The Biggest, Messiest Band Breakups in Music History

Talking Heads didn’t formally break up until 1991, but their last record was 1988’s Naked, and their last tour was the 1983-84 run behind their album Speaking in Tongues. Those final few years were a tumultuous time in which David Byrne took over nearly every aspect of the band, leaving his group’s other three members increasingly frustrated. And when they tried to tour as Heads in 1995 with a new vocalist, Byrne took them to court. “[David] is a man incapable of returning friendships,” bassist Tina Weymouth said in 2005. “Cutting off attachments when a thing/person is perceived to have served its purpose or there is a perceived threat to ego is the lifelong pattern of his relations.” The group’s only live performance of the past 30 years took place at their 2002 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In recent years, Byrne staged a highly successful Broadway musical where he performed many songs from the Talking Heads catalog. None of his bandmates saw it. “I would have liked to go, but I wasn’t going to just drop in uninvited,” drummer Chris Frantz told Rolling Stone in 2020. “I think that would have been peculiar. And no invitation came, so I haven’t seen the show. I’ve seen little bits on YouTube. I think it’s highly unlikely that without Talking Heads songs he would have even had a Broadway show.”

New Order were in a pretty cushy situation at the turn of the millennium. While most of their 1980s peers were playing casinos and state fairs, struggling to find any traction, they were scoring genuine hits like “Crystal” and headlining massive festivals. All they had to do was keep their shit together and the three of them could have kept raking it in for decades. But bassist Peter Hook was still bitter that guitarist-singer Bernard Sumner formed the side project Electronic with ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr in 1991, and Sumner and drummer Stephen Morris were pissed that Hook bought the rights to the music recorded at Manchester’s iconic Hacienda club and released it as part of a 2006 compilation. All of this contributed to tension on their tour that year. When it wrapped, Hook said the band was ending via a MySpace post. “After 30 years in a band together we are very disappointed that Hooky has decided to go to the press and announce unilaterally that New Order have split up,” Sumner and Morris said in a group statement. “We would have hoped that he could have approached us personally first. He does not speak for all the band, therefore we can only assume he no longer wants to be a part of New Order.” When New Order returned to life in 2011 without Hook, a nasty legal battle kicked off. And over a decade later, they still haven’t spoken. 

The Smiths existed for a scant five years (1982-87), and looking back at their chaotic story, it’s kind of a miracle they even lasted that long. That’s because they never had a proper manager, bassist Andy Rourke became a heroin addict, guitarist Johnny Marr’s urge to work with outside artists rankled his bandmates, and singer Morrissey is … well, Morrissey. “The differences in personalities are what often make for interesting chemistry,” Marr told Rolling Stone in 2018, “and inevitably the differences in personality comes a point when those things are gonna stop forward motion, I guess. I suppose as well, me and Morrissey just saw our futures differently.” They sniped at each other in the press a bit after the breakup, but things didn’t grow catastrophically ugly until 1989 when Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce sued Morrissey and Marr over royalties. Things finally reached a courtroom in 1996, and a judge awarded the rhythm section £1 million in back royalties and 25 percent of band profits going forward. Morrissey said the legal battle ruled out any chance of a reunion. “The court case was a potted history of the life of the Smiths,” he said. “Mike, talking constantly and saying nothing. Andy, unable to remember his own name. Johnny, trying to please everyone and consequently pleasing no one. And Morrissey under the scorching spotlight in the dock being drilled. ‘How dare you be successful? How dare you move on?’ To me, the Smiths were a beautiful thing and Johnny left it, and Mike has destroyed it.”

When Oasis and the Black Crowes hit the road together in the summer of 2001, they jokingly called the tour Brotherly Love. That’s because the brothers at the core of both bands had spent the past decade fighting like maniacs. Chris and Rich Robinson dissolved the band just a few months later, reunited it three years after that, and then saw it collapse yet again in 2015. Rich Robinson said it came down to a business dispute. “I love my brother and respect his talent,” he said, “but his present demand that I must give up my equal share of the band, and that our drummer for 28 years and original partner, Steve Gorman, relinquish 100 percent of his share, reducing him to a salaried employee, is not something I could agree to.” In 2017, Chris Robinson told Rolling Stone he had no interest in a reunion. “I plan on, at some point, singing those songs,” he said. “But not with any of those people. Family’s family, business is business. But music is music. And that music has been tainted to me by behavior and attitudes. Actions. You know what I mean? Money’s never motivated me. It’s not gonna start now. No matter what happens.” The band came back two years later for a reunion tour. Tickets were not cheap.

