Examples of artists who built their careers on music that they didn't really like.

I was inspired to start this thread while reading Examples of record companies pressuring creative choices?

What I'm looking for aren't musicians who were told that they had to play songs that they didn't like - I'm looking for musicians who wrote music they didn't like on their own. Artists whose heart was beholden to one style of music, but their creative muses bent them toward another.

This may be a short and pointless thread. I can't really think of any good examples off the top of my head. I can think of sidemen, like Charlie Watts who would probably have rather been playing jazz than rock and roll. Or artists who liked many genres of music, like the Mountain Goats who are known for singer-songwriter indie and ALSO their appreciation for metal. But those are not what I'm interested in.

Primary songwriters. Huge fans of genre x. But ride genre y, which they secretly loathe, to fame and fortune.

Charlie Rich?

I've always wondered if this was the case for that one dude in Alabama.

http://www.verbicidemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Alabama.jpg

What was Charlie Rich's deal?

I think he falls more into the area of an eclectic unclassifiable talent only able to find commercial success by donning some sort of creative straitjacket. Also his songwriting dwindled away the more successful he became.

I think Charlie Rich would have been happiest playing jazz to a couple dozen people in a small club his whole life.

Nina Simone

when miley claimed not to like "pop music"

http://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/miley-cyrus-ive-never-heard-a-jay-z-song-2009611

Pete Townshend: "I really didn't like working with that band at all. ... What we produced was not something that I wanted any part of, particularly. The Who didn't make the kind of music that I wanted to make, they weren't the kind of band I wanted to be in, and it was just one of those things where I happened to be there, and when you put us together, we went off in this particular direction. If we'd have been robbing banks I would have had as little control in whether or not I was a part of it or not."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gqwyb9sFqo

There are any number of contemporary Country artists who grumble about having to make a certain type of music in order to get airplay, and that they'd rather be playing traditional country.

Wasn't Charlie Watts often quoted in the 60s as saying he thought rock and roll was "silly?" Certainly he's made more money with the Stones than he has as a session jazzbo.

John Lydon maybe, at least in terms of the band that originally made him famous?

Fred Wesley

dunno if he counts as a "primary songwriter", certainly his contributions as bandleader during James Brown's peak were a huge part of the music. He always wanted to be a jazz guy though.

Ditto Pee Wee Ellis.

Joanna Wang?

I'm having trouble thinking of examples of this - requires people that publicly repudiated their most popular work, which isn't something a lot of people tend to do.

Scott Walker maybe? I think I've read or heard interviews with him where he was critical of a lot of his early stuff that made him popular. I don't know if he thought this at the the time though.

I can imagine this has happened a lot, whether people are vocal about it or not. You're in a band because you like to play but it isn't necessarily exactly your thing, band suddenly takes off, the arguments for staying outweigh the arguments for leaving.

I recall that Billy Zoom had a basic contempt for what X was doing, that he would have been much happier in a rockabilly band.

The LA disco guys Rinder & Lewis come to mind. They were the producers behind El Coco, Saint Tropez, Le Pamplemousse, and other projects. But they were jazz guys from way back - at least Rinder was, not sure about Lewis. While "secretly loathe" might be too strong a way to characterize their attitude to disco, they definitely leave the impression in interviews that they felt they were slumming it making their string of successful dance records in the '70s. Today Rinder spends his time doing abstract paintings, which he describes as "the jazz of painting."

I thought they were (prog) rock guys?

I'm sure I read one of them say they were in some rock band and their manager said to them get yourselves down to such-and-such disco and check out that scene, that's where the action is.

lol is jazz the default thing musicians would rather be doing

I think so. Getting back to the blues, instead of all this psychedelia and bubblegum crap, was a thing among rock musicians in the late 60s, hence Zappa having that bit in "200 Motels" about Jeff Simmons wanting to leave the Mothers of Invention to play the blues.

