Famous musicians who hated the songs that made them legends
In 1975, Frank Sinatra stood on a stage in Jerusalem and introduced one of his biggest hits by saying, “Here’s a song that I cannot stand.” Then he sang it.
He wasn’t alone. Many artists have built careers on a song they’d rather skip. Sometimes it was overplayed. Sometimes the joke got missed.
Six cases follow, each with a documented quote or account. Some of these artists have softened since.
Frank Sinatra: “Strangers in the Night”
It was Sinatra’s first No. 1 in 11 years, and he won Record of the Year for it. He also hated it from the first time he saw the sheet music, per biographer James Kaplan: “I don’t want to sing this.”
The “dooby-dooby-doo” at the end is often read as contempt. A Frank Sinatra Enterprises executive, Charles Pignone, explained why he kept singing it: Sinatra knew what the audience wanted.
Robert Plant: “That bloody wedding song”
“I’d break out in hives if I had to sing that song in every show,” Plant said of “Stairway to Heaven” in 1988. He also called it “that bloody wedding song.”
Led Zeppelin released it in 1971. If you shout for it at one of his shows, you’ll get shut down.
The Beastie Boys: A joke that landed wrong
They wrote “Fight for Your Right” in the summer of 1986 on napkins at the Palladium, with producer Rick Rubin and a lot of vodka. It was meant to parody frat-house party anthems.
“There were tons of guys singing along who were oblivious to the fact it was a total goof on them,” Mike D said. Adam Yauch told NPR in 2006 that he just thought it was funny.
The song peaked at No. 7 in the U.S. “Licensed to Ill” became the first rap album to top the Billboard chart.
Kurt Cobain: “An embarrassment to play”
In a 1993 Rolling Stone interview, Cobain said it was “almost an embarrassment to play” “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” He blamed MTV for running the video a million times.
On a bad night, he said, he could barely get through it. When asked why he’d left the stage without playing it, he said that would have made everything twice as bad.
Michael Stipe: The fruity pop song
“I hate that song, Space Ghost,” Michael Stipe told an animated talk-show host about R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People.” He’s also called it a “fruity pop song written for children.”
R.E.M. left it off its 2003 greatest-hits album. The story goes that the band wrote it as a sarcastic answer to its label’s request for happier radio songs, and the label and the public loved it.
Stipe has since said he’s “always at peace” with it. He just finds it embarrassing that it became a hit.
Radiohead: The sabotage
Guitarist Jonny Greenwood has said he didn’t even like “Creep” while recording it, and tried to sabotage the song by hitting the guitar hard. It became the band’s biggest hit anyway.
When a Montreal crowd called for it, Thom Yorke told them he was tired of it. He called the song crap. It has since made an occasional return at shows.
The bottom line
Sinatra won the Grammy for Record of the Year for a song he introduced in 1975 as one he couldn’t stand. Cobain’s quote ran in a 1993 Rolling Stone interview.
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