David Crosby was an incredible songwriter and singer, but he wasn’t always the best bandmate. The Byrds learned this pretty early into their run during the 1960s. “I had a large ego and Roger and I started having conflicts with each other over material, business, expenses,” Crosby wrote in his memoir Long Time Gone. “Everything we did was a potential source of disagreement.” Things came to a head in 1967 when Crosby sat in with Buffalo Springfield at the Monterey Pop festival and went on an onstage rant about the JFK assisination that embarrassed the other Byrds. There were also major battles during the recording of their album The Notorious Byrd Brothers. By the end of 1967, they’d simply had enough. “[Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman] came over and said that they wanted to throw me out,” Crosby said in 1980. “They came zooming up in their Porsches and said that I was impossible to work with and I wasn’t very good anyway, and they’d do better without me. And frankly, I’ve been laughing ever since. Fuck ’em. But it hurt like hell.”

In the early days of the Pixies, the band pretty much understood that Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Black Francis) wrote all the songs. The formula led to classic albums like Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, but bassist Kim Deal eventually felt some understandable resentment, especially after proving her songwriting chops when she co-wrote their classic “Gigantic.” The formation of the Breeders in 1990 gave her a creative outlet, but that made it harder to return to the Pixies where she had only had a supporting role. Deal didn’t have any songs on 1991’s Bossanova and 1992’s Trompe le Monde. Making matters worse, she wasn’t getting along with Thompson offstage, and the Pixies 1992 tour opening for U2 turned into a miserable slog, as the unhappy band soldiered through gigs in front of oceans of indifferent fans who’d never heard of them. “We were not getting much of a reaction and feeling a little tense, especially me,” Thompson said. “I needed to get away from that band and those people.” He did that a few months later when he broke up the band via fax. “If I would have called a meeting or something, then it would have just kind of devolved into this big discussion,” Thompson said in 2004. “And I just wasn’t up for that. I was just, like, ‘I’m done. I’m done. Goodbye. There’s no discussion,’ you know what I mean?” 

Between 1968 and 1970, Creedence Clearwater Revival pounded out six albums and landed some of the greatest singles in rock history on the charts, including “Proud Mary,” “Fortunate Son,” “Bad Moon Rising,” and “Up Around the Bend.” But deep resentments lingered behind the scenes because John Fogerty wrote and produced all the band’s material with little input from his bandmates. This was especially tough on guitarist Tom Fogerty, John’s older brother, who quit the group in 1971. “He was the older brother and the younger brother had a lot more talent,” Fogerty wrote in his memoir, Fortunate Son, “therefore he was jealous even to a greater degree than the other two in Creedence Clearwater Revival.” The band briefly carried on as a trio, but bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford insisted that they be brought into the songwriting process. The result was Mardi Gras, one of the most infamously awful albums in rock history. It was also the last gasp of the band. They broke up shortly after it came out. Relations since that time have been highly strained, to put it mildly. 

The 1979 World Series of Rock at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium had an incredible bill featuring AC/DC, Journey, Thin Lizzy, Ted Nugent, and Aerosmith. But the most infamous moment took place when Terry Hamilton, wife of Aerosmith bassist Tom Hamilton, threw a glass of milk at Eyssa Perry, wife of Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry. “I got into it with Joe,” Steven Tyler wrote in his memoir Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? “ ‘Man, can’t you come over here and control your woman?’ You can get into a crazy head space where all you want to say is, ‘Fuck you!’ I could have just said, ‘I’m outta here, but I didn’t; instead I said, ‘You’re fired!’ Those were the words! I’ve never actually punched Joe, but that night I came really close.” Perry left the band after the “spilled milk” incident and wouldn’t return until 1984. 

