“You Started It: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Most Notorious and Bitter Feuds” by Ken McNab; Backbeat (279 pages, $24.95)
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All you need is lawyers.
Sure, rock stars wail about love onstage. Offstage, though, they rail. Often it’s against bandmates and in lawsuits. Ken McNab’s “You Started It: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Most Notorious and Bitter Feuds” details these battles.
They usually spring from three different yet expected gripes: You’re getting more money than I am. You’re getting more respect than I am. You’re getting more action than I am.
The most common feud, unsurprisingly, seems to be over cash. The Band, for instance, had grown up together, painstakingly working their way up to backing Bob Dylan. But when they started putting out their own music, compositions that had felt like group efforts, they found they needed a name on the copyright line.
More often than not, guitarist Robbie Robertson chose his own.
“We were surprised by some of the songwriting credits,” co-founder Levon Helm had recalled of their first album. “We didn’t realize that song publishing — more than touring or selling records — was the secret source of the real money.”
Then, they discovered that the money was mostly going to one person. “Someone had pencil-whipped us,” Helm said.
This opened up a legal rift and a lasting wound that never healed. While different members would perform together after the group officially disbanded in 1977, Robertson remained unwelcome.
Sometimes feuds have less to do with who raked in the royalties than who basked in the spotlight. Bands may begin unified, but egos can quickly get in the way. In 1961, three talented Detroit singers debuted as The Supremes. By 1967, however, they were officially Diana Ross & the Supremes.
Making Ross’ coronation even more painful? Not only had bandmate Florence Ballard started the group, but she had a stronger voice. Ross, though, was slim, chic and, not coincidentally, music mogul Berry Gordy’s lover.
The cruel melodrama — later captured in “Dreamgirls” — not only broke up the trio, it broke Ballard. She died of a heart attack in 1976. She was 32. And Ross’ public grief at the time impressed nobody.
“The worst act of mock mourning I have ever seen,” recalled a Ballard friend, who watched as Ross made an entrance at the service, sobbed theatrically, and then swooned into the arms of her bodyguards. “Diana didn’t even allow Florence to be the star of her own funeral.”
In other groups, sex sometimes sparked disagreements, but rarely threatened the band itself. Musicians tried to honor a “what-happens-on-tour-stays-on-tour” policy.
However, that wasn’t possible in Fleetwood Mac.
Although the band had long experimented with different styles and lineups, by 1975, they found their way. The new group included Mick Fleetwood, married couple John and Christine McVie, and lovers Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham. But from the start, the personal relationships were a lot more discordant than the music.
The McVies were already talking divorce. Nicks and Buckingham were quarreling, too, but “if we’d broken up within the first six months of Fleetwood Mac there would have been no record,” Nicks acknowledged. “We took the decision to hang in there.”
The first album was a smash, but members were mining their messy relationships for material by the next record. Christine McVie wrote a song about her new boyfriend, “You Make Loving Fun.” If it was hard for her ex to watch her sing that, it paled next to Nicks’ anger when Buckingham launched into his kiss-off to her, “Go Your Own Way.”
“I very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men is all I wanted to do,” Nicks said. “Every time those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him.”
Matters turned uglier and even more complicated when Fleetwood and Nicks briefly paired off. Nicks blamed this coupling on being “completely drunk, messed up and coked out.”
Amazingly, Fleetwood Mac continued in various forms for years, with members leaving, then returning. But when Nicks caught Buckingham making faces behind her back at a 2018 charity concert she reached her breaking point. She told the lawyers to inform Buckingham it was time he went his own way.
“It was the only route we could take,” said Christine McVie, who died recently at 79. “There was too much animosity.”
It was also a reminder that the closer the relationships, the more painful — and potentially explosive — the disagreements. The bonds didn’t have to be romantic; family members in the Beach Boys and the Kinks often turned on each other, infuriated.
Sibling rivalry reached Cain-and-Abel levels, though, with Noel and Liam Gallagher, the brothers behind Oasis. The two men apparently had nothing good to say about each other.
“Rude, arrogant, intimidating and lazy” is how Noel described his brother and bandmate. “He doesn’t like me and I don’t like him,” Liam admitted.
Their 1990s hits included “Definitely Maybe” and “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” Drugs and booze took their toll, and they sometimes performed the wrong songs in concert. Liam would ditch tours at the last minute, and fights would erupt backstage.
When Liam swung a guitar at Noel’s head one night, though, that was it. The show was canceled and, within the hour, Noel announced so was the band.
Saying it brought “relief,” Noel summed up his perpetually enraged brother as “a man with a fork in a world of soup.”
No breakup was more traumatic, though — at least for fans — than that of the Beatles. Although they weren’t blood brothers like the Gallaghers, John Lennon and Paul McCartney shared a special bond. They had met while they were still teenagers, and would be together almost constantly for more than a decade, making music and experiencing a phenomenal fandom no group had seen before.
Naturally, as they evolved, they began growing in different directions. John loved Yoko, avant-garde statements, and radical anthems. Paul loved Linda, cozy domesticity, and upbeat ballads. It was John who first saw the band’s end coming, and privately told Paul he wanted to leave. What angered him was that Paul then made his own announcement to the press – and used it to promote his first solo album, “McCartney.”
Lawsuits soon followed, but Lennon grew even angrier when Paul’s second album came out, with the song “Too Many People” chiding someone who took his lucky break “and broke it in two.” John perceived it as an attack. And, he responded with his song, “How Do You Sleep?” a vicious rejoinder that smirked “those freaks was right when they said you was dead” and declared “the sound you make is muzak to my ears.”
Twisting the knife? Former bandmate George Harrison joined in to play guitar.
Eventually, Lennon and McCartney reached a truce, agreeing to stop weaponizing their songs. They even played together casually, although John finally told Paul to stop showing up uninvited, with his guitar, at Lennon’s home at The Dakota. Their bond, though, was never again what it had been.
“The sad thing is that John and Paul both had problems and they loved each other and, boy, could they have helped each other,” Linda McCartney said. “If they could only have communicated!”
But just because you can make music, doesn’t mean you can talk, or understand how to create true harmony.
