10 worst opening songs by classic artists

‘Father of All’ – Green Day

It felt like every Green Day fan breathed a sigh of relief when the band came back with Revolution Radio. The trilogy left everyone feeling tired and the world’s greatest pop-punk band looking like a shadow of their former selves, but tunes like ‘Still Breathing’ saw them walking in the right direction again. So naturally that meant it was time for their next switch-up, and we were treated to one of the most unwarranted experiments of the band’s entire career.

While ‘Nightlife’ had solidified itself as one of Green Day’s worst songs a few albums before, ‘Father of All’ is by far the worst single they ever made. Outside of the dance beat that doesn’t really work with the rest of the tune, Billie Joe Armstrong’s stab at falsetto sounds like he’s going for the glam-rock approach from the 1970s and comes off more like the indie voice that had become tired around 2015.

Although the record itself wasn’t much better, this was far from what people needed to whet their appetites. The band had bypassed any fans claiming that they had sold out in the 2000s, but looking at the cheetah-print leisure suit that Armstrong was sporting in the video, this was the sound of the millennial generation’s favourite band having a midlife crisis for the span of three minutes.

‘Hello I Love You’ – The Doors

Every song The Doors made was as much about the atmosphere as it was about the musical theory. Jim Morrison always seemed to be on the verge of madness half the time he sang anyway, so hearing him take it past the point of no return on tunes like ‘Back Door Man’ and ‘The End’ whenever he played them live was exactly what people were asking for circa 1968. So with that kind of band, one of the worst things you could do is make them come up with a by-the-numbers pop tune. I present to you good people: ‘Hello I Love You’.

As much as the band may have wanted to get on the radio, this has all the mystique of ‘Light My Fire’ but with none of the payoff. Since it’s also a carbon copy of The Kinks’s ‘All Day and All of the Night’, the whole track feels like it never gets out of first gear, almost like Morrison is forcing himself into the studio and making the most unenthusiastic screams of his entire career towards the end of the tune.

Although Waiting for the Sun did feature a few more surprises like a peek at ‘The Celebration of the Lizard’ and ‘Five to One’, this was the kind of tune that felt cheap coming from them. Hell, the band themselves only needed a little more time to put the title track of the record on the album instead of waiting until Morrison Hotel, so why not give them a little more space to breathe?

‘Tattoo’ – Van Halen

When Van Halen announced that they would be releasing a new album in the 2010s, it truly did feel like the impossible had happened. Eddie Van Halen had to take a long sabbatical before he was back to proper health, and with David Lee Roth back in the group, it finally felt like all of that animosity had finally started to smooth over. If only they could have kept some of that creative ingenuity in the can with them, though, we may have been able to get a better opening single than ‘Tattoo’.

It’s no big secret now that most of A Different Kind of Truth was made from rough sketches that the band had lying around, but this all-new material had some of the doofiest lyrics the band had ever written. We really didn’t need a return to the Van Halen III lyricism or anything, but this feels like switching too far in the opposite direction, especially when Roth’s lines boil down to having a tattoo of Elvis Presley on his elbow and making him talk when he bends it.

While it’s novel to base an entire song around dad jokes for a group that had grown into middle age, it does get the album off to a lethargic start than most people were used to. The Roth era was all about getting into the album, shredding minds, and then leaving the audience delirious to what they had heard, so having something this milquetoast did cool people’s jets before they heard tunes like ‘Chinatown’ get resurrected.

‘Back to School’ – Deftones

Deftones has always felt like a band slightly out of time. Even though they were doing their own atmospheric approach to metal years before the nu-metal boom started, it didn’t take long for their label heads to jump on it as soon as bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit started lighting up the charts. All they needed now was a tune to bring them to the top of the charts, but the one the label settled on meant bastardising one of their greatest albums.

While White Pony is all about putting the listener in a trance as the band talks about the dangers of drugs, ‘Back to School’ feels like a poor man’s attempt at writing a nu-metal anthem, complete with a cheesy video to prove it. Despite the song already existing in the form of ‘Pink Maggit’, Chino Moreno originally wrote this version as a joke when the label demanded that they take the chorus of the original and make it into a pop-metal song.

Since no one ended up getting the joke and the song charted, it was included as a bonus track, completely disrupting the flow of the rest of the album when ‘Feiticiera’ starts. Some truly devoted fans may have been blessed with the original copy of the album without ‘Back to School’, but it doesn’t bode well for an album’s legacy when even the band recommends that everyone skip the first track on the record.

‘Woman Is…’ – John Lennon

When it came to public speaking, John Lennon didn’t seem to be afraid of anything. He may have been in hot water occasionally for what he said when he was in The Beatles, but now that he was free from the Fab Four, he was more than happy to speak his mind on whatever cause he believed in. And while ‘Power to the People’ worked fabulously for the time and ‘Give Peace a Chance’ became an anthem, Some Time in New York City already had people squirming from the first notes.

While the whole album was meant to be a comment on everything from race relations to women’s rights, Lennon’s anthem for the gross double standard women face was already going to cause controversy by having a racial slur in the title. Since I will not be posting the actual title in this copy, Lennon was bound to have detractors from those who hadn’t even heard the song yet, which is a shame because the tune itself is fairly enjoyable.

The saxophone is a great touch, and Lennon is in fine form vocally as he sings about the struggles that women still face to this day, but using one demographic’s racial slur and projecting it onto another demographic of people was never going to go over well. It’s easy to admire the audacity Lennon had to use it in the first place, but there were far better ways he could have delivered his point.

