5 Famous Musicians That Nearly Joined Other Bands
Theoretically, a band is more than the sum of its parts, but it’s hard to deny a certain amount of Daisy Jones and the Sixing. It’s hard to imagine Queen without Freddie Mercury, Radiohead without Thom Yorke, the Beatles without, like, any of the Beatles. If any of those people had found more attractive offers, music history could have looked very different.
Slash Nearly Joined Megadeth
You ever get so high you almost become Megadeth’s new guitarist? Slash did when he lived in the same neighborhood as Dave Mustaine just before Guns N’ Roses hit it big. “We’d hang out, smoke crack and come up with major heavy metal riffs,” he said. “It got to the point, in our drug-fueled creative zone, that we started seriously entertaining the idea of me joining Megadeth. Guns was in a holding pattern, after all, and I was high enough to consider all kinds of bad decisions.” Ultimately, “in my heart of hearts, I knew I couldn't leave Guns,” he added, but noted “Dave Mustaine is still one of the most genius musicians I have ever jammed with,” because you really don’t want that guy mad at you.
Keith Moon Nearly Joined Led Zeppelin
In 1968, when Jimmy Page left the Yardbirds to form a new band, “there was some bar-room talk about (Keith) Moon and (John) Entwistle splitting from the Who to create a new ‘super-group’ with the guitarist,” according to one Moon biographer. It never ended up happening, but Page liked Moon’s idea for a name, joking that the project would go down not like a lead balloon but a lead zeppelin.
Dave Grohl Nearly Joined Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Trickster god that he was, Tom Petty tried to bamboozle Dave Grohl into joining his band. In 1994, just after the rather necessary disbandment of Nirvana, Petty asked Grohl to play drums for a Saturday Night Live appearance, being in between drummers himself. “Man, that was good,” he later told Grohl. “It would be a shame if that’s the only time we do it.” Grohl decided “it would have been an emotional thing to be behind the drums every night and not have Kurt there,” though, which means the only reason we have the Foo Fighters is that Dave Grohl was too sad to play drums.
Kurt Cobain Wanted to Join Hole
It seems the feeling wasn’t exactly mutual. In 1993, when asked if he and wife Courtney Love would ever collaborate, the Nirvana frontman said, “I’d like to. But to tell you the truth, I would rather just quit my band and join Hole. When I have played music with them, there’s a level of connection that’s a little bit higher than with anyone else I ever played with.” Ouch. Let it never be said that the voice of a generation wasn’t also a messy bitch.
Michael Bolton (Might Have) Almost Joined Black Sabbath
Bolton denies it, but according to guitarist Tony Iommi, after Ronnie James Dio left Black Sabbath in 1982 and Ozzy was off somewhere being Ozzy, “we would audition various singers — including Michael Bolton, believe it or not. He was one of them, which was an odd one.” It wasn’t that odd, really; we’ve extensively covered Bolton’s pre-easy listening heavy metal career. In fact, Iommi doesn’t seem sure why the audition failed. “It just went on a bit, and we couldn’t decide,” he said. It’s hard to say if their ambivalence was for the best. We wouldn’t have had the same Black Sabbath, but we also wouldn’t have had Michael Bolton.
