Bands Who Are Absolute Nightmares When On Tour

It's a poorly kept secret that rock stars and their bands don't exactly view themselves as normal people. To paraphrase Christopher Walken: Sure, they put their pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us, but once their pants are on they make hit records, rock auditoriums full of people, and dodge mountains of groupies who are all trying to get their pants off again. Just imagine being on tour: Everybody allowed to come into contact with you is there to cater to your every whim, thousands of people show up every night in different cities just to hear you rock, and you get paid obscene amounts of money for this. You could be the Dalai Lama, and that would still go to your head.

This is why, every time one of these artists have come to town, you can bet there was a healthy contingent of people — police, security guards, stagehands, etc. — who hoped against hope that that fleet of tour buses would just rumble on by. Many of them are older acts who engaged in the fine, sadly lost art of trashing hotel rooms, some place insane demands upon the venues and cities lucky enough to be blessed by their presence, and some can't seem to quit antagonizing their own fans — but all of these bands are absolute freaking nightmares on the road.

The Doors were the dictionary definition of a legendary band, and lead singer Jim Morrison was the prototypical rock god — but if you caught them live, you never knew exactly what you were going to get. Morrison could be an intensely charismatic and borderline otherworldly stage presence, but he could also be a complete drunken madman prone to the type of jaw-droppingly inappropriate behavior that sounds like urban legend but somehow is not. Forgetting the lyrics to his own songs in an alcoholic haze was just the tip of the iceberg, and every time he made the news for some insane reason, he seemed to be trying to top himself.

For example, during a 1967 show, a cop who failed to recognize Morrison (who was making out with a groupie at the time) maced the singer after he refused to vacate the area. Morrison recovered in time to take the stage — where he decided to forgo performing in favor of a profane rant against the police, which got him arrested. Then there was the time in 1969 he allegedly exposed himself onstage to earn another trip to the slammer, or that other time in 1970 when a lamb somehow ended up onstage, prompting Morrison to exclaim he'd sure like to have sex with it. These are far from the only examples, but you signed up for a short, entertaining article, not a 10,000-word treatise.

Even if you prefer new music to classic rock, you'd have to admit these older bands could really teach these young whippersnappers a thing or two about partying so hard that everything gets weird and possibly illegal. Take Jefferson Airplane, whose lead singer Grace Slick was a boozy force of nature (a. boozicane?) rivaled only by her onetime boyfriend Jim Morrison for sheer volume of consumption and subsequent extreme awkwardness. When she wasn't wantonly humping anything in her path — "I pretty much nailed anybody that was handy" — she was boozing, attempting to perform while boozing even more, or getting arrested for booze.

In 1978 alone she was arrested twice before the summer even began, then kicked off the sunny season by causing a riot after canceling a concert in Germany due to illness. She made it up to them the next night, however, by getting utterly plastered before even setting foot onstage and tearing into the locals over Germany's Nazi past. "Who won the war?!" she implored, as the crowd booed and threw things; she then adroitly tried to win them back over by shouting "Heil Hitler!" and giving Nazi salutes. This, of course, led to her dismissal from the band. Fortunately, though, she would rejoin the revamped Jefferson Starship three years later, in plenty of time to contribute to one of the worst songs anyone has ever heard: "We Built This City."

Guns N' Roses has always been a hit-or-miss live proposition for one shaggy, screeching reason: front man Axl Rose, who quickly developed a reputation for being an enormous jerk who loves to tussle with fans and only deigns to perform if and when he feels like it. The world got a sneak preview of these tendencies in 1991, when GNR rocked the brand-new Riverport Ampitheatre in St. Louis. At least they did until Rose took issue with something some fan was doing in the front row. When security failed to remove the guy within three seconds, Rose decided to handle it himself and leaped into the crowd. One riot, 65 injuries and thousands of dollars in property damage later, the band was facing multiple lawsuits and Rose's reputation was cemented.

Feeling like he could do better, Rose managed to anger pretty much all of Montreal during the Guns' joint tour with Metallica. When the latter had to cut their set short after lead singer James Hetfield was seriously burned by pyrotechnics, Rose and the boys could have calmed the crowd and saved the day by putting on a blistering set — so of course, they didn't. They played a cursory few songs before Rose exclaimed "This will be our last show for a long time," and bolted. Presto, instant riot — but Rose, having learned his lesson, somehow made Canadians riot again by canceling a Vancouver show a full decade later.

