3 Early Bands Featuring Future Rock Legends

A rock star’s origin story remains endlessly fascinating.

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Not just a run-of-the-mill rock star, but the legends. How did it happen? Was greatness evident from the start? It’s like watching clips of Wayne Gretzky playing hockey as a kid. Everyone else on the ice isn’t even playing the same sport.

This list looks at three early bands of future rock legends. What’s immediately obvious is how profoundly they stuck out within these groups. Like an adult wearing a child’s jacket. Busting at the seams. Waiting for the stadium.

Baby, we were born to run.

The Castiles featuring Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen said he was kicked out of his first band because his guitar was “too cheap.” That cheap guitar, a Christmas gift from his mother, cost $60. His exit from The Rogues led to another band called The Castiles, formed by a neighborhood kid named George Theiss. Springsteen wrote about the band’s first gig in his memoir Born to Run: “We set up in the shade under the overhang of a little garage and stood in front of an audience of maybe fifty souls.”

A 1967 gig at a youth center survives as Springsteen’s earliest live recording. The garage rock band performed cover songs and had booked Springsteen’s first studio session a year earlier. But after three years, internal bickering, and a marijuana bust, The Castiles were finished. Check out Springsteen with The Castiles covering Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” from 1967.

Bad Radio featuring Eddie Vedder

In 1990, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Mike McCready needed a drummer and a singer to complete their newly formed band. Gossard and Ament were picking up the pieces following the end of their previous group, Mother Love Bone, whose singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose. They invited former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons to join and asked if he knew any singers. Irons didn’t join then, but he would eventually become Pearl Jam’s drummer in 1994.

But his friend Eddie Vedder fronted a San Diego funk rock group called Bad Radio. Vedder’s group sounded much closer to the Red Hot Chili Peppers than the grunge rock of Pearl Jam. However, he’d written a song called “Better Man,” and you can find YouTube clips of Bad Radio performing it. In other clips, Vedder’s stage presence and attire resemble a more timid Anthony Kiedis. But even with Bad Radio, while singing “Better Man,” the avatar for ’90s alt-rock slowly comes into focus.

Band of Joy featuring Robert Plant and John Bonham

By the time Robert Plant formed Band of Joy, he’d already been a part of several groups and had recorded solo singles for CBS Records. John Bonham played drums in Plant’s former band the Crawling King Snakes before joining the singer again in Band of Joy.

They shared the R&B influences of ’60s British mod culture, but listening to Plant and Bonham on these early recordings, they sound too big for the band they were in. What you hear is half a band hurling toward history. Meanwhile, Jimmy Page was attempting to carry on with The “New” Yardbirds. He needed a singer. Terry Reid turned down the gig but introduced Page to Plant. “Good Times Bad Times” opens Led Zeppelin I. The distant thunder heard in Band of Joy became a raging heavy blues storm.

Photo by Dick Barnatt/Redferns