As S Club 7 learned the hard way, it’s a very bad idea to tell the world exactly how many members you have when picking your name. It means that any one disgruntled member can turn you into a punchline at any moment, simply by walking out. That’s what happened to the made-for-TV group Fifth Harmony in 2016 when Camila Cabello quit to focus on her solo career. “We have been informed via her representatives that Camila has decided to leave Fifth Harmony,” the remaining foursome wrote in an icy public statement. “We wish her well.” They wished her so well that when they played at the MTV Video Music Awards the next year, they started their performance by making it look like a fifth member took a violent fall off the stage. “It definitely hurt my feelings,” Cabello told The New York Times. “I wasn’t expecting it, I wasn’t prepared for it — especially because at that point I’d moved on from it. I was just like, ‘What? Why?’ ” The group responded by saying that they wanted to “show the world in an artistic way that, hey, the four of us are Fifth Harmony.” Turned out, the world didn’t much care. The group disbanded in 2018 after their lone Cabello-free LP failed to generate a hit.

The Clash had many reasons to be happy at the end of the Combat Rock tour in 1982. They were one of the most critically acclaimed bands in rock, and one of the most popular due to their recent hits “Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” They even played stadiums opening for the Who. But they had to fire drummer Topper Headon due to his drug habit despite his having written “Rock the Casbah,” and frontman Joe Strummer and guitarist Mick Jones had very different visions for the group’s sound going forward. Simply put, Jones was infatuated with hip-hop, and Strummer wanted to get back to their punk roots. After a raggedy performance at the 1983 US Festival, Jones was fired. Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon limped ahead in 1985 with the underwhelming album Cut the Crap. But a Jones-free Clash simply didn’t work, and the group called it quits at the end of the year. 

Despite releasing tranquil songs like “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Take It Easy,” Don Henley and Glenn Frey were anything but mellow dudes back in the Seventies. They were the undisputed leaders of the Eagles due to their domineering personalities and the fact they wrote and sang the majority of the band’s songs. This created a very tense dynamic that contributed to the departure of original guitarist Bernie Leadon in 1975 and original bassist Randy Meisner in 1977. By 1980, they were one of the most popular bands in rock, and one of the most bitterly divided. Things came to a head at a 1980 fundraiser for California Sen. Alan Cranston. Frey thought that guitarist Don Felder was rude to Cranston’s wife backstage, causing a fight that spilled over to the stage. “I’m going to kick your ass when we get off the stage,” Felder told Frey near the end of the set. This marked the end of the band until their Hell Freezes Over reunion tour in 1994, but they were still obligated to deliver the concert LP Eagles Live. As a not-so-subtle message to fans that the world of the Eagles was about to blow up, the record cover shows a bird’s nest filled with grenades. 

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel patched up their extremely rocky relationship in 2003 when they agreed to perform “The Sounds of Silence” at the Grammy Awards, and they followed it up with a series of reunion tours over the next seven years. They may not have been best friends, but they made an absolute fortune when they got together, and the sporadic schedule gave both of them plenty of time to pursue their own projects. Everything was fine until Garfunkel briefly choked on a chunk of lobster while in Nicaragua to play a private show. It left him with vocal cord damage, and he was unable to sing during the duo’s headlining set at the New Orleans Jazz Fest a few weeks later. They were subsequently forced to postpone an upcoming tour. Garfunkel slowly regained his singing voice, but Simon, claiming that Garfunkel wasn’t being 100 percent forthright about his recovery, refused to rebook the tour. In 2015, a frustrated Garfunkel blasted Simon in an interview with the Telegraph. “How can you walk away from this lucky place on top of the world, Paul?” he said. “What’s going on with you, you idiot? How could you let that go, jerk?” He went on to say that Simon had a “Napoleonic Complex,” and that he befriended him in grade school since he felt bad for him due to his height. “And that compensation gesture,” he said, “has created a monster.” Garfunkel later said that he regretted the comments, but it was too late. Simon has ruled out any future reunions. “Quite honestly, we don’t get along,” he said in 2016. “So it’s not like it’s fun. If it was fun, I’d say, OK, sometimes we’ll go out and sing old songs in harmony. That’s cool. But when it’s not fun, you know, and you’re going to be in a tense situation, well, then I have a lot of musical areas that I like to play in. So that’ll never happen again. That’s that.”