When Keith "The Loon" Moon was manning the skins for British rock band The Who, hospitality employees trembled at the mere mention of their name. This is because Moon, one of the greatest drummers of all time, is arguably less famous for that than he is for constantly destroying his accommodations as if a hotel room killed his father. Every one of his exploits sounds like a wild tall tale — but not according to the great Alice Cooper, who once said, "Everything you've ever heard about Keith Moon is true. And you've only heard a tenth of it."

For starters, there's the legendary incident on Moon's 21st birthday in which he drove a Lincoln Continental into the swimming pool of a Flint, Michigan, Holiday Inn. This was apparently not an isolated occurrence, as he also once drove a car straight through the floor-to-ceiling glass of a hotel lobby and up to the reception desk, then got out and calmly asked for his room key. A limo driver once reported that a panicked Moon asked him to turn around and return to the hotel they'd just left, saying he'd forgotten something — which was to hurl the TV out the window. ("I nearly forgot," he said upon returning.) He attempted to steal a hotel waterbed, which burst, so he was relocated to another suite — which he trashed. All this, plus a consistent fondness for the old cherry-bomb-in-the-toilet trick — and if Cooper is to be believed, this only scratches the surface.

Despite their fun-loving, party-hard image, Van Halen has to be one of the most stressful bands in the world to be in, because the guys kind of can't stand each other. Guitarist Eddie Van Halen and lead singer David Lee Roth in particular have been known to butt heads constantly, which is perhaps one of the reasons the outfit has always been sort of like the Murphy's Law of live bands: If there's something weird, stupid, or awkward that can happen, it probably will.

In the band's early days, they were just as hotel-room-trash-y as the next guys, unless the next guys happened to be Journey. In 1978, Van Halen were opening for the arena rock kings when they became displeased with the headliners' lavish catering and bevy of groupies, amenities the boys felt deprived of. So, they utterly destroyed their hotel room, chucked TVs out the window (known as "pulling a Moon"), and had a fire extinguisher fight in the hallway, and blamed it all on Journey. But that's nothing compared to their bizarre stage antics — from Roth challenging a fan to a fight in 1984, to Eddie smashing guitars and storming off stage in 2004, to the mangled mess they made of their signature hit "Jump" at a 2007 show. It's their crackerjack live performances that made Van Halen legendary, and when they're on, they're on. When they're not, David Lee Roth might threaten to kick your ass.

Lil Wayne is a very popular rap guy, to be sure, but while Metallica insists that their security be unarmed, Wayne demands a phalanx of armed guards suitable for a head of state. His tour rider begins with the requirement of a two-vehicle police escort from the airport to the hotel, which will be joined by an additional squad of four armed, off-duty officers to accompany Wayne from the hotel to the venue, then back to the hotel, and anywhere else he might need to go. Sounds pretty secure, right? Not secure enough!

Ten more armed guards must patrol the backstage areas, and for international dates, an additional four-man armed security team must be available to Wayne 24 hours a day. For his off-venue accommodation, Wayne requires nothing less than the presidential suite of a five-star hotel, and obviously, copious amounts of food, booze, energy drinks, and towels — 10 white hand towels and 10 white full-size towels — must be present in his room upon arrival. It's a good thing Wayne is too huge to play smaller towns, or just popping out to McDonald's before the show might require him to commandeer their entire police force.

In the early '80s, there was no band more notoriously hard-partying than Motley Crue, much to the chagrin of their manager Doc McGhee. Their destructive, drug-addled ways were and are well-known, but McGhee put life on the road with Crue into hilarious focus during an interview on the Talk is Jericho podcast: "They were more like a gang than a band," he explained. "You apologized every day. We got thrown out of every hotel with them. ... We had to put up $15,000 in cash just to get into a Howard Johnson's." He even described an incident in which the band was booted from their hotel after brawling with none other than Van Halen. (In the latter's defense, an unidentified crew member started it by biting Eddie.) But these days, the Crue aren't so much rowdy as they are a royal pain in the keister for venues.

Among the standard, still-excessive rock star requirements for backstage amenities, the Crue requires that each venue have on hand the location of any AA meetings taking place in the area since the boys are now mostly sober. But their newfound sobriety doesn't mean they don't know how to have fun: among their other requests are a jar of peanut butter (creamy, please), a jar of Grey Poupon mustard, a sub-machine gun, and a 12-foot boa constrictor. You know, the usual stuff.

