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When Hit Songs Become A Nightmare
Welcome to the rock star version of a recurring nightmare.
From John Lennon wincing through “Let It Be” to Cher dramatically eye-rolling through her 45th performance of “Dark Lady,” this is the musical equivalent of being forced to display your awkward teenage poetry on billboards worldwide. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”—a song so revered that it’s practically musical scripture—makes Robert Plant cringe harder than watching your parents dance at a wedding. And poor Ace Frehley—stuck forever in that “New York Groove” while secretly wishing he could catch the next train out.
These aren’t just songs; they’re gorgeous, beloved albatrosses hanging around their creators’ necks—platinum-selling embarrassments that paid for mansions that their writers are too mortified to enjoy. Welcome to the special hell reserved for musicians who hate their biggest hits.
Let It Be – The Beatles
Paul McCartney had a heartwarming dream about his mother Mary offering him comfort and turned it into one of The Beatles’ most beloved songs. How sweet. John Lennon, meanwhile, thought it was “granny music” that had “nothing to do with The Beatles.” According to Lennon, “It could’ve been Wings.” Ouch. Nothing quite says “our band is disintegrating” like dismissing your bandmate’s masterpiece as something better suited for his future project.
Lennon, forever the contrarian, even believed McCartney was trying to rip off Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”—an impressive feat considering “Let It Be” was recorded ten months before that song even existed.
Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin
Robert Plant has spent decades trying to escape the spiral staircase of his own creation. While Jimmy Page considers “Stairway to Heaven” the crystallization of Led Zeppelin’s essence, Plant once quipped, “I’d break out in hives if I had to sing that song in every show.” He’s even referred to it as “that bloody wedding song” and donated $1,000 to a radio station that promised never to play it again.
The song that launched a million amateur guitar players has become Plant’s personal purgatory, proving that even rock gods can grow to hate their own mythology.
Dark Lady – Cher
While Cher was hanging out with artistic elites like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty who were making “fabulous art,” she was singing about a fortune-telling woman who sleeps with the narrator’s man and promptly gets murdered for it. Not exactly Citizen Kane. Also, she said there was no place in the song for her to pause and take a breath.
“I never liked ‘Dark Lady,’ and it was a big hit,” Cher admitted. She was busy dreaming of rock stardom while being forced to sing theatrical murder ballads. The irony? It took her 25 years to score another #1 hit after the song she couldn’t stand. Sometimes the Universe has a twisted sense of humor.
Cherry Pie – Warrant
Imagine writing a song about dessert-based innuendo in 15 minutes. Warrant frontman Jani Lane’s masterpiece “Cherry Pie” was hastily scribbled on a pizza box after the record label demanded “a rock anthem” similar to Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator.” Lane later expressed his feelings with poetic eloquence: “I could shoot myself in the head for writing that song.”
Though Lane later walked back his comments, claiming he was having a bad day during the infamous interview, the song transformed a band that wanted artistic respect into walking punchlines who would forever be associated with suggestive fruit metaphors.
New York Groove – Ace Frehley
The KISS guitarist didn’t even write his biggest solo hit, and “frankly didn’t think that much of it” when he first heard it. Frehley only recorded “New York Groove” because his producer pushed for it, and he had to get help from a friend just to create the signature “acka-acka” sound effect by having him awkwardly manipulate a talk box tube in his mouth.
The supreme irony is that this reluctantly recorded cover became the most successful single from any of the four KISS solo albums. Sometimes the songs we care about least are the ones the world embraces most—a cosmic joke only rock stars truly understand.
Rainbow in the Dark – Dio
After leaving Black Sabbath to form his own band, Ronnie James Dio nearly took a razor blade to the master tapes of “Rainbow in the Dark” because he thought it was “too poppy.” The metal god who had just emerged from the darkness of Sabbath was embarrassed by this keyboard-driven anthem that dared to be slightly uplifting.
“I absolutely hated that song,” Dio admitted, horrified that something so catchy had infiltrated his otherwise properly heavy album. Thankfully, his bandmates talked him down from his destructive impulses, preserving what would become one of his signature tracks. The song’s message about feeling trapped and unable to release tremendous potential feels especially ironic considering Dio himself felt trapped by the song’s success.
All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You – Heart
What’s more rock and roll than a song about using a random hitchhiker as an unwitting sperm donor because your actual partner is infertile? Heart’s Ann Wilson has called this 1990 hit “hideous” and said it “stood for everything we wanted to get away from.”
Written by “Mutt” Lange (for Don Henley, who wisely passed), the song tells the charming tale of a woman who picks up a handsome stranger, takes him to a hotel for a night of explicitly mentioned multiple orgasms, abandons him with a note, and then years later reveals the resulting child to him. Just your standard romantic fare! Wilson has spent decades refusing to perform this #2 Billboard hit, apparently not thrilled about being forever associated with what amounts to reproductive deception set to a power ballad. Sometimes your most successful work is also your most embarrassing moral quandary.
In the end, these musical masterpieces have become golden handcuffs for their creators—million-dollar prisons. So the next time you’re belting out “Stairway” remember that somewhere, there’s an aging rock star silently wishing he’d written anything else instead.
-Staci L. Wilson
Photo: Ann and Nancy Wilson (John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com via Wikimedia)
Great piece, witty premise! All points well taken, but I will always hold “Let it Be” close to my heart as the lifelong balm it has been for me. 🙂
“Let It Be” should be in a different category. The only Beatle who seems to have had an issue with it was Lennon, and despite the songwriting credit, it was Paul’s song. And crucially, Lennon didn’t have to go out and tour and sing it endlessly, so what was he kvetching about? Made a pile of money on a song he never had to play again after recording it. Ditto for “The Long and Winding Road,” which was far more deserving of being dismissed as “granny music,” especially after Phil Spector poured the syrupy strings and chorus all over it.
I was just entering my teens in the early 70s. I remember many discussions about the meaning to the lyrics of Stairway. In the mis 80s I saw an interview with Plant who said he got a call from an excited Page one day to come down and put some lyrics to this song he and Jonesy had been working on. At the time he had been doing a dive into ancient druid mythology and as it were he didn’t care for the song and wrote the lyrics off the cuff, stating they don’t mean a thing, saying he hated the song. He said the first time they performed it live, it bombed. He said he looked at Page and said, I told you. Then the album came out and it took off and became a concert and radio staple.
If you ever get a chance, you should listen to Ray Wylie Hubbard introduce his song “Redneck Mother”, made famous by Jerry Jeff Walker. It’s hilarious. He explains why the song is so simple and not very good. Often times he puts the story in the context of being asked “what’s the most important thing about being a songwriter?” The answer is to ask yourself if you can sing that song for the rest of your life? Then, every 6 months he goes out to his paycheck and he gets a check. And he thinks, “hey, that ain’t half bad.” “Do you want to hear it again?” Etc. He is a great entertainer. All song writers and performers should have this problem.