Van Halen was a band in name only when they reunited with Sammy Hagar (see #14 below) for an arena tour in 2004. It was more like an experiment where two bitter factions – the Van Halen brothers on one side, and Hagar and bassist Michael Anthony on the other – trying to see if they loved making money and pleasing their fans more than they hated each other. It possibly might have worked if Eddie Van Halen was sober at this time. But he wasn’t. He was also incredibly angry that Hagar tried to advertise his Cabo Wabo tequila on the tour, even tattooing the logo onto his arm. Tensions boiled over at the last show in Tucson, Arizona. “He came up to me before the show and rolled my sleeve down over my Cabo Wabo tattoo,” Hagar wrote in his memoir Red Rocker. “I rolled it back up. ‘Don’t be fucking with my shirt, dude,’ I said. ‘That thing ain’t gonna last,’ he said, showing me his Van Halen tattoo. ‘See that? That’s better. That’s going to last longer.’ It was the worst show we’d ever done in our lives. Eddie played so bad …They tell me he pulled some crazy shit on the plane home. My man was completely gone and out of it.” Hagar and Van Halen made peace shortly before the guitarist died in 2020, but they never played together again. 

Rage Against the Machine spent the entire Nineties raging against capitalist greed, racist police officers, an American foreign policy they deemed heartless and imperialist, and a legal system stacked in favor of the powerful. But at the start of the 2000s, they began raging against each other. They’ve never fully articulated why things broke down, though bassist Tim Commerford’s decision to create a spectacle at the MTV Video Music Awards by climbing on some stage scaffolding, resulting in his arrest, certainly didn’t help matters. There were also major disagreements about releasing the covers collection Renegades, and even fights about band merchandise. On October 18, 2000, Zack de la Rocha announced that the band was over. “I feel that it is now necessary to leave Rage because our decision-making process has completely failed,” he said in a statement. “It is no longer meeting the aspirations of all four of us collectively as a band, and from my perspective, has undermined our artistic and political ideals. I am extremely proud of our work, both as activists and musicians, as well as indebted and grateful to every person who has expressed solidarity and shared this incredible experience with us.” They reunited for a series of shows between 2007 and 2011, and there was another run in 2022, but they’ve yet to release a note of new music.

Guns N’ Roses parted ways with original drummer Steven Adler in 1990 due to his severe heroin addiction, and founding guitarist Izzy Stradlin left the following year due to burnout from heavy touring and tension with his bandmates. Despite the defections, the band was still one of the biggest acts on the planet by the time they finished the two-and-a-half year Use Your Illusion tour in the summer of 1993. Crafting a proper follow-up album after the 1994 covers collection The Spaghetti Incident, however, ultimately destroyed the group. A big source of tension was singer Axl Rose’s decision to bring in childhood buddy Paul “Huge” Tobias as a new guitarist despite his lack of songwriting chops, a move that met heavy resistance fromfounding guitarist Slash. “He was, without a doubt, the least interesting, most bland man holding a guitar I’d ever met,” Slash wrote in his memoir. “I felt like we were being force-fed with no innate qualities who didn’t deserve and couldn’t handle the gig.” They also simply could not agree on the sound for the new album, and the sessions were extremely tense. They eventually tried to bring in former Ozzy Osbourne guitaristZakk Wylde into the mix, but it was hopeless. “After a while, I could barely show up because the animosity was so crippling,” Slash wrote. “It was so negative.” Slash left the band in 1996; bassist Duff McKagan followed in 1997. When they reemerged in 2001, Rose was the last remaining member, and it was a band in name only. Slash and Duff came back in 2016 for an extremely lucrative reunion tour that is still going.