‘Fuel’ – Metallica

For every fan who complained whenever Metallica switched things up, don’t ever say they didn’t know how to open a record. From the beginning of their career with ‘Hit The Lights’ to kicking down the doors and everyone’s eardrums on ‘Frantic’ from St Anger, the band kept up a track record of always keeping things exciting from the first note. It might be a good problem to have, but ‘Fuel’ manages to be the one song that does the exact opposite of what a lead-off track is supposed to do: it lies to you.

Since the last Metallica record had seen them embracing alternative textures and subsequently pissing off their hardcore fanbase, this was supposed to be the grand return to speed-metal that everyone was used to. James Hetfield is at the top of his game, and the solo is one of Kirk Hammett’s best from this era, but looking further down the record, it’s actually the same schtick that the band pulled on Load, even down to having twangy guitars on ‘Low Man’s Lyric’ and an impressive amount of ballads.

So despite being among the finest tracks Metallica ever spat out in the 1990s, ‘Fuel’ earns its spot here solely for being misleading. Everyone had been excited to hear what the next album had to offer, but the minute that ‘The Memory Remains’ came on, fans knew that they had been duped. Metallica were still up to their alternative shenanigans, and while there are some great tunes on the record, it doesn’t help when the first song pulls a classic bait-and-switch.

‘Find Myself’ – Mötley Crüe

The entire hair metal industry seemed to be completely dead and buried by the time 1995 started. It was clear that the last bands on the scene were breathing their dying breaths when Nirvana came in, but as soon the grunge movement faded, there was hardly any chance that acts like Warrant and Dangerous Toys had a shot at bringing their flavour of glam metal to the mainstream. The old guard was still kicking, though, and while Mötley Crüe did go through more than a few shakeups, Generation Swine almost sounded promising for the first few seconds.

While the idea of an alternative hair metal album is enough to send a chill up someone’s spine, Nikki Sixx actually sounds like he could pull it off on ‘Find Myself’. Taking his first major lead vocal on a studio album, Sixx’s dry delivery has a lot more in common with the industrial rock going on at the time, but the minute that Vince Neil comes back in, we practically change to a different radio station, as he continues to play into the same tropes that got tiring around 1988.

But if you look at what the band themselves were up against, it’s no wonder why Neil sounds so out of place. None of them wanted to be working with each other again, but it’s a shame that Sixx was so close to making his version of Achtung Baby before Neil came in. Because the minute that nasal voice starts up, any band he’s in is physically incapable of playing the ‘irony’ card.

‘The Requiem’ – Linkin Park

No band could have played nu-meal forever. The genre was basically given its last rites during Woodstock 1999, and while Linkin Park managed to defy everyone’s expectations and make a smash album in Hybrid Theory, it was clear they needed to move on if they were going to survive the 2000s intact. So for them, that meant embracing the digital age with both hands, but did they really have to make us wait so long to actually get to the music on A Thousand Suns?

Granted, the album itself is among the band’s finest and could stand as their sonic departure in the same way Radiohead departed with Kid A, but the main problem starts with the interludes. As ‘The Requiem’ begins, the whole thing sounds promising as we hear a child sing the theme melody from ‘The Catalyst’, but the way that the tracks fade into each other doesn’t work that well, each of them taking up valuable space and not having any relation to each other before going into ‘The Radiance’.

The rest of the album isn’t much better, usually placing some of the band’s best songs like ‘Waiting for the End’ and ‘When They Come For Me’ next to tracks that sound like field recordings like ‘Empty Spaces’. This may have worked a lot better in the days of vinyl, but since we were at the dawn of streaming when this album was made, it makes the album both a nightmare to put on shuffle and one of the most unnecessarily drawn-out track lengths in history.

‘Blood From a Clone’ – George Harrison

George Harrison was never one to take the conventional approach in anything he did. He had seen firsthand what made John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s tunes work so well when he was in The Beatles, so he knew that he wouldn’t be able to get away with a bog-standard chord progression of lyrics that didn’t mean anything. He had to come correct, and while All Things Must Pass gently invited you in on ‘I’d Have You Anytime’, Somewhere in England starts with a track that’s pissed off that you showed up.

Whereas Harrison’s introduction to the 1980s did get fans excited with the John Lennon tribute ‘All Those Years Ago’, his label’s decision for him to go back to the drawing board left him absolutely furious. No one wants to be told their music isn’t good enough, much less a Beatle, so when he went back to the drawing board, ‘Blood From A Clone’ was a way of sticking it back to Warner Bros for thinking that all he needed to do was make dumb pop tunes for his audience.

From a musician’s perspective, I can respect Harrison’s willingness to stick to his guns, but hearing ‘Blood From a Clone’ as the first song is the last thing that people would have expected out of Harrison. He told it like it was most of the time, but he could also be mild-mannered and kind, and the way that he barges in the door already pissed off made him look like an angry curmudgeon before we got to hear what he had to say.

‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’ – The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys have always had a beautiful contradiction throughout their work. Although half of their material felt like it was being made on an assembly line in their early years, something clicked the minute that Brian Wilson took over the studio, leading to everyone following his lead and making music history. Wilson had a vision for what the band was going to be, but right after losing himself for a few years, Mike Love was given the leadership role, and that’s when the dark days officially began.

Outside of Love using the band as a nostalgia act whenever they played live, ‘Kokomo’ should have already been a sign of horrid things to come. How horrid you ask? Well, judging by the presets heard at the beginning of Summer in Paradise, it’s safe to say that the band jumped the shark more than a few times. The original version by Sly and the Family Stone is among the greatest summer songs of all time, and yet theirs sounds like it should be playing in the background of a long-forgotten MTV reality show.

You have to give Love credit for wanting to keep up with the times, but given how little Brian was involved in everything along with the terrible retreading going on in ‘Summer of Love’, it starts to dawn on you. This isn’t the Beach Boys. That band died a long time ago, and this was an excuse for Love to do unspeakable things to its corpse.