10 Rock Albums That Were Killed By One Song
The songs that sent their albums spiralling...
It's usually a labor of love for any band to make an album. No matter how strenuous the process gets, there's nothing like having the sound in your head made real right before your ears. At the same time, the freedom that you have in a studio has come back to bite many bands throughout the years.
Whether it be because of an off-hand experiment or just a certain moment where everything went wrong, bands have created songs that have messed up the rest of the album by design. The album itself might not even by that bad, but when you have these songs on the track listing, they stick in the listener's brain and refuse to go away. Even if you have some of your best work on these records, they will forever have to live in the shadow of the one song where you dropped the ball.
Here are just a few examples of songs that sent their parent albums on a downward path. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears were put into these albums, but it only took one tune to nullify any goodwill the rest of the record had.
10. I Was Made For Lovin You - KISS
In terms of raw hard rock attitude, there was no one who could equal KISS in the mid 70's. Their brilliant combination of rock bombast combined with the circus like spectacle of their live shows made them one of the most successful bands on the planet. However, even the 4 Demons of Rock weren't bulletproof against the trends.
When going into the studio after completing their solo albums, Paul Stanley had come to the forefront with a song that had a disco bent to its delivery. The record was far from hard rock, but the hook line was too much for the rest of the band to pass up. Though "I Was Made For Lovin You" was a huge hit for the band, it could be credited as the song that killed off their hard rock goodwill.
The subsequent album Dynasty ended up being a suprisingly decent KISS release, but with this song as its main selling point, many soldiers in the KISS army were staying home instead of running out to buy it. This also marked another end of sorts, with Peter Criss leaving shortly after the album's completion and Ace Frehley following suit a couple albums later. "I Was Made For Lovin You" isn't even that bad of a song, but it was the disco treason that left many hard rockers feeling burned for years.