10 Rock Albums That Were Ruined By One Song

Every young band that’s looking to make a classic album has no real time for filler. This is the moment where you’re supposed to prove that you’re a musical force to be reckoned with, and having one dud in the track listing isn’t really going to help your case for reaching the top of the world. While some albums do reach the top, they did have a handful of tracks that didn’t quite stand the test of time.

Then again, are all the songs here really that bad? Not necessarily. When you look at these as cut and dry songs, they actually hold up fairly well to the rest of the rock scene. We’re measuring these in the context of the album though, and putting them next to the gold standard of rock song just makes these tracks look lackluster by comparison. That’s not even the song’s fault either.

Sometimes it comes down to having the right song at the wrong time, putting together a decent rock album and disrupting the entire flow of the thing by putting in a song that just doesn’t fit all that well. More often than not though, these are the tracks that just make you scratch your head and wonder how the hell they thought using these songs were a good idea in the first place. No one can make perfect albums forever though, and sometimes you need to hear songs like these to appreciate the classics that much more.

At the beginning of grunge, Stone Temple Pilots seemed to signify everything wrong with what the genre had to offer. Grunge had started as a pure scene in the Seattle underground, and now we had people like Scott Weiland coming from San Diego sounding like a MTV-ified version of Eddie Vedder. Purple tended to shut up most of the haters real quick though...with the exception of that one hidden track.

While nothing has really changed from their first album Core, the songs on here have a much more defined identity than just grunge, with tracks like Interstate Love Song celebrating the lifestyle of a band taking to the road. The band had certainly found their swagger, but Kitchenware and Candybars gets pulled back down to Earth so hard towards the end of the album. Leaving things off on a Led Zeppelin like blues jam to close out everything, you have about a minute to take in the entire thing before lounge music enters the picture, as one of their friends takes the mic and sings an entire song about what it means to have a second album in your catalog.

The charm of this song is certainly appealing for a few seconds, but it definitely starts to wear out its welcome by the end, where the parody starts to wear thin and you just wait for it to be over. This one is far from the worst thing in the world (or the worst thing by STP for that matter), but it just stings because we could have potentially had one more kickass song in that spot instead.