Unlike many great bands, the Police did not grow up together. Sting and guitarist Andy Summers are nearly a decade apart in age, and drummer Stewart Copeland is an American who the frontman didn’t meet until shortly before the band formed in 1977. They formed a tight bond during their early days on the club circuit, but began splintering apart once they started scoring hits singles and raking in big money. Copeland and Summers resented Sting for dominating the songwriting process, causing major tension. “Part of the frustration was that Stewart and Andy were driven to write,” Sting said in 2007. “It’s difficult to tell somebody it’s not a good song, and it was usually me.” They were the biggest band on the planet in 1983 thanks to hits like “Every Breath You Take” and capable of selling out stadiums, but they were fighting like crazy behind the scenes. “At first it is a kind of democracy, and then it becomes not a democracy,” Sting said in 2020, “it becomes a benign dictatorship.” The benign dictatorship came to an end when they concluded the 105-show Synchronicity tour in 1984. 

If anyone doubted that Pink Floyd were in a rough spot when The Final Cut arrived in 1983, they merely had to look at the album credits to see the truth. “By Roger Waters,” it read. “Performed by Pink Floyd.” There’s no mention of Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright since Waters sacked him during the sessions for 1980’s The Wall. Waters also has solo credit on all 13 Final Cut songs. Needless to say, David Gilmour was unhappy serving as little more than Waters’ backing guitarist at this point. The band didn’t tour behind the album, and Waters left the band a couple of years later, kicking off a nasty lawsuit and press battle when the band carried on without him. “If one of us was going to be called Pink Floyd, it’s me,” Waters told Rolling Stone in 1987 when he found himself struggling to fill seats as a solo artist while his old band was packing stadiums. “That’s my pig up there. That’s my plane crashing. It’s their dry ice.”

Tom DeLonge wasn’t on speaking terms with his Blink-182 bandmates in 2008 when drummer Travis Barker nearly died in a plane accident that killed four people. The tragedy put their personal problems in perspective, and the band reunited in 2009 for a series of tours that kept them busy for the next five years. But old problems began resurfacing when DeLonge refused to commit to recording a new record. He also forced the band to work almost entirely around his schedule. By 2015, Mark Hoppus and Barker had had enough and announced that Barker was leaving the band to be replaced by Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio. “It’s hard to cover for someone who’s disrespectful and ungrateful,” Barker told Rolling Stone in 2015. “You don’t even have the balls to call your bandmates and tell them you’re not going to record or do anything Blink-related. You have your manager do it … When we did get back together after my plane crash, we only got back together, I don’t know, maybe because I almost died. But he didn’t even listen to mixes or masterings from [our 2011 LP Neighborhoods]. He didn’t even care about it. Why Blink even got back together in the first place is questionable.”

By 1992, Mötley Crüe were worn out. The previous three years had been a crazy whirlwind thanks to the huge success of the Dr. Feelgood album and tour, their decision to follow it up with the compilation Decade of Decadence 81-91 and yet another huge tour. They needed time away from the music business and each other. Instead, management sent them right back into the studio to make another record. Vince Neil was often very late to sessions, causing riotous arguments with the rest of the band when he did show up. “I’m fucking out of here!” he yelled after one particularly nasty one. “Call me if you ever change your fucking mind!” Neil claims he was fired. The band claims he quit. “Vince wasn’t the problem,” drummer Tommy Lee admitted in their memoir, The Dirt. “He was just the scapegoat.”

British reggae band UB40 had a long run of hits in the Eighties and Nineties by putting their own spin on classics like Neil Diamond’s “Red Red Wine,” Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” But they fell apart in 2008 when lead singer Ali Campbell left the band. “Ali made a very simple decision; he chose to pursue and put his solo career over and above continuing to work with UB40,” the band said in a statement. “It’s as simple as that.” Later that year, the remaining members brought in Ali’s brother Duncan Campbell to replace him, causing a horrible family schism that only grew worse when Ali put together a competing version of UB40. “I sat back for five years and watched my brother Duncan murdering my songs,” Ali said. “We’re saving the legacy.” This led to a protracted battle in the British court system that ultimately led to a settlement. Duncan Campbell left UB40 due to a stroke, but he still hasn’t patched things up with his brother. “Not really,” Ali told Good Morning Britain when asked if he was going to make peace with his ailing sibling. “I have no contact with him.”

