Hard Rock

Lenny Kravitz

He doesn't play that guitar

The riff of "Are You Gonna Go My Way" (9 March 1993) is not played by him: the guitar is Craig Ross's, the song is co-written with him and the Academy nominated them both for Best Rock Song in 1994. "Always on the Run" was written by Slash for Guns N' Roses. And one of his four straight male rock Grammys, the one of 23 February 2000, he won with "American Woman", by The Guess Who, from which he removed the guitar solo.

Steppenwolf

The motorcycle was a Ford Falcon

The century's biker anthem was not written by the band that sings it, and it was not about a motorcycle: Mars Bonfire wrote "Born to Be Wild" as a folk ballad about his battered Ford Falcon, and he had left the group in June 1967, before the name Steppenwolf existed. "The Pusher" is Hoyt Axton's, Easy Rider dropped it in as a temporary track, and the single stalled at no. 2 on the Hot 100 in 1968.

Thirty Seconds to Mars

The seven-year law

In August 2008, EMI sued them for thirty million dollars for breaching a 1999 contract they had signed before releasing a single record. They defended themselves with a Californian employment law that voids contracts of more than seven years, closed a settlement on 28 April 2009 and signed with the same label again. The Guinness record they ended up with is not a box-office one: it is three hundred and nine concerts on a single tour.

Queens of the Stone Age

The desert went through Seattle

Kyuss broke up in 1995 and Josh Homme went to Seattle as touring guitarist for Screaming Trees: there he met Mark Lanegan, a full member of Queens of the Stone Age between 2001 and 2005 and the second voice of Songs for the Deaf (2002), the album Dave Grohl played on. Nick Oliveri, also from Kyuss, was sacked in 2004. The band has nine Grammy nominations and no statuette.

Foo Fighters

Five times Best Rock Album

Foo Fighters' debut was recorded in six days, from 17 to 23 October 1994: Dave Grohl played everything except a guitar by Greg Dulli on "X-Static". The band has fifteen Grammys out of thirty-two nominations, five for Best Rock Album, a record in the category. And the drumming on "Everlong" is not Taylor Hawkins', who joined in March 1997 with the album already finished.

Incubus

Twenty-two years later they recorded it again

Incubus arrived with the nu-metal wave and their biggest hit was an acoustic song: "Drive" reached number one on the Modern Rock chart on 3 March 2001 and number nine on the Hot 100. Morning View was recorded in 2001 in a beachfront mansion in Malibu, and in May 2024 the band re-recorded the whole of it as Morning View XXIII.

Creed

Ninth in sales and first in mockery

Creed were the ninth best-selling act in the United States in the 2000s: fifty-three million records worldwide, Human Clay certified diamond and a Grammy for "With Arms Wide Open". They were also the easiest joke of that decade. In 2014, Scott Stapp suffered a psychotic episode brought on by alcohol and drug abuse; the band came back in 2023, pushed by baseball and TikTok.

Jane's Addiction

The punch in Boston

Founded in Los Angeles in 1985 by Perry Farrell and Eric Avery, it left five records and the idea of Lollapalooza, which in 1991 was born as its farewell tour. It ended on 13 September 2024 in Boston, with a punch on stage, and broke up with a joint statement on 17 December 2025.

Grand Funk Railroad

Seventy-two hours

The fifty-five thousand tickets for their Shea Stadium concert sold out in seventy-two hours. The Beatles, in that same stadium, had taken weeks. Meanwhile, the critics tore them apart without mercy.

Foreigner

The question the whole world asked

"I Want to Know What Love Is" was written by Mick Jones alone, and sung by Lou Gramm, who has spent years publicly disputing how the band credits were shared out. When Foreigner entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in October 2024, Jones watched from home and Gramm sang a single song.

The Who

They smashed everything and wrote operas

They destroyed their instruments every night and at the same time pushed rock into telling long stories. That double nature is their genius.

Deep Purple

The smoke was real

The riff half the world learns first came from watching a casino burn across a Swiss lake. The lyrics describe, literally, what happened that afternoon.

