10 Rock Albums That Were A Nightmare To Make

It's bad enough to have to recover from a bad album. Even if you think that you made a clear artistic statement, it's not going to mean a thing if your latest offering falls on deaf ears. We may have seen plenty of artists recover from bad albums, but what about when you have to throw out your new one before anyone even hears it?

That's exactly the sh*t hand that Green Day were dealt when trying to follow up their folk punk album Warning. Trying to get back to their punk roots, these brats had an entire album in the can with Cigarettes and Valentines, only to have the master tapes turn up missing when they were getting ready to go through the final mixes. That kind of blow can destroy any band's confidence, and yet Billie Joe Armstrong was able to turn that stress into rocket fuel.

Looking to blow their initial attempt out of the water, Armstrong started coming up with new and exciting takes on the punk genre, complete with storylines and characters much more grandiose than what you saw on their breakthrough release Dookie. What resulted was American Idiot, which sent them into the stratosphere once again, being one of the first real punk rock operas to achieve widespread commercial acclaim. At a time when Green Day seemed dead in the water, these godfathers of pop punk were able to hunker down and give themselves the career reset they desperately needed.