Petty and pretty famous classic rock feuds

Rock music has always run on tension, between bandmates, between bands, between artists who share a genre and can’t quite share a room. Some of these feuds produced genuinely interesting music. Some produced lawsuits. Some produced Liam Gallagher wishing AIDS on Damon Albarn in a newspaper interview and then running into him at a club fifteen years later and going for a beer. The range is considerable.

Oasis vs. Blur

Albarn showed up at Oasis’ number one party in 1995, just to say well done, and Liam got in his face, shouting “Number fookin’ one!” at close range. Albarn went home and scheduled “Country House” to drop the same week as “Roll With It.” Rolling Stone documents Blur winning that battle, 274,000 copies to 216,000. Liam told a reporter he hoped Albarn would catch AIDS and die. Oasis covered a Blur song at the Brit Awards and renamed it “Shitelife.” Then, fifteen years passed, the two principals bumped into each other at a club, went for a beer, and sat there asking what exactly all of that had been about. Noel later told an interviewer, “You can say you respect someone as an artist a thousand times and it will never get reported. But you call someone a c— once…”

Axl Rose vs. Slash

In 2009, Axl told Billboard that one of them would die before a reunion happened, delivered not as a threat but as a weather report, the tone you’d use for something outside anyone’s control. Ultimate Classic Rock documents Axl refusing to attend the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2012, Slash telling Rolling Stone that Axl simply “hates my guts,” and then in 2016 Slash rejoining Guns N’ Roses and telling a Swedish television show the reconciliation was “probably way overdue.” Neither of them died. The prediction was wrong on both counts.

Don Felder vs. The Eagles

Felder wanted to sing “Victim of Love.” Glenn Frey said he wasn’t a singer, on camera, in the band’s own authorized documentary. Rolling Stone covers the 2001 firing, the lawsuits, the settlement, and the two decades of nothing. When Frey died in 2016, Felder said publicly he had always hoped they’d have dinner one day and let it go with a handshake. That dinner was never going to happen while Frey was alive and Felder probably knew it, which makes the statement less a regret and more a particular kind of grief about the version of things that was always just out of reach.

John Lennon vs. Paul McCartney

Lennon wrote “How Do You Sleep” in 1971, asked George Harrison to play guitar on it, and recorded the line “the only thing you did was Yesterday” in what must have been, for everyone in the room, a fairly charged afternoon. Rolling Stone documents that they eventually reached something like peace, recording together during a chaotic 1974 session and remaining distant until Lennon’s death in 1980. What gets left out of most retellings is the arithmetic: they were in their thirties when Lennon died. Whatever they might have made together at fifty doesn’t exist. That’s the part of the feud that never got resolved.

Paul McCartney vs. The Rolling Stones

McCartney told The New Yorker in 2021 that the Stones were “a blues cover band,” which landed exactly the way he knew it would. Ultimate Classic Rock covered Jagger’s response: performing in Los Angeles a few weeks later, he noted McCartney was in the audience and invited him up to help with “a blues cover.” Neither side escalated. Both continue to deny there is any feud, a position maintained for approximately sixty years, while occasionally saying things that suggest otherwise. At some point, the denial becomes its own tradition, separate from whatever the actual feeling is.

The bottom line

Rock feuds are rarely about what they say they’re about. Chart positions and songwriting credits are usually proxies for something older and smaller: who got more attention, who wasn’t listened to, who was first and who got the credit. The pettiness is the point. It always was.

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Petty and pretty famous classic rock feuds