The Beastie Boys went from frat boys of rap to beloved elder statesmen in an improbably short time. But during their tour in support of their 1986 debut Licensed to Ill, they were about as welcomed by the towns receiving them as a plague of locusts and caused nearly as many problems. These shows famously featured such family-friendly set decor as giant, inflatable dongs and scantily clad women writhing about in suspended steel cages, which went over about as well as you'd expect during the era of the PMRC. In advance of their Washington, D.C., date, the Washington Post ran an article that screamed, "BAN THE BEASTIE BOYS: Beware, parents! The Beastie Boys don't do concerts; they do orgies."

While this wasn't exactly the case, their raucous shows and throwback tendency to demolish hotel rooms drew the ire of law enforcement agencies across the country. After having run out of people to annoy in the U.S., the Beasties departed for the U.K. leg of the tour, where a Liverpool audience unaccustomed to such rowdiness took umbrage when the band started chucking beer bottles into the crowd. A riot broke out, Ad-Rock was arrested, and the whole ugly incident led to the Beasties being dropped from the Def Jam label. They responded to the setback by moving to Los Angeles, hooking up with the Dust Brothers, and producing one of rap's greatest masterpieces. So if you wanna kick-start your career, start a riot? Unless you're Axl Rose. Three is enough, Axl.

Led Zeppelin's on-tour antics were even more legendary than their performances. According to the Independent, Jimmy Page used to bring a Nazi uniform on tour, not so he could shock audiences but so he could wear it to drag queen bars. Because evidently, doing drugs with drag queens in the club's bathroom was simply not something you could do unless you were in full Nazi regalia. And John Bonham once wheeled Page into a hotel room full of female groupies on a luggage cart. That sounds almost tame, except for the part where Page was naked and covered in whipped cream.

That's not as bad as it got — when Page was super out-of-control, his tour manager would take him back to his room and chain him to the toilet. Meanwhile, John Bonham would drive his motorcycle through the hotel corridors, just like Danny Torrance on his Big Wheel except if he'd encountered creepy twin ghosts and a tidal wave of blood he would have found some way to turn it into a party.

And, finally, there was the TV tossing thing, which Led Zeppelin invented, by the way. After one particularly fruitful evening in which they threw five sets into Puget Sound, a hotel clerk asked the band's manager what it was like to toss a TV out a window. The manager handed the clerk $500 and said, "Here you go, mate. Go toss a TV courtesy of Led Zeppelin."

In 2016, the two female-led bands — Wax Idols and King Woman — opening for heavy metal pioneers Pentagram announced they were dropping out of the tour because of an "overload of bullsh*t" and because they'd been "treated really poorly and harassed in gross ways."

This particular tour started off badly, with front man Bobby Liebling failing to show up for the first performance and arriving two hours late for the next one. But that wasn't what finally made Wax Idols and King Woman pull out. Hether Fortune of Wax Idols told Noisey that some of the other women in her band were being subjected to "inappropriate comments" and "touching." From there it seemed to escalate to Liebling making "absurdly gross, inappropriate comments," and then getting on stage and making rape jokes in front of the crowd. It got bad enough that Fortune's female bandmates mostly just hid in their van and refused to associate with the members of Pentagram until they finally decided to back out of the last three performances.

Oh and finally, Liebling basically said the only reason he'd even decided to tour with two female-led bands was so he'd have "a lot of options with women," whatever that means. So yeah, Pentagram on tour is a gross, misogynistic, super-uncomfortable experience, and not just for the women in the audience.

Ozzy Osbourne had a weird infatuation with urine, and not in a medical way, either. In fact, if you have a weak stomach you'd better just skip ahead because we're about to repeat an anecdote that will make you want to barf.

According to Vanity Fair, in the 2001 Motley Crue autobiography The Dirt, bassist Nikki Sixx says on a tour stop in Lakeland, Florida, Osbourne snorted a line of live ants and peed all over the pavement. And then, because at that point he had an audience, he bent over and lapped up all the pee "like a cat."

Okay, so eeewww, but that's not all. On his 1984 Bark at the Moon tour, Osbourne, Tommy Lee, and Vince Neil got drunk on sake and peed on a police car. Perhaps Osbourne's most notorious urine-related incident, though, happened after a show in 1982, when he ended up at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, and then he peed on it. 