The Smashing Pumpkins endured through the death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin in 1996, the two-year absence of drummer Jimmy Chamberlin following that tragedy, and bassist D’arcy Wretzky’s decision to leave in 1999. But Billy Corgan decided to end the band in 2000 due to declining album sales and endless drama with his remaining bandmates that he simply grew tired of handling. “The truth of the matter is that guitarist James Iha broke up the Smashing Pumpkins,” Corgan said in 2004. “Not me, not drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, but James. Did it help that bassist D’arcy Wretzky was fired for being a mean-spirited drug addict, who refused to get help? No, that didn’t help keep the band together, not at all … Many friends at the time suggested letting James leave, so Jimmy and I could continue on under the name. But I was too loyal to the man I had started the whole thing with, and so I protected him until the very end.”

When the Sex Pistols broke up after their first North American tour in early 1978, after releasing just a single studio album, few people were surprised. Manager Malcolm McLaren took perverse delight in dividing the band into warring factions. He felt the chaos that resulted generated valuable press attention. But the decision to sack original bassist Glen Matlock in early 1977 and replace him with Sid Vicious was more than the group could endure. Matlock was a gifted songwriter and relatively calm presence, while Vicious literally didn’t even know how to play bass and was a heroin addict. Their inevitable implosion was greeted by McLaren as a positive since he always saw them as more of a political statement than a rock band. “The management is bored with managing the successful rock & roll band,” he said in a statement. “The group is bored with being a successful rock & roll band. Burning venues and destroying record companies is more creative than making it.”

Eight years before they broke down at the end of their 2004 reunion tour (see #24 above), Van Halen went through an even more bruising battle. It was caused by, of all things, the soundtrack to Twister. When they were asked to make a song for the tornado action movie, they’d just finished a long tour, and Hagar told his bandmates that he was exhausted. It led to a bitter fight. “That was the temperature of the band at that time,” Hagar told Rolling Stone in 2022. “It didn’t matter what we were going to do. We were fighting about everything.” The Van Halen brothers claimed that Hagar quit in the aftermath, but the singer tells a different story. “Oh, I was fired,” he said. “I was told that I quit by Eddie. It was Father’s Day, Sunday morning, 9 a.m. The phone rings and I’m laying there with my brand new baby. He goes, ‘You know, you always just wanted to be a solo artist, so go ahead and be one. We’re going to get Dave back in the band.’ ” Things weren’t nearly that simple. The band hired Gary Cherone in 1997, fired him after one unsuccessful album and tour, and spent much of the next decade in a state of absolute chaos. 

At the dawn of the new millennium, just when it seemed like CSNY would forever remain a memory, Neil Young decided to resurrect the group for a series of reunion tours. They hit the road in 2000, 2002, and 2006 and made a ton of cash in the process. In the years that followed, they came together at occasional charity shows and special events, without a hint of the tension that defined their original run. But then Young divorced his longtime wife, Pegi Young, and began dating Daryl Hannah. In an unguarded moment that he’d live to regret, David Crosby called the actress a “purely poisonous predator” in an interview with an Idaho newspaper. “I have screwed up massively,” Crosby later told Howard Stern. “Daryl Hannah never wound up in a Texas prison. I’m screwed up way worse than that girl. Where do I get off criticizing her? She’s making Neil happy. I love Neil and I want him happy.” This wasn’t enough. Young cut off all communication with his former bandmate. They never spoke again, sealing the end of CSNY forever.

