I would never try to take anything away from his reputation,” and the ensuing 719 pages proceed to do just that, it gets a little creepy.

(I sense that McCartney is telling the truth about these things not necessarily because he says so, but because the things he says fit with the evidence — Sgt Pepper has the structural underpinnings of many subsequent McCartney albums, “In My Life” sounds like a McCartney melody, not a Lennon melody, so forth. Someday, I’ll do a post on the Shakespeare Authorship question.)

His campaign doesn’t stop there. He calls his new album Flaming Pie, the title of which refers to a John Lennon quote regarding the origin of the name “Beatles” — “I had a vision that a man came unto us on a flaming pie, and he said, ‘You are Beatles with an A.’ And so we were” — except Paul here claims that he, in fact, is the “man on the flaming pie.” Nice.

He releases Paul is Live, a concert recording from one of his 90s tours. The cover of the CD is a (extremely poorly) Photoshopped version of the Abbey Road cover — with all the other Beatles removed and replaced by a sheepdog. Not only is this bad, bad album cover art (oh God, like Abbey Road hasn’t been parodied enough times), it negates the other individuals who worked on Abbey Road (oh, remember that album Abbey Road? Yeah, that was mine, did you know that?) and it also, for those in the know, reminds everyone that the Martha of “Martha My Dear” was McCartney’s sheepdog. Because maybe there are people out there who think that Martha was Lennon’s sheepdog, I guess.

This is all irritating enough (and there is more where this came from), but then it gets ugly. McCartney, I’m told, can’t get past this incident in the hotel lounge. It eats away at him, he can’t stand it. Why, if this goes unchecked, hotel-lounge pianists the world over might introduce “Yesterday” as a John Lennon song until the end of time. He knows it’s a little late to call do-over on a decision he made with his friend forty years ago to make the credits read “Lennon/McCartney,” but the “Yesterday” thing just bugs the **** out of him, so he calls up Yoko Ono and asks, politely, if it would be okay with her if the credit were reversed for just this one song. John didn’t help him with any of the words, nor with any of the melody, and all this is well-documented, and it is Paul alone on the recording, and everyone knows that, and he’s not asking to have John’s name taken off the song, Yoko wouldn’t be losing a penny of royalties, Paul wants only to have the credit reversed, so that, in the future, no inebriated hotel-bar patron might mistakenly hear that “Yesterday” was written by John Lennon.

Yoko politely declines Paul’s request.

Now it’s war — it’s the battle of the cold-blooded, iron-willed bastards. Paul may be a brilliant, canny businessman and an absolute tyrant in the studio or boardroom, but he’s up against Yoko Ono, who never liked him and who is no slouch in the boardroom herself (for all her starry-eyed, peace-n-love posturing). And besides, she holds all the cards. It seems like such a small thing, but when Yoko has the opportunity to irritate Paul, there is apparently no such thing as a slight too small (let’s not forget, the rumor is that it was Yoko that tipped the Japanese police to McCartney carrying pot into Japan in 1980 — on top of everything, she’s a narc!).

McCartney puts out another crappy record and goes on another tour. The next live album, Back in the US (Paul seemingly giving up on selling himself as a solo artist any more, now he’s just “ex-Beatle Paul”) has a number of Beatles songs on it, and McCartney pointedly lists himself first as the composer of every one of them. Just to irritate Yoko, to goad her into trying to sue him or something. In his mind, there will be a public outcry from Yoko and that will push the issue into the public realm and then McCartney can act all innocent and everyone will say how McCartney has been cheated out of his rightful credit on all these wonderful songs that he wrote and John Lennon really didn’t, you know. I’m not making this up, he actually talks about this in the media, that this was his plan. It’s all so petty and bizarre and paranoid that it makes me recoil in disgust.

I know that Paul McCartney is a pillar of 20th-century culture. I know he was a large part of why the Beatles were so great, especially in the latter, greater half of their trajectory. Everyone knows that. My wife knows that, my children know that. Anyone with the ability to both read and listen to music knows that. I think everyone in the world knows it except Paul McCartney.

Anyway, he seems to be better now. I don’t know if it was the knighthood or the second marriage or the death of George Harrison or the billion dollars or so that he has to comfort him, but somewhere in there he gave up his pursuit of Beatle-history-dominance, decided that maybe being Paul McCartney was a good enough gig after all. Personally, I think he’s taking it easy to reduce his stress; he’s bound and determined to outlive Ringo — and then there will be no one to question him."

 

When Elvis Costello’s vibrato goes out of control.

 

I'm not a Beatle fan in the least but that was a fabulous post, very entertaining!

 

Ted Nugent, and for me they're more than quirks.

 

I guess Slayer.I love the energy and music if you would call it that!
The lyrics or gibblilogiboish are often adverse to my reality and usual rationalized singalongs!

 

John Bonham. If half the stories about him are true, he was not a nice person to be around on tour.

 

Strange? Isn't he worshipped around these parts?

 

When I read of a couple of those prurient Zep tabloid books I thought, wait, Robert Plant was BFFs with that *******?

 

James Brown when he stiffed his backing band on pay

 

When I started listening to a bunch of Thelonious Monk albums one after the other, I realized that he uses a certain descending pattern in each and every solo he plays, so that you end up rolling your eyes every time it comes up. I mean, weren't those jazz players supposed to be past masters at their instruments, much more skilled and versatile than the poor illiterate kids who play rock and pop and don't know any better?

 

How about when Ozzy says “Go Crazy” thirty times a show?

 

As for irritating quirks: Tom Araya's wildly off-key shrieks, which can sound more like someone passing a kidney stone than a shriek of the damned.

 

Speaking of Kiss, how about Paul Stanley's stage banter between songs? He sounds like Foghorn Leghorn and he goes on for what seems like a half hour. For God sakes, shut up and play the next song already!