Well actually, Osbourne didn't technically pee on the Alamo. According to Ultimate Classic Rock, he actually peed on the Cenotaph, which is across the street from the Alamo. That was close enough as far as Texas was concerned, though, and he was told to never return to San Antonio. Though evidently even Texas eventually forgives — 10 years later Osbourne donated $10,000 to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and all was forgiven. But definitely not forgotten. Not ever.

Kid Rock has a reputation for bad behavior, and he knows it. In fact he's so self-aware about his inability to behave like an actual human being that TMZ says he once told a judge no one should be allowed to bring up his reputation as a "tough guy" or a "thug" in court, you know, lest that prejudice the jury into thinking he's a tough guy or a thug. Also, he doesn't think it's fair if opposing lawyers bring up his prior arrests.

In 2006, Rock and six members of the hip-hop group the Boo-Yaa Tribe allegedly beat up three guys outside the Hollywood nightclub Teddy's in Los Angeles. For that incident, a judge ordered Rock to pay $35,000, which is kind of a long way from the $15 million the victims were asking for, but celebrities don't have to be punished for their actions in the same way regular people do. Then in 2007, Kid Rock stopped at a Waffle House while on tour in Atlanta and got into a brawl with another Waffle House customer. For that indiscretion, he was ordered to pay $40,000 instead of the $2.9 million Rock said the plaintiff had originally asked for. So maybe the plaintiffs didn't get the millions they were hoping for but still, $35,000 and $40,000 are pretty decent-sized numbers ... until you realize that's really only worth a few dozen hotel television sets. 

Marilyn Manson has made a tidy living from being shocking. In fact one might argue that he does shocking first and music second. (Sorry, Manson fans, but stabbing himself on stage with a broken beer bottle trumps pretty much every weird lyric he's ever written.)

So yeah, the dude is a little unpredictable. He's been known to threaten random magazine editors with death, and he acts totally drunk and incoherent on stage, though no one seems quite sure if it's just part of his act. But that's all rock star stuff, right? Well. There's "rock star," and there's also being disgusting and shocking at the expense of another person, which is what happened in 2001 at a concert in Clarkston, Michigan.

According to MTV, Manson — who was wearing nothing but a G-string — approached a security guard, wrapped his legs around the poor dude's head and rubbed his bits and pieces all over the guy's head and neck. Manson was charged with felony fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct and misdemeanor assault and battery. The guard also filed a civil suit against him, which he dropped in 2004 in exchange for an undisclosed settlement.

The felony criminal charge was later reduced to a misdemeanor, which could have landed him in jail for 90 days except it didn't — the judge just ordered him to pay $4,000 in fines instead. Manson called the decision "a victory for art." Right. Art.

Not all absolute nightmares involve trashing hotel rooms or getting really, really wasted or brawling with people you don't like. Some stars quietly become absolute nightmares out of the public eye, more or less.

To be fair, when the public starts calling you a "diva," you've kind of earned the right to act like a diva. And Mariah Carey, as everyone knows, is a diva. She's such a diva that she doesn't say a word to anyone on the day of a performance, lest she damage her voice on a particularly harsh consonant. She's such a diva that she once demanded that a record store redecorate their bathroom prior to hosting her for a one-hour performance, and she also smashed a tea set she'd been drinking from so no one else could come along and say, "Anyone want to buy this tea set that Mariah Carey once drank out of?" But nothing quite tops the demand she made when Westfield Shopping Center in London invited her to switch on their holiday lights. According to Marie Claire, the singer wanted to be surrounded by 100 white doves and 20 white kittens — a source said that the doves were a go, but they couldn't deliver on the kittens because of "health and safety." For the record, Carey later denied ever having made such a request. "Twenty cats is an absolute lie," she said. "I'm not a cat lady."

We've all heard stories of stars who demand extra respect just because they're famous, but not too many of them are delusional enough to think that the absolute entire world must know who they are and that anyone who doesn't has clearly committed the unforgivable sin of, um, not ever having heard of them.

Chris Robinson is the lead singer of the Black Crowes, but you already know that, and if you didn't, you need to just pretend like you did for reasons that will shortly become clear. Anyway, according to the Orlando Sentinel, Robinson was buying stuff at a 7-Eleven when he overheard a customer say to her companion, "There's the lead singer of the Black Crowes!" to which her companion had the audacity to reply, "Who are the Black Crowes?"