Charlie Watts is also tbqh not really up to snuff as a jazz drummer, not enough so to have made a career of it.

lol Zappa really is yr default answer isn't it :)

xp

I'm sure I read one of them say they were in some rock band and their manager said to them get yourselves down to such-and-such disco and check out that scene, that's where the action is

That's exactly it. The career progression was jazz/session work in the '50s/early '60s, then R&B/Soul, then hard rock in the early '70s

IIRC at least some of the wrecking crew people felt that way, which is not too surprising.

Charlie Watts is also tbqh not really up to snuff as a jazz drummer, not enough so to have made a career of it.

But might he have been, had he stuck with it instead of getting sidetracked with the Stones? Ginger Baker, same question.

nah, i really don't think so. Fred Wesley and Pee Wee weren't great jazz players either but were able to carve a much more distinct identity in funk even if that wasn't their original intention.

Mike Clark is another sideman example, made his name playing in the Headhunters with a very unique style but wanted to be playing straight-ahead jazz the whole time.

(and he IS a great jazz drummer, but doesn't necessarily sound very different from a thousand other great jazz drummers)

Mandy Moore?

Alex Chilton, perhaps? He seemed to take an active dislike to Big Star's entire catalog.

think that was more for personal reasons than actual genre distaste - he was still praising Byrds/Beach Boys etc. up to his death

Derek: David, we had a fifteen-year ride, mate. I mean, who wants to be a fuckin' 45 year old rock'n'roller farting around in front of people less than half their age?....
David: So true, so true, yeah....
Derek: ...cranking out some kind of mediocre head-banging bullshit we've forgotten?
David: It would b...it's beneath us...who wants to see that...not me.
Derek: That's right...absolutely right. I mean, we could take those projects that we thought, you know, we didn't have time for....
David: Oh, there's dozens, there's so many dozens of projects.
Derek: You know, we didn't have time for 'em because of Tap and bring 'em back to life maybe.
David: Do you remember what we were...do you remember the time?...
Derek: At the Luton...at the Luton Palace...
David: Yes.
Derek: We were talking about a rock musical based on the life of Jack the Ripper...
David: Yeah,'Saucy Jack.'
Derek: Right. 'Saucy Jack.' Now's the time to do that.
David: "Saucy Jack, you're a naughty one, Saucy Jack, you're a haughty one, Saucy Jack."
Derek: Right...
David: It's a freein' up, innit?
Derek: Yeah.
David: It's all this free time it's suddenly time is so elastic....
Derek: It's a gift, it's a gift of freedom. You know.
David: I've always, I've always wanted to do a collection of my acoustic numbers with, the London Philharmonic as you know.
Derek: We're lucky.
David: Yeah.
Derek: I mean people...people should be envying us. You know.
David: I envy us.
Derek: Yeah.
David: I do.
Derek: Me too.

Guitarist from Limp Bizkit bad-mouths the band as much as anyone.

Thom Yorke. He's doing his best, bless him.

William Onyeabor

On the Charlie Rich tip, I recently picked up one of those various artists Hi Records comps and was reminded of his very brief "Soul Singer" period on the label.

One of the things that screwed him over right from the start was he'd initially signed on with Sun Records as a songwriter, only for his two main interpreters to leave the label (Johnny Cash), or suddenly have their star fall (Jerry Lee Lewis). To make money, he had to go commercial.

Feargal Sharkey

Kip Winger’s True Passion: Music For Ballet

I thought of Feargal Sharkey too...I just wasn't sure which of his two incarnations he didn't like.

Van Morrison when he was working with Bert Burns. Brown Eyed Girl a far cry from TB Sheets and Astral Weeks.

More on Van, think he was pretty clear that he wrote some of his singles because he needed cash & Astral Weeks type stuff didn't pay the bills.

I remember Paul Wheaton saying if he wasn't in the Beautiful South he wouldn't buy the albums.

I daresay most musicians are like that.

Heaton. Stupid spelling corrector...

Alison Moyet's had at least two 'I hated that stuff' periods..

How much of that is "remembering the effort of making that album makes me not want to listen to that album"?

this thread reminded me of the stories of blues musicians in Elijah Wald's 'Escaping The Delta' who wanted to play Jimmie Rodgers and Broadway tunes.