Determining a single accurate breakup date for Fleetwood Mac isn’t easy. The band spent its entire 50 year career in a state of perpetual dissolution. Even before they hit it big in the mid-Seventies, they’d jettisoned Peter Green, Danny Kirwan, Jeremy Spencer, and Bob Welch. The Mac lineup that made Rumours and defined California rock kept that chaotic spirit alive, from the divorce of John and Christine McVie, to the breakup of Stevie Nicks’ and Lindsay Buckingham, to Buckingham’s decision to walk away from the band after their 1987 LP Tango in the Night, to Christine McVie’s departure in 1998 (she’s return in 2014). Nicks and Buckingham did manage to reach a fragile truce in 1996, which allowed them to stay on the road for another two decades. But when it came to gear up the Mac again for another tour in 2018, everything fell apart. It began at New York’s Radio City Music Hall when the band was honored by MusiCares. Nicks gave a long speech that night, and she felt that Buckingham was smirking behind her in a disrespectful fashion. Days later, manager Irving Azoff called Buckingham to say that Nicks was unwilling to remain in the band with him. “The irony is that we have this standing joke that Stevie, when she talks, goes on a long time,” Buckingham told Rolling Stone. “I may or may not have smirked. But I look over and Christine and Mick are doing the waltz behind her as a joke.” Buckingham filed suit against the band for wrongful termination, which was ultimately settled out of court. “It breaks my heart that we spent 43 years always finding a way to rise above our personal differences and our difficulties to pursue and articulate a higher truth,” Buckingham said. “That is our legacy. That is what the songs are about. This is not the way you end something like this.”

Florence Ballard started the Primettes in 1958 when she was still in junior high school, inviting her friend Mary Wilson and eventually Diana Ross to join the group. With a little help from Smokey Robinson, the trio signed with Motown in 1960 and changed their name to the Supremes. They originally took turns singing lead, but Motown head Berry Gordy Jr. pegged Ross as the leader and began placing her in front of the others in their performances and on the Supremes’ singles as well. As time went on, the public saw Wilson and Ballard as little more than Ross’ background singers. This was codified by Motown in 1967 when they changed the name of the group to Diana Ross and the Supremes. Around this time, Ballard developed a drinking problem and started showing up late for gigs. Without her knowledge, Gordy had Patti LaBelle & the Blue Belles singer Cindy Birdsong follow the group on tour to learn their act so she could eventually join them. Ballard had no clue this was happening until she saw clothing fitted for Birdsong backstage at a Las Vegas gig. She quit the group and tried to start a solo career, but it went nowhere and she was forced to apply for welfare in the early Seventies. She died practically penniless in 1976. She was just 32.

Queensrÿche only had a brief moment of mainstream acceptance when their power ballad “Silent Lucidity” reached Number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1990. But they’ve been plugging away on the metal scene ever since dropping their classic debut single “Queen of the Reich” back in 1983. Geoff Tate was their frontman from the beginning, though the other members of the band grew dissatisfied with him in the 2000s when he installed his wife as their manager and his stepdaughter as the head of their fan club. Things boiled over backstage at a Brazil gig in 2012 after a tense meeting where Tate’s bandmates voted to fire his family from their roles in the band. “[Drummer] Scott [Rockenfield] looks at me and he smirks and says, ‘We just fired your whole family, and you’re next,’ ” Tate told Rolling Stone in 2012. “I just lost it. I tried to punch him. I don’t think I landed a punch before somebody grabbed me and hauled me to the side.” The singer denied reports that he pulled a knife on Rockenfield, but what’s undoubtedly true is that Tate left the band when this tour ended. It kicked off a long and nasty legal battle with his bandmates. In 2017, Rockenfield left the band as well.

Before Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill began their romantic affair near the height of the Fugees’ success in 1996, they should have gone back and studied the history of bands like Fleetwood Mac to learn that this was a spectacularly bad idea. “It was like we were two outlaws in love,” Jean wrote in his 2012 memoir Purpose: An Immigrant’s Story. “We had flights on planes. We had huge fights, and a few times when it went down, she started swinging at me right there in the seats. People would scatter. We never got arrested, but we came close a few times in Europe.” The situation grew worse when Hill discovered that she was pregnant and told Jean that he was the father, even though the pregnancy was actually the result of an affair with Rohan Marley, son of Bob Marley. “In that moment something died between us,” Jean wrote. “I was married and Lauryn and I were having an affair, but she led me to believe that the baby was mine, and I couldn’t forgive that … She could no longer be my muse. Our love spell was broken.” Needless to say, this is merely Jean’s account of what happened. The few times Hill has addressed the breakup directly, she points to creative disagreements and battles over credit. “The Fugees was a conspiracy to control, to manipulate, and to encourage dependence,” Hill said in 2005. “I was not allowed to say I was great; that was considered arrogance, conceit.”

