'70s Musicians You Wouldn't Want To Meet IRL

Many of the musicians that made a mark on the music scene of the 1970s left behind a legacy that's lasted long after the decade ended. They blazed fresh trails and scored chart-topping hits that continue to reverberate with new generations of fans as the years go by. 

However, while the music these artists created lives on, so too have pretty unsavory stories about some of them. Sure, the '70s were a wild time for rock-star excess, but some took that way too far. Meanwhile, times have changed. As society has evolved, outrageous behavior once condoned is now being re-examined through a new lens when it comes to some of the decades biggest music stars. 

From the member of an iconic still-performing band who was arrested after an underage sex worker OD'd in his mansion, to the legendary guitarist who disgusted fans with a racist onstage tirade, to a late rock icon with a reputation of being an utter jerk, examples abound. To discover more, keep on reading for a rundown of some '70s musicians you probably wouldn't want to meet in real life.

As guitarist for Cream, Blind Faith, and Derek and the Dominos before embarking on a successful solo career, Eric Clapton has generated hit records in numerous decades. A staple of the 1970s rock scene, Clapton went on to experience even greater success in the '90s and beyond. 

Arguably, Clapton's most notorious moment during the '70s occurred at a 1976 concert in Birmingham, England. Addressing the audience, Clapton drunkenly offered his support for British politician Enoch Powell, who'd generated controversy for his anti-immigrant rhetoric and predictions of a race war.  "I don't want you here, in the room or in my country," Clapton said of non-white immigrants, as reported by the Daily Beast. "I think Enoch's right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a Black colony. Get the foreigners out," he continued, using a few colorful racist slurs to emphasize his point. "England is for white people, man. We are a white country." Over time, that rant has become just one reason why Clapton is loathed by other musicians.

Clapton addressed his racist tirade during a 2018 press conference for the documentary, "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars." "I sabotaged everything I got involved with," he told the Daily Mail, blaming his drinking and drug use for the outburst. "I was so ashamed of who I was, a kind of semi-racist, which didn't make sense. Half of my friends were Black, I dated a Black woman, and I championed Black music."

The Eagles may have rocketed up the charts with such mellow country-rock hits as "Take it Easy," and "Peaceful Easy Feeling," but behind the scenes the band members indulged in all manner of illicit substances. That was particularly true of drummer/singer Don Henley, who's had plenty of shady moments over the years.

In 1980, he was arrested and charged with providing cocaine to a minor when an underage sex worker he'd hired overdosed in his home. That girl was also arrested, as was another girl, aged 15. "I had no idea how old she was. I had no idea that she was doing that many drugs," Henley said when interviewed by GQ, (via Ultimate Classic Rock). "Yes, she was a hooker; yes, I called a madam," he added, confirming he'd called authorities when she'd overdosed. "I didn't want this girl dying in my house; I wanted to get her medical at­tention," he added. "I did what I thought was best, and I paid the price."

In 2024 court testimony during a trial involving the stolen original lyrics for "Hotel California," he admitted he'd been deeply depressed at the time, and self-medicated with drugs. "I wanted to forget about everything that was happening with the band, and I made a poor decision which I regret to this day," he said, as reported by The Guardian. "I've had to live with it for 44 years. I'm still living with it today, in this courtroom. Poor decision."

Gary Glitter became the ultimatel glam-rock one-hit wonder thanks to the success of "Rock and Roll Part 2," an infectious anthem that's become ubiquitous at sporting events. Born Paul Gadd, the British rocker has been a figure of ill repute since 1997, when the discovery of child pornography on a computer he'd brought into a shop for repair led to his arrest. 

Released after serving four months in prison, he offered an apology — of sorts — when speaking with journalists. "I regret doing what I was sent to prison for," he said in a televised press conference. "I've served my time. I want to put it all behind me — and live my life." That, however, proved difficult when it became clear that he'd become a pariah in his homeland. He ultimately fled the U.K., living in various countries before landing in Vietnam. 

His reputation went from bad to unthinkably horrible in 2006, when Vietnamese authorities charged him with the sexual abuse of two young girls. He was convicted,  and served 27 months in prison before his release in 2008. His pedophile past caught up with him in 2015, when Gadd was extradited to Britain to face charges relating to his sexual exploits with minors during his heyday in the 1970s. He was convicted, and sentenced to 16 years behind bars. In February 2024, Gadd — then 79 — requested to be paroled, but was denied. As of March 2025, Gadd remains incarcerated, among the musicians who are currently in prison.