It's not clear why the universe didn't immediately implode, but it didn't, so Robinson turned around and told her she'd know who the Black Crowes were if she didn't eat so many Twinkies, because evidently Twinkies somehow interfere with the body's natural ability to give a crap about who wrote "Lickin'." Anyway, the encounter ended with Robinson spitting on the offender, followed later on by an assault charge. Don't feel too bad for Robinson, though. He paid $53 in court costs and got six months of probation. The assault charge was dismissed.

Coheed and Cambria is a pretty big name (well, big enough to open for grunge legends Soundgarden, anyway), but not so big that their bass player doesn't have to go around robbing pharmacies before a concert. According to MTV, in 2011, Coheed and Cambria's bassist Michael Todd was arrested for demanding prescription painkillers from a Massachusetts Walgreens. He showed the pharmacist a note he'd written on his cell phone, which said he had a bomb and needed painkillers. The pharmacist gave Todd six bottles of OxyContin because even though he probably didn't actually have a bomb, well, you never know. 

After the robbery, Todd took a cab back to the Comcast Center, where Coheed and Cambria was about to open for Soundgarden, because calling a limo would have been way too obvious. Anyway, sadly for Todd and happily for Walgreens, someone spotted him getting into the cab, and he was arrested shortly afterward.  

Coheed and Cambria distanced themselves from their bandmate's behavior, declaring their intention to continue the tour without him and promising to "address the situation with Michael" at the end of the tour. "Addressing the situation," by the way, meant kicking him out of the band. That's not where Todd's misfortunes ended, though. He also got one year of house arrest and three years of probation because all's fair in love and being a famous white dude who robbed a drugstore.

Cardi B and her husband Offset are a knockout duo onstage and offstage, too, where they sometimes get into brawls — strip club brawls, specifically. In early 2020, as reported by the Miami Herald, the pair performed at the Fontainebleau in Miami and afterward visited a strip club called "Booby Trap On The River," where some fellow patrons were clearly in a festive mood. Unfortunately for those folks, Cardi B got caught in the crossfire of a freshly opened champagne bottle. Well, page 257 of Things You Shouldn't Do to Divas clearly states that divas should not be sprayed with champagne, so Offset took a swing at the champagne-wielding offender.

The couple left before police arrived, which was probably wise, since it wasn't the first strip club brawl Cardi B has been involved in — according to Rolling Stone, she was indicted on 14 charges for a 2018 brawl, including two felony counts of attempted assault with intent to cause serious physical injury. Video of that earlier brawl showed her tossing an ice bucket at a bartender whom she suspected was having an affair with Offset. There were also some flying chairs involved.

The charges were upgraded from misdemeanors to felonies after Cardi B refused a plea deal. As of 2020, the case is still ongoing, but Cardi's defense attorney seems pretty sure it will never go to court — although he did dodge a question about whether or not his client might settle.

One of the things that tends to happen to you when you become a famous musician is that you, you know, gain fans. Fans, in case you require a definition, are those people who are responsible for you being famous, and they also contribute to your bank account by buying your albums and going to your concerts.

In 2015, Afroman was performing in Biloxi, Mississippi, when a female fan somehow managed to wander onto the stage. Now, she did kind of get into Afroman's personal space, but his reaction was a little disproportionate to the offense — he punched her, and it wasn't even ... are you ready ... because he got high. Har har. According to TMZ, Afroman didn't hold back, either. The blow was a haymaker, and it knocked the poor woman down. It was bad enough, in fact, that the police showed up, escorted Afroman offstage, and charged him with assault. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to anger management classes in lieu of jail time. He also reportedly settled a lawsuit out of court.

Now, granted, if you're a fan, you should probably stay off the stage because if you're not part of the act, you're going to mess up the vibe of the people who belong there. On the other hand, when you're famous, you should be nice to your fans, and that usually means not punching them, because that's what you pay your security guys to do.

Aerosmith may not have invented the whole rock stars trashing hotels thing, but they turned it into a fine art. In fact, Aerosmith didn't just trash hotels on a whim — they were premeditated hotel trashers. They knew they were going to destroy things on tour, so they brought along tools to help make it more fun. A chainsaw was standard tour equipment for Aerosmith, and not because they thought they might have to lumberjack a couple of trees before a show. Extra-long extension cords weren't just for the stage — they were nice to have on hand in case the band wanted the television to explode when it hit the pool. You have to give them some credit, though, for making sure no one was ever actually in the pool at the time, although that could just as easily have been luck.

