Meet the ‘rejects’ kicked out of rock’s biggest bands
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Years after being fired as the group’s drummer, Steven Adler faced an intervention staged by former bandmates in Guns N’ Roses panicked by his demented appetite for heroin, crack and powdered cocaine. “I nodded to each hopeful shiny face,” Adler recalled. “I saw the love in their eyes. God knows I owed them. But the only thing I owed them was the truth. So… I promised them that I would go straight out and do more drugs than I’d ever done before. Then I saw the light go out in their eyes.”
This vivid incident is reported in The Rejects, a book by music industry veteran Jamie Collinson about the lives of musicians who have been dismissed from famous and celebrated groups. In a collection that could easily have run to 10,000 pages, the author collates personal favourites such as Nirvana – whose taciturn guitarist Jason Everman went on to become a decorated US Army Green Beret following tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan – with the well-thumbed tales of music-makers such as Pete Best, from The Beatles, and former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock, without whom the book might seem incomplete.
Alas, there are problems from the off. “I remember a band I worked with many years ago, organised around a leader and performing under his name,” he writes in an introduction that fails to appreciate the difference between a band in the applicable sense and salaried musicians hired by a solo artist. Worse still, Collinson’s ear is apparently made of tin. The description of the evergreen wonder that is Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades as “off-putting” certainly scotches my long-held theory that this is the one song beloved of everyone in the world.
Elsewhere, the inclusion of music-makers such as Ross Valory (Journey), Gary Young (Pavement) and Siobhan Donaghy (Sugababes) suggests a randomness that is at times perfectly incoherent. There are even moments when Collinson seems bored by his own enquiries. For the life of me, I cannot understand why The Rejects contains a chapter on Kim Shattuck’s brief spell with The Pixies that runs to less than a page and a half. While failing to mention that Shattuck died in 2019, aged 56, he mischaracterises her main group, The Muffs, as a “minor LA punk” band. There was nothing minor about them. I wonder if he means he’d never heard of them.
Too often, this is sloppy stuff. In many of The Rejects’ significant chapters, the author makes no effort to actually speak to its subjects, preferring instead to mine other books, magazines and the internet for quotes and hard information. When he does plonk a recording device under the nose of first-hand interviewees, he seems badly briefed. “So… were you ever actually thrown out of the band?” he asks former Brian Jonestown Massacre member (and now celebrated novelist) Tony O’Neill. One of the reasons Collinson might not know is because, like many in the record biz, for a time he “believed rock to be dead” and so didn’t pay it any mind. The book is at its worst when its author sounds like a music industry archetype incapable of independent thought.
The Rejects is at its best when Collinson stretches his legs with anecdotes that bear no tangible relationship to the subject at hand. Certainly, a two-part chapter dedicated to former Queens Of The Stone Age bassist Nick Oliveri reveals a good deal more about the author than it does its subject. “I put in my ear plugs and settled in to watch the support bands, sipping my pint as slowly as possible,” he writes of an acoustic gig in a pub in Bournemouth from which he leaves early on account of an early start the next morning. The personal touches that pepper the book cast the author in an unexpectedly vivid light. Despite sometimes sounding like a wally, his presence on the page is kind and good.
One thing is for sure – he seems too nice for this game. “As I’ve been writing, I’ve become more and more conscious that a lot of these stories end in addiction and sometimes death,” he notes at the book’s halfway point. Collinson lays the blame for this carnage on drugs. In truth, though, The Rejects would be a much better book if it understood that substance abuse is a symptom rather than the cause of the problem. It is the brutality of the rock biz itself that drives people mad.
The Rejects is published by Constable at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
