Rock Stars Who Left Their Successful Bands For Flop Solo Projects

Why mess with a good thing? These musicians tried to fly solo and found out the hard way that going it alone was harder than it looked. [music] >> Producers plucked four musician actors from an open audition and had them sing along to tracks written and recorded by industry professionals. The four guys portraying the monkeys, including Peter Torque, were allowed to start writing and playing their own music after hostile negotiations with their handlers.
But Torque remained creatively unhappy. Torque finally quit in December 1968. And according to Monkey Mania: The True Story of the Monkeys, he had to pay $160,000 to get himself out of his contract. Torque seemingly yearned to go back into the Greenwich Village folk scene where he’d come up as a banjo player in the early60s. No longer a monkey, Torque quickly returned to that kind of music, forming a band called Peter Torque and/or [music] release.
Despite Torque’s stature and proven popularity, the new group couldn’t secure a recording contract. During the mid 1970s, Torque had to leave music behind and moved into David Crosby’s basement. After that, he taught school in Los Angeles, fronted a couple of smaller bands in the 1980s, and signed on for the Monkeys Reunion in 1986.

In 1994, he released his one and only solo album, Stranger Things Have Happened. >> Stranger [music] Things. [singing] It was met with critical indifference, but he continued to be musically active for his entire life, even reuniting with the Monkeys for two more albums shortly before his death in 2019. [music] >> In 1974, Douglas Culvin co-founded the Ramones.
There he played bass under the stage name DD Ramon with other band members also adopting Ramon surnames after him. The Ramones remained a unit throughout the 80s. [snorts] >> Hey, let’s go. HEY, LET’S GO. >> BUT in the latter part of the decade, Culvin got sick of his bandmates’s bickering. He was also coping with physical and mental health difficulties and decided to mix things up and told the other Ramones that he wanted to record a rap album.
And so in 1989, Kulvin changed his stage name to Dee King, departed the Ramones, and delivered the rap LP Standing in the Spotlight. The first single, Mashed Potato Time, a hip-hop cover/interpretation of a 1962 hit by a different DD Sharp [music] of [music] hip and pop. If Dee had the skills to match his passion for the form, me didn’t prove it on that track in which he unconfidently tries to stay on rhythm as he half-heartedly boasts about his wealth and prowess [music] with women.

The mashed potato on the radio on boom boxes wherever you go. >> The album sold poorly and was critically despised, which you probably surmised. Dee recorded some more little noticed music and returned to the Ramones in an unofficial capacity, writing songs for his old band until they broke up in 1996. >> He knew that from firstirhand experience.
You Raone fans know that first song we showcased, 53rd and Third. Dee wrote that one and it was about his time standing on that very same infamous street corner pimping himself out to score money for drugs. [music] That hard life came back at him. His 2002 death was attributed to a heroin overdose. >> As lead singer and primary songwriter, John Fogerty propelled Credence Clearwater revival to remarkable commercial heights in [music] the late 60s and early 70s.
But it was the front man’s older brother, Tom Fogerty, who had gotten into music first. [music] His high school band, Spiderweb and the Insects, merged with John’s Blue Velvets to become the swamp rock hitmakers and eventually renamed themselves Creed’s Clearwater Revival. By that time, John Fogerty had taken the creative and performative reigns of the operation.

trying to [music] get a hand. >> In February 1971, CCR issued a press release informing fans that Tom Fogerty had left the band, which would continue on as a three-man act. The split was presented as amicable with Tom saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. But in several later interviews, Tom expressed the musical frustration suffered in the shadow of his [music] brother.
He explained to Rolling Stone, “After we were into our sixth platinum album, I thought maybe I could do a little singing, but John was not going to change things, so I split.” Free to write and sing exactly what he wanted, Forgetty released a single in 1971, Goodbye Media Man. [music] [music] In 1972, an aonomous LP arrived. The former didn’t make the hot 100 and the latter sputtered out at number 78 on Billboard’s album chart.
None of his six other albums sold well before Tom Forgetty’s tragic death in 1990 [music] at age 48. He died of tuberculosis which was a complication of AIDS. [music] Sugar down. >> In 2009, after a slew of top selling albums as the standard bearer for Millennium Era emo rock, Fallout Boy announced that due to a creative impass, the band was taking a hiatus.
The temporary splits allowed its members to pursue their own musical muses full-time. For lead singer Patrick Stump, that meant less rock and more pop, burying the punkadjacent [music] ethos of Fallout Boy and channeling his muse Michael Jackson instead. In the woods of the clear, [music] so beat it, just beat it

>> Stump announced Soul Punk in February 2010, but the album didn’t come out for another year and a half after being delayed until October 2011. It was a true solo album, too. Stump played every instrument on Soul Punk himself, and it ended up being an expensive and time-intensive endeavor, which he self-funded.
The result was far away from what fans came to expect with Fallout Boy. The first single, This City, sounded like adult contemporary meets top 40 dance pop with Stump styled in the video to look like a teen idol. [music] >> And when Soul Punk finally became available for purchase, a shockingly low number of people bought it.
The Fallout Boy [music] fans didn’t bring their support as Stump solo effort debuted and peaked at number 48 on the album chart with only 9,000 copies sold. By 2013, Fallout Boys hiatus was over.