It’s unfortunate that supergroups don’t really happen nowadays. Back in the day, supergroups were all the rage. And a few of those groups delivered some legendary music, from Cream to Temple Of The Dog to The Highwaymen. One can’t help but wonder about the supergroups that almost happened, but never did. Let’s take a look at three examples!
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1. Bowie + The Beatles
This would have been a real delight. In an interview from years ago, David Bowie once said that Paul McCartney and John Lennon showed up to his hotel room in 1974, where the two former Beatles members proposed the idea of a supergroup.
“We just spent the evening talking,” said Bowie. “That must’ve been the first evening they were back together since the big bust-ups. They actually asked me if I’d join the two of them and become a trio with them, and we’d change the name to something like David Bowie and The Beatles because they liked the idea of it being DBB.”
Bowie went on to say nothing ever came of the proposed partnership, and we’re still kind of mad about it.
2. R.E.M. + Nirvana
Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain said on numerous occasions that he enjoyed the music of R.E.M. He even referred to them as “the greatest.” Cobain and Michael Stipe ended up becoming friends, too. Stipe clocked the difficulties Cobain was going through in the mid-1990s, so he proposed the idea of a supergroup to keep him occupied.
“I was doing that to try to save his life,” said Stipe. “The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.”
Sadly, even after sending over a plane ticket and a car, Cobain ghosted him and died just a few years later.
3. Tony Williams+ Jimi Hendrix + Miles Davis + Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney makes our list of supergroups that never happened yet again. And this one would have been a real doozy. Imagine what a band would sound like if it was made up of a few of the greatest jazz musicians, guitarists, drummers, and songwriters of all time.
Tony Williams, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, and Paul McCartney were almost part of such a group. Allegedly, in 1969, Davis and Hendrix sent a message to McCartney in an attempt to get him to join their group. McCartney was on vacation at the time, so the project never really took off. But given the fact that McCartney had so much respect for Hendrix, we bet he would have taken them up on the offer if he wasn’t partying it up in Scotland.
Photo by Dave Hogan/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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