Queen

The guitar his father built

Brian May built by hand, with his father and with a neck carved from a fireplace mantel, the instrument Queen recorded almost everything on. He also holds a doctorate in astrophysics.

Nickelback

The band the whole world decided to hate, and that filled stadiums for twenty years anyway

The internet picked them as the worst band in the world and turned contempt into a sport. Meanwhile they were selling some fifty million records and filling stadiums for twenty years. The gap between those two things is what's worth looking at.

Survivor

The anthem of grit was born from a phone call by Sylvester Stallone

Stallone wanted "Another One Bites the Dust" for the training scene in "Rocky III" and could not get the rights. So he called a Chicago band that hardly anybody cared about and asked them for something with that pulse. Out came the most universal gym anthem there is.

Heart

They kicked the door open

Two sisters played serious hard rock in the seventies, when that world belonged to men. And «Barracuda», one of the angriest riffs in history, came out of fury at a business that only wanted to look at their bodies.

Bon Jovi

Tommy and Gina

The band the critics never wanted and the public never let go of. They wrote anthems for raising a fist on a bad day, and survived every fashion that buried their contemporaries.

Van Halen

A new language

They arrived in California with fifty dollars and a piano. A hundred seconds of guitar later, Eddie Van Halen had taught the instrument to do things nobody had ever heard.

Jimmy Page

The architect

He was not just Led Zeppelin's guitarist: he was their producer and their sound designer. He moved the microphone away from the instrument to record the whole room, stacked armies of guitars, and left behind a building that all of hard rock still works inside.

Robert Plant

He never became his own statue

At twenty-three he was the voice of Led Zeppelin and could have lived off that forever. He turned down the most lucrative reunion tour in the world and won the album of the year Grammy with a whispered record. He honoured his band by refusing to embalm it.

Mötley Crüe

The names rock stopped naming

Razzle, of Hanoi Rocks, died, and two strangers aged eighteen and twenty were left with permanent brain damage. Almost nothing has been written about them in forty years. They were called Lisa Hogan and Daniel Smithers.

Mötley Crüe

They needed a notary to be believed

In 2014 they signed before a notary that they would never tour again, sold that signature as their great farewell, released the film of the ending — and in 2019 blew the contract up with explosives to announce the comeback.

Europe

The song they did not want to release

The guitarist said it was madness and that there was no way they would use it. The riff sat in a drawer for five years, the manager rescued it for a laser show, and the label forced it out as a single against the band's wishes.

Aerosmith

The only thing they owed no one

Fifty-five years of career and a single number one, with a ballad someone else wrote, meant for another singer and offered first to another band. What was theirs, and nobody gave them, was the sound.

Scorpions

The whistle and the Kremlin

The whistle in "Wind of Change" was not played on any instrument: Klaus Meine did it with his mouth, because he does not play lead guitar. And the people who had to be convinced were the label.

Guns N' Roses

Three nights on MTV

"Appetite for Destruction" entered at number 182 and the label was about to drop it. It was saved by an executive who got MTV to air the video once a night, for three nights.

KISS

Somebody else wears the makeup

On 2 December 2023 they played for the last time, and four digital avatars came out to replace them. Two of the four founders had spent decades watching others go on wearing their painted faces.

Freddie Mercury

The teeth he never had fixed

He was born with four extra incisors and was mocked for them at boarding school. He could have paid for the correction a thousand times over and never did, convinced that mouth was part of his voice. The strangeness that embarrassed him was also his gift.

AC/DC

The black sleeve

They lost their singer just as everything was about to happen. Five months later they released the second best-selling album in history, with an all-black cover.

Poison

The laundromat ballad

They were the kings of the Sunset Strip party, and their most lasting song came out of a Dallas laundromat and a phone call he should not have made.

How Much Rock Owes Nikola Tesla

Without alternating current there's no electric guitar, no amplifier, no stadium. The full chain running from the induction motor to the distorted roar, what Hendrix knew, and the game of imagining which bands would survive a world without Tesla.

Hard Rock: The Decade of Excess

Private jets, record-breaking stadiums and riffs carved in marble: in the seventies rock became an empire. The glory, the bill, and the box-office split Peter Grant imposed that every touring musician still lives off.