4 of the Messiest Band Breakups in Music History

We all know about the messiest band breakups of all time. The Beatles, Oasis, Jane’s Addiction, The Everly Brothers, and others had pretty intense public breakups. But what about those lesser-known disbandments that didn’t hit the headlines quite as hard? Let’s look at just a few examples, shall we?

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

In the late 1960s and for a bit in the early 1970s, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were an enormously popular supergroup. The outfit found a perfect balance between the flower power energy of the 1960s and the simmering anger of the 1970s. Each person in the band was a strong musician on their own. And unfortunately, they each had strong personalities, too.

Couple that with drug use and a love triangle, and you get the breakup of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in 1970. Stephen Stills and Graham Nash were both in love with the same woman. Neil Young wasn’t totally invested in anything but his solo career. Crosby essentially watched the whole thing fall apart from there, and the band went on an indefinite hiatus.

Live

This 1990s alternative rock band had quite a few hits under their belt, and they could have easily continued touring today. Sadly, though, after Live’s members brought an investor into their business circle, things took a turn for the worse. Chad Taylor, Chad Gracey, and Patrick Dalheimer all have different perspectives on what happened. It was an enormous mess, and frontman Ed Kowalczyk felt he had no choice but to replace those three members with new musicians. Gracey still has beef with Taylor, too.

“I don’t ever want to play with Chad Taylor again,” Gracey once said. “The best way to deal with a narcissist is to not deal with him, so I don’t want to.”

Blink-182

Some might not know this, but Blink-182’s initial breakup was on the messy side. Specifically, Tom DeLonge once said that the band had gotten to a point where they weren’t communicating well with each other, and money had a lot to do with the paranoid rift between the three members.

“It was all about money,” said DeLonge. “It was all about ego, it was all about fame… We weren’t even communicating. We were communicating through other people.”

They broke up in 2005 and almost completely stopped speaking to each other. The group has since made up and is still together today.

Sonic Youth

Consider this entry on our list of the messiest band breakups as a reason to maybe not start a band with your spouse. 

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore were married for decades. Then, in 2010, Gordon discovered that Moore had been communicating with other women and had a “p*rno-like video” on his laptop, which led to their divorce just shy of 30 years together. Sonic Youth would be over and done with just a few months later.

Photo by Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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