As bad as chucking live TVs into pools is, it doesn't come close to that time in June 1976 when Steven Tyler and Joey Kramer set off fireworks in their Lincoln, Nebraska, hotel room. Granted, they appear to have been trying to launch the fireworks out the window, so they probably wouldn't have burned the whole building down or anything, though they could have easily taken out some hapless hotel guest unfortunate enough to be walking past their room. It's actually pretty shocking that any hotel manager allowed these guys to get within a couple of blocks of their establishment.

The Ramones' hatred for each other was well-known, and there's just no way they would have ever gotten as far as they did if they hadn't learned how to work together onstage. Offstage, though, let's just say it was a whole lot of awkward.

According to Rolling Stone, the Ramones were always either fighting or not speaking to each other. In fact, Joey and Johnny Ramone — who weren't actually related, in case you were unaware — didn't speak to each other for most of the 22 years the band performed together. And when Johnny was speaking, he was shouting and sometimes hitting people.

Johnny liked to be in control, to the point where he'd fine his bandmates — like literal fines — if they showed up late to practice. Johnny was abusive to his girlfriend, too, and bandmates could often hear the sound of her body getting thrown into the wall of their hotel room. "Dee Dee [Ramone] was terrified of Johnny," band manager Danny Fields once said, "because Johnny would punch him in the face ... it would always be after the show, about something like, 'You did a B-major when you should have done a C-minor.' I'd stand outside the dressing room. Inside you'd hear glass shattering and bodies slamming into walls." Now imagine that for a couple of decades. These were clearly not guys you'd want to meet backstage.

You've probably got at least one story about a coworker that you just didn't get along with. You had nothing in common, he kind of smelled, and he wouldn't stop talking about some weird hobby he had that you had no interest in. But, at least you got to go home after your shift was over. Now imagine being on tour with that guy, and a couple of other guys who you can't really relate to.

Pink Floyd's internal feud seems to have started out with them really just not having much in common. According to Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, they didn't even eat together because some were vegetarian and others were solidly carnivorous. And they were mean to each other, too. Syd Barrett was quirky, and his bandmates weren't exactly tolerant of his quirks — they hounded him constantly, which probably only hastened what appeared to be a drug-fueled descent into madness. Barrett's quirks eventually turned into erratic behavior, like playing the same chord over and over again, from concert beginning to concert end, and staring vacantly out into the crowd. It finally became impossible to play with him, and that's when the band hired David Gilmour to replace him, which solved one problem and created another. Gilmour's years-long feud with Roger Waters is a rock 'n' roll legend.

Justin Bieber became a star at the tender age of "self-centered immature brat," and not much has changed. So really, it's not Bieber's fault he's obnoxious, though that doesn't make most of us hate him any less.

According to The New Yorker, Bieber's on-tour behavior is so consistently appalling that he's been banned from performing anywhere in China. The official reason was "to maintain order in the Chinese market and purify the Chinese performance environment," which the Chinese did not think could be done if they allowed "badly behaved entertainers" to cross their borders. So what did Bieber do to bring down the wrath of the Chinese government? Well, during one visit, he had his bodyguards carry him up the Great Wall of China. In a similar vein, on a visit to Tokyo, he took selfies in front of the Yasukuni Shrine, which exists to honor the war dead, not to inflate the ego of some dumb kid who for some reason is also famous.

There was also the thing with the monkey — in 2013, the singer tried to bring a young capuchin monkey into Germany but failed to produce proof that the animal had been vaccinated. Customs officials seized the monkey and told Bieber he'd have to pay to retrieve it, but Bieber decided he didn't actually want the monkey anymore. It was eventually sent to live in a zoo. So Bieber is both obnoxious and an animal abandoner.

Every band needs a gimmick, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' gimmick was socks. They went onstage wearing nothing but socks, and not on their feet. So that's a pretty low bar to start from, but they were also serial sexual harassers.

Even before the Chili Peppers were big, they were treating women the way generations of misogynistic rock stars have always treated women — like roadside attractions, only less deserving of respect. In 2016, Julie Farman, who worked for Epic Records back when the Chili Peppers were rising stars, blogged about how she'd once been cornered in a storage room by two band members who declared their intention to make her the filling in a "sexy sandwich."  

