10 Worst Performances In Rock Music History

Every rocker will tell you how important it is to crush it in a live setting. As much fun as making magic in the studio can be, it's not going to mean a single thing if you can't translate that to millions of fans in front of you night after night. While we have no shortage of great gigs, not every massive show goes down with necessarily flying colors.

For one reason or another, every one of these shows was sabotaged from the start, with one thing going wrong after another. Whereas you can usually just chalk this up to rock stars letting their ego get in the way of things, most of these just came down to technical difficulties, where the band either couldn't hear themselves or things went wrong behind the scenes. That's not to say that these performances weren't at least entertaining to watch though, becoming a part of rock history if only for how funny they are, as the musicians try their best to save the evening.

One thing that we're ruling out on a list like this though: no shows that turned fatal. For as many times people walked into a venue and didn't walk out, this is more to celebrate the imperfections rather than memorialize the lives that were lost playing music. Music is supposed to bring people together after all, except these shows are known more for their dysfunction than anything else.

In the grand history of the MTV era of music, it's easy to just say that there was nothing good to come out of hair metal. While that's certainly not true, there was more than a few bands that rose to the top that were more concerned about the product that they could put in their hair rather than the actual music they were playing. And if there was any indication that music was taking a back seat, just look at what Poison did when they rolled into the MTV Awards.

Up to this point, Poison had always been an amazing stage act, with Bret Michaels acting as the de facto parent of the group making sure everything was in check. This was around the time that CC Deville was hitting the bottle pretty hard though, which led to him being absolutely out of his mind by the time they were expected to go on.

As the dress rehearsal was already pretty shaky, CC went into his own world when the cameras started to roll, launching into Talk Dirty to Me when they were supposed to play Unskinny Bop. You can really see the anxiety on Bret Michaels' face throughout the whole broadcast, which eventually came to a head with him and CC fighting backstage and Deville sent packing a few weeks later. They may have tried to make it amid the changing times, but the classic era of Poison pretty much died on the stage that night.