Johnny Paycheck struck Nashville gold when his 1977 cover of David Allan Coe's "Take This Job and Shove It" catapulted to No. 1 on the Billboard country singles chart. Meanwhile, Paycheck — whose real name was Donald Eugene Lytle — had earned a reputation as a hell-raising rebel with a fiery temper. Given that Paycheck was one of the bad boys of outlaw country, it shouldn't surprise that he had his brushes with the law. In 1981, for example, he was charged with sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl. He entered a plea of no contest, and avoided jail time when he was sentenced to a year of unsupervised probation.

A few years later, he stopped for a drink at the North High Lounge in Hillsboro, Ohio in 1985. Paycheck exchanged words with another patron, Larry Wise, and reportedly took offence when Wise invited him to his home to have some deer meet and turtle soup. He grabbed a .22-caliber pistol holstered on his hip, and took a shot at Wise, the bullet grazing his head.

"I never seen the gun, and I never heard the shot," said Wise during the ensuing trial (via Rolling Stone). "He blowed my hat off," Wise continued. Paycheck was found guilty, and sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in the slammer. After spending just two years in prison, he was pardoned by the governor, and released in 1991. The singer died in 2003 at the age of 64.

After soaring to stardom as Black Sabbath's frontman in the 1970s, veteran rocker Ozzy Osbourne went on to an even more successful solo career in the '80s. In the 2000s, the Prince of Darkness reinvented himself as a cuddly (albeit unconventional) sitcom dad with "The Osbournes." Back in the '70s, though, his outrageous antics became the stuff of legend. That was the case when he and then-wife Thelma lived in the country, where Osbourne developed a new hobby: killing animals, particularly chickens. One day, realizing the chickens had not laid any eggs in a few days, Osbourne entered the chicken coop and opened fire. As recounted in the book, "How Black Was Our Sabbath," a neighbor who was in his garden had watched the carnage, and casually told the rocker, "Unwinding, are we, John?"

Osbourne also enjoyed shooting at his wife's cats. "I was taking drugs so much I was a f*****," Osbourne recalled in an interview with The Scotsman. "The final straw came when I shot all our cats. We had about 17, and I went crazy and shot them all. My wife found me under the piano in a white suit, a shotgun in one hand and a knife in the other."

Then there was the time his the local vicar dropped by, and Thelma inadvertently served him hashish-laced brownies. When the clergyman passed out, Osbourne feared he'd died, and dragged him to his home. Osbourne was shocked to later see him alive and well.

These days, Ted Nugent is known for his opposition to stricter gun-control laws and his full-throated support of the MAGA movement. Back in the 1970s, however, he came to fame for his fiery fretwork on guitar-heavy hits like "Wango Tango" and "Cat Scratch Fever." Prior to that, however, Nugent was a draft-dodging hippie who showed up for his army physical with his bloodstream full of crystal meth and his pants full of excrement. That was because, a week before his physical, he'd stopped using the bathroom. "I did it in my pants. Poop, [urine], the whole shot," Nugent told High Times in a 1977 interview. "My pants got crusted up." His strategy worked, and he avoided being drafted. 

During the 1970s, Nugent also demonstrated attitudes toward underage girls that can, at best, be described as problematic. That, in fact, is on full display in the lyrics to his 1981 single, "Jailbait," written when he was in his 30s. "She's young, she's tender," Nugent sings. "Won't you please surrender." 

Those lyrics weren't just wish fulfillment, but an apparent expression of what actually going on in his life, after the 30-year-old Nugent legally adopted his 17-year-old girlfriend so she could accompany him on tour. "I guess they figured better Ted Nugent than some drug-infested punk in high school," Nugent said said in a VH1 documentary (as reported by HuffPost), explaining how he convinced the girl's parents to let him become their daughter's legal guardian. 

Brought in to replace original bassist Glenn Matlock in 1970s punk band The Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious certainly lived up to his stage name. As his friend, John Gray, told John Lydon (a.k.a. Pistols singer Johnny Rotten) for his memoir, "No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs," Vicious (real name: John Simon Ritchie) had some odd habits that made him particularly unpleasant to be around. "Sid would strangle cats and slash himself with an old Heinz baked beans tin lid," Gray recalled. There was also the infamous incident in which Vicious, displeased by a bad review from British music journalist Nick Kent, tracked Kent down and bashed him in the head with a bicycle chain.

Of course, all that bad behavior paled in comparison to his 1978 arrest for allegedly murdering his girlfriend, Nancy Spungeon, in New York City's famed Chelsea Hotel. Spungeon had been stabbed in the abdomen, and bled to death. He initially confessed to murdering Spungeon, but later changed his story, claiming he was innocent, and that he'd been asleep when she was stabbed.

Vicious died of a heroin overdose just a few months later, still awaiting trial for first-degree murder. He was 21 years old. 