That's not the most public of their offenses, either. In 1990, singer Anthony Kiedis was convicted of sexual battery and indecent exposure for his behavior after a show in Washington DC. (Jurors recommended a $1,000 fine for each charge, which must have barely bothered Kiedis, like, at all.) Then, during a 1990 taping of "Club MTV Dance," the Red Hot Chili Peppers trashed the stage and groped a bikini-clad audience member. After that incident, police arrested bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith and charged them with lascivious behavior, battery, and disorderly conduct. They were found guilty, and their fines were donated to a rape-crisis fund. Flea later complained that authorities had "totally tried to make an example of us." Poor Red Hot Misogynists.

A very easy-to-define line exists between good dog owners and people whose dog ownership should be limited to T-shirts with pictures of dogs on them, and that comes down to poop. Good dog owners clean up their dog's poop. Lousy dog owners don't.

Now, if Britney Spears really didn't want to potty train her lap dogs and really, really didn't want to clean up after her not-potty-trained lapdogs, it seems like she could have just hired someone to do it for her, because it takes a special kind of donkey butt to let your dogs poop all over your hotel room and then expect housekeeping to clean it up. That's not the only reason why the Los Angeles Four Seasons Hotel isn't super-fond of Britney – she was also flagrantly defying their "no smoking" rule.

Spears evidently takes her star privilege pretty seriously, to the point where harassing fellow hotel patrons isn't outside of the realm of behaviors she isn't embarrassed about. In 2007, per the New York Post, she was kicked out of the Chateau Marmont because of her odd behavior in the hotel restaurant. Did she send her filet mignon back 27 times? No. Did she loudly berate her server because there was too much ice in her drink? Nope. She smeared food all over her face, to the disgust of the restaurant's other patrons. If nothing else, Spears can at least claim to be one of the grossest of the world's superstars.

The Rolling Stones existed during the golden years of hotel trashing, so you won't be surprised to hear that they played along with the general expectations people had for musicians behaving badly. Their after-hours antics were so depraved that Robert Frank's tour documentary covering their 1972 trip to the United States was actually suppressed by the Rolling Stones themselves, who evidently realized that they'd crossed so far over the line that maybe they shouldn't actually broadcast it to the public. Among other things, the film shows groupies stripping on an airplane, various people (including Mick Jagger) engaging in drug use, and the usual hotel trashing that, by now, you're probably pretty sure was a requirement for keeping your rock star license, or something.

It's Keith Richards who is most known for general mayhem, though. (He once snorted his father's ashes and then declared that the old man wouldn't have cared.) But by the time the band was well into their third decade, he'd mellowed a bit from "gimme drugs and girls" to "gimme shepherd's pie." According to Rolling Stone (the magazine, not the rest of the band), when Richards showed up before a show on the 1989 Steel Wheels tour, he discovered that someone else had eaten the shepherd's pie that had been laid out for the band alongside some other standard British pub fare. Richards was so disappointed that the concert had to be delayed until someone could procure another one.

Like Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez before her, Demi Lovato got her start with Disney. Yes, wholesome Disney, which is known for producing only the most wholesome stars. Well, Lovato may have let fame go to her head at way too young an age, because only a few years after the release of Disney's Camp Rock, she made the news for punching one of her backup dancers in the face.

According to Narcity, Lovato was on tour with the Jonas Brothers when punchee Alex Welch says the star became suspicious that one of her many dancers had "told on" her. Evidently, Lovato had gotten in trouble with her managers for her bad offstage behavior. Lovato called all her dancers together, threatened them, and then seemed to independently conclude that it was Welch. "And she walks up and punches me and literally walked away," Welch remembered.

Lovato later admitted she'd been partying and was already in trouble for (you guessed it) trashing the hotel. Someone in her entourage told hotel management that Lovato was taking Adderall, and Lovato was so enraged that she got one of the tour managers to tell her who had ratted her out — by convincing him that she just wanted to thank the kind soul who had clearly only talked out of love and concern: "I remember thinking, 'I'm about to beat this b*tch up.'" Fortunately, the incident ended after the first punch.

Courtney Love has always been kind of a mess, but after the death of Kurt Cobain, her life got more and more out of control. Love spent her days surrounded by her own messes — years after she sort of fell out of the spotlight, her daughter said she was "exist[ing]" on drugs like Xanax, Adderall, and Abilify and that her house was such a disaster that a family cat died after getting trapped in a mountain of stuff. 