Robert Palmer?

allegedly Nas would have rather been performing Christopher Cross-esque pop

Sammy Davis Jr hated The Candy Man, and was endlessly irritated that it became one of his biggest hits, and most likely his most famous song.

But might he have been, had he stuck with it instead of getting sidetracked with the Stones? Ginger Baker, same question.

― Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱), Friday, July 8, 2016 12:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

IDK, but I doubt it wrt Watts -- he just doesn't really display the right kind of acumen, chops or feel for it. I mean maybe if he had just woodshedded jazz 6 hours a day for a couple decades.

As for Baker, he really did put a lot of his career into playing "jazz" and I think he was quite awful at it, as well as at rock drumming, but far worse at jazz.

Also Jordan OTM about Mike Clark being a good but undistinctive straight ahead jazz player, while being a singular funk player.

Ginger Baker's No Material, with Sonny Sharrock, Nicky Skopelitis, Peter Brotzmann, and bass player Jan Kazda, as a last-minute substitute for Bill Laswell, is a pretty great, nut-rageous jazz-skronk-rock set (two sets now, on the expanded reissue). So glad I'm glad I'm glad he didn't just recycle Cream forever, though I liked some of that too.

Supposedly, the sessions for Gene Autry's version of "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer," which I think he introduced, at least as a hit, took forever, because he can be heard complaining so much about the material; he didn't want to cut it because he knew damn well it would be a monster and he'd be stuck it with it (might not have to sing it in non-seasonal shows, but he'd have to hear himself singing it on the radio every xmas from then on).

Along the lines of the Gene Autry thing, Rosemary Clooney hated the quirky pop songs she did such as "Come On-A My House" and "Botch-A-Me" that were her first big hits

Cause she was a JAZZ singer, baby

Supposedly, the sessions for Gene Autry's version of "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer," which I think he introduced, at least as a hit, took forever, because he can be heard complaining so much about the material; he didn't want to cut it because he knew damn well it would be a monster and he'd be stuck it with it (might not have to sing it in non-seasonal shows, but he'd have to hear himself singing it on the radio every xmas from then on).

― dow

i don't know if it's what he _really wanted_ to do, but gene autry started out doing jimmie rodgers-style yodeling murder ballads and protest songs like "the death of mother jones". i really love this material, actually.

Second on Alex Chilton, but would it be more appropriate to cite the Box Tops, whom Chilton always referred to as the creation of Dan Penn, than the Box Tops?

Waylon Jennings, and perhaps Willie Nelson, also come to mind here.

than Big Star, that is.

I talked to a couple of Showaddywaddy back in the day, they music they actually liked was things like The Eagles (they were just being known in the UK back then), it's not that they hated the stuff they did but basically it was a job, and a well paid one.

Did Bob Dylan not want to play rock and roll from the beginning, but fell in with the folk scene because it was happening at the time?

And Tom Waits, maybe? Sort of got stuck in a stylistic rut until he met Brennan

Dylan was a rock n roller but fell deep in love with Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly

Wondering where Richie Blackmore falls on this.

Built his career on 20th Century music, really wanted to play 16th Century music?

What about something like Simple Minds hating their biggest hit, "Don't You (Forget About Me)"? Is that this thread or another?

MGMT have repeatedly trashed their first album

Cause she was a JAZZ singer, baby

Someone introduced Elvis to Ernest Tubb and Tubb, the most gracious and courteous of entertainers, listened patiently as the nineteen-year-old poured out his love for Tubb's music and told him it was his real ambition to sing country music. "He said, `They tell me if I'm going to make any money, though, I've got to sing (this other kind of music). What should I do?' I said, `Elvis, you ever have any money?' He said, `No, sir.' I said, `Well, you just go ahead and do what they tell you to do. Make your money. Then you can do what you want to do.'"

MGMT have repeatedly trashed their first album

― Treeship

i think that's a different thing. p. sure peter stampfel has repeatedly trashed every record he's ever made, but that doesn't mean he's spent his life choosing to make music he doesn't really like.

Jerry Garcia.