Throughout the 1970s, Jim Gordon was one of rock's most respected drummers, distinguishing himself as a session musician, accompanying Joe Cocker on his legendary Mad Dogs and Englishman tour and becoming a full-fledged member of Eric Clapton's Derek and the Dominos. Gordon lived life in the fast lane, and his escalating drug and alcohol use took its toll on him. What he didn't know at the time, however, was that all that drug use was exacerbating his schizophrenia, which wouldn't be diagnosed until years later. 

There were certainly signs of mental illness, though. In 1973, he got into a vicious argument with his then-wife. The fight became physical, and he wound up beating her so severely that several of her ribs were cracked. The marriage ended then and there. Meanwhile, as the voices he'd been hearing in his head grew louder, he feared telling anyone.

By the later part of the 1970s, drugs and alcohol had dimmed the talent that made him such a sought-after musician, and he'd also come to be viewed as too unreliable to be hired for the session work he'd once excelled at. His violent tendencies erupted again in 1983, when he brutally murdered his 71-year-old mother, beating her to death with a hammer. Claiming a voice in his head told him to commit the murder, he spent the rest of his life in prison until his death in 2024.

Trailblazing rock icon Lou Reed, who died of cancer in 2013 at age 71, is widely regarded as one of rock's leading poets and influential luminaries, due to his groundbreaking work in The Velvet Underground and as a solo artist. On the flip side, Reed also had a well-earned reputation for being an unadulterated jerk, with a horrible temper and tendency toward rudeness. 

Referring to the glowing tributes after his death, writer Howard Sounes — who'd written a biography about Reed — told Vice, "They seemed to forget the truth that almost every journalist who ever met Reed knew: He could be very unpleasant." Just ask Reed's first ex-wife, Bettye Kronstad, who told Sounes about the time he'd punched her in the face and blackened her eye. "It was pretty clear to me that the only way he would ever stop doing that was if I did it to him, so he'd have to walk onstage with a black eye," she said, as excerpted in The New York Times. 

"He was constantly at war with people — with family, friends, lovers, band members, managers, and record companies," Sounes told the Times of Reed. "He was a suspicious, cantankerous, bitter, angry man." As Sounes told Vice, "He habitually fell out with people. He made enemies. He messed people about. He was often rude. He was a drunkard and a drug addict, which doesn't enhance anybody's personality."

Ginger Baker got his start in London's jazz scene before making his mark alongside Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce as the drummer in Cream. After the group broke up, Baker briefly reunited with Clapton for the supergroup Blind Faith, before founding his own jazz-rock fusion outfit, Ginger Baker's Air Force, which, despite its lofty moniker, crashed on takeoff.

By all accounts, Baker had a mean streak. That was certainly the opinion of the drummer's son, Kofi, who recalled what it was like receiving drum lessons from his dad. "If I didn't get something right immediately he'd shout and swear at me and smack me around a little bit," Kofi told Rolling Stone in 2018, revealing he'd long been estranged from his father. "It's never really bothered me because my dad is such an a**hole anyway that it's not like I was stressed about making him proud or anything," he said.

Baker's cantankerous streak was on full display in the 2012 documentary, "Beware of Mr. Baker," in which the drummer described his relationship with former Cream bandmate Clapton. "He's the best friend I've got on this planet and always will be," Baker declared, via Far Out. Clapton, however, characterized their relationship very differently, insisting he didn't know Baker all that well — and explained why. "I always pulled back when it started to get scary or threatening or just difficult," Clapton said.

John Philips was the leader of The Mamas and the Papas, the L.A.-based folk-rock group responsible for such hits as "California Dreamin'" and "Monday, Monday" before the band's breakup in 1968. The group's chief songwriter, leader and musical visionary, Philips also became seriously addicted to cocaine and heroin in the mid-1970s, and spent years in a drugged-out haze before eventually getting sober. He died in 2001 due to complications from a liver transplant.

While there was no shortage of controversial stories about him while he was alive, it wasn't until after his death that the most shocking one emerged. In her memoir, "High on Arrival," his daughter, actor Mackenzie Phillips, alleged that she and her father had a sexual relationship that lasted for years, while both were still heavily using drugs. 

While promoting the book, she appeared on "Today," where she revealed she received a huge wakeup call when she became pregnant — and couldn't be certain whether it was her husband or her dad who was the father. "I was horrified," she said, as reported by the New York Daily News. "It brought me smack-dab into present time. The implications of it were just so intensely disturbing to me that I had an abortion. I never let him touch me again." Her stepmother, Michelle Phillips, disputed her claims, but the former "One Day at a Time" star has stood by her story.