According to Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, Love didn't willfully trash hotels the way other rock stars did. Rather, she just didn't care what kind of state she left them in. "The Courtney Love hotel room was a particular kind of disaster," the book says. "She brings like two or three giant suitcases full of clothes, and somehow all those suitcases would get opened and everything would get spread out all over the hotel room. And then it's all coated in cosmetics and baby powder, it's just a tornado of clothes and makeup. [...] It looks like an episode of Hoarders."

Other accounts of Love's hotel rooms paint an even grosser picture. In 2009, staff at the Inn on Irving Place in Manhattan found used hypodermic needles and feminine products everywhere except the trash can. "She caused so much damage in eight hours and wreaked so much havoc," said a source. "It was actually kind of funny."

Sometimes the nightmare isn't the way the band behaves — it's the way their fans behave. In 2000, Pearl Jam was playing at Denmark's Roskilde Festival when the mosh pit got out of control. Now, if you've ever been in a mosh pit, you've almost certainly had the thought, "I'm gonna die," because mosh pits can be terrifying. But in general, moshers come out of the experience with nothing more than a few bruises and maybe a bloody nose. Not at this show, though.

According to Rolling Stone, eight people suffocated in the mosh pit, and a ninth died in the hospital the following day. Up until that point, it was the second deadliest rock concert in history — The Who's 1979 Cincinnati Riverfront concert, where 11 people died in a stampede, still held the first place record. (Since then, several horrific nightclub fires have toppled both concerts combined, claiming 100+ lives).

The Roskilde Festival was a tragedy, but it wasn't a surprise — Crowd Management Strategies says mosh pits were responsible for at least 10,000 injuries between 1998 and 2008, and they're a staple at Pearl Jam concerts. In 1998, a writer described a Pearl Jam concert in Greenville, South Carolina, where fans were crowd-surfing and climbing barricades to get into the mosh pit. A writer in Missoula, Montana, described a similar scene in 1995. So as fun as a Pearl Jam concert is, the mosh pits do seem a little nightmarish.

Most of these band's problems can be distilled down to one common denominator: arrogance. Not every musician is a superstar, but a lot of them think they are. That was Swiss rock band Krokus' problem back in the '80s, when they were touring with Def Leppard.

Reports say that the band members were so arrogant that they repeatedly ignored basic instructions from Def Leppard's people about seemingly insignificant things, like what part of the stage the band should set up on. The tension got so bad that Krokus' manager punched Def Leppard's dummer, which is not usually something you do when you're interested in preserving a professional relationship. 

Shockingly, Krokus got booted from the tour after that one. According to Ultimate Classic Rock, the band also feuded with AC/DC. In 1981, they were left out of the UK's Monsters of Rock festival, and though the reason was never made explicit, the rumor was that AC/DC asked for their exclusion. We may never know why, exactly, but there's some speculation that AC/DC were insulted that Krokus frontman Marc Storace didn't want to try out for the band after the death of Bon Scott. Or, maybe it was because AC/DC just didn't want those arrogant wannabes getting in their way.

After all those years of wild parties and trashed hotels, today's Aerosmith just wants to spend their downtime eating Subway sandwiches and watching TV. Or maybe they just don't really want to hang out with Megadeth.

Poor Megadeth. They must have been really excited about the opportunity to tour with Aerosmith in 1993 — until they were dumped. So what happened? Did Megadeth bore Aerosmith's fans? Did they show up to shows late? Were they too wasted to play? Nope. According to Entertainment Weekly, they were whiny.

Just three shows into the 24-date tour, Aerosmith announced that Megadeth was out, and Jackyl was in. Megadeth's official statement on the subject was that they'd left the tour because of "artistic restrictions," but the word from Aerosmith was a little different. "With Megadeth we thought we had a hard-rockin' animal," guitarist Joe Perry said, "that would lubricate the first 10 rows and get the audience ready for us." As it turns out, that was actually the kinder version of the story. An unnamed spokesperson said that Dave Mustaine, lead singer of Megadeth, was just annoying. "He would piss and moan and whine," said the source. "What he was really upset about was [Aerosmith] weren't hanging out with him." So in other words, touring with Megadeth is like being stuck in a room with that one annoying kid from high school who is hoping to get noticed by the cool kids. How the mighty have fallen.