Just one year after the release of their breakthrough 1988 LP Straight Outta Compton, Ice Cube quit the group because he felt manager Jerry Heller and the other members were denying him proper royalties. He didn’t speak much about the situation at the time, saving all the venom for his 1991 solo track “No Vaseline.” “I started off with too much cargo,” he raps. “Dropped four niggas now I’m makin’ all the dough.” He then rips apart Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, MC Ren, and DJ Yella, all by name. (Sample line: “You’re gettin’ fucked real quick/Eazy’s dick is smellin’ like MC Ren’s shit.”) The most controversial line in the song was aimed at Heller. “Get rid of that devil real simple, put a bullet in his temple,” he wrote. “ ’Cause you can’t be the Nigga 4 Life crew with a white Jew tellin’ you what to do.” N.W.A broke up right around this time, and Eazy-E and Dre exchanged their own diss tracks. They eventually forgave each other, right around the time that Eazy-E died of AIDS in 1995. But “No Vaseline” still stands out today as one of the nastiest diss tracks in the history of recorded music.

Van Halen appears three times on this list, but their original breakup was the ugliest. It took place just as the David Lee Roth incarnation of the band was at the pinnacle of its success thanks to their LP 1984 and the hits “Jump,” “Hot for Teacher,” and “Panama.” But frontman David Lee Roth felt the group was drifting too far from their hard-rock roots by embracing synthesizers, and Eddie Van Halen felt Roth was too focused on his solo career and possible future as a movie star. There were also personality clashes stemming back to the early days of the band. In August 1985, Eddie told Rolling Stone that the rumors about Roth leaving the band were true. “The band as you know it is over,” he said. “Dave left to be a movie star. He even had the balls to ask if I’d write the score for him. I’m looking for a new lead singer. It’s weird that it’s over. Twelve years of my life putting up with his bullshit.” 

In early December 2004, Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo unloaded on guitarist Dimebag Darrell in an interview with Metal Hammer magazine. The group had been inactive for three years at this point, and both sides blamed the other for the impasse. Anselmo said that Dimebag had developed a crippling drinking problem, and the guitarist turned around and said the singer was using heroin. “There was never a point when [Dimebag] could not get drunk,” Anselmo said. “Which was pretty much every day. And now I’m hearing it’s worse than ever…. He would attack me, vocally. And just knowing that he was so much smaller than me I could kill him like a fuckin’ piece of vapor, you know, he would turn into vapor — his chin would, at least, if I fuckin’ smacked it. And he knows that. The world should know that. So physically, of course, he deserves to be beaten severely.” Days after this interview hit, a deranged fan murdered Dimebag during a concert in Columbus, Ohio. It would be deeply unfair to pin any blame for the tragedy on Anselmo. The gunman is 100 percent responsible. But the heated rhetoric in the final days of Dimebag’s life caused deep divisions between Anselmo and Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul, Dimebag’s brother, that were never resolved. Paul died in 2018. Earlier this year, Anselmo and Pantera bassist Rex Brown revived the band with guitarist Zakk Wylde.

Long before Oasis, the Black Crowes, and even the Kinks, there was the Everly Brothers. They were the original feuding-brothers rock act, though few fans knew about their personal issues during the Fifties and Sixties as they landed hits like “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” and “Cathy’s Clown.” As Phil Everly said in 1970, “We only ever had one argument. It’s been lasting for 25 years.” By the Seventies, they were coasting on past success and fighting worse than ever. Complicating matters was Don Everly’s addiction to ritalin, which he claimed led to him having a nervous breakdown and receiving electroshock therapy treatments. In 1973, they decided to end things with a pair of shows at Knott’s Berry Farms. “I was half in the bag that evening — the only time I’ve ever been drunk onstage in my life,” Don Everly told Rolling Stone. “I knew it was the last night, and on the way out I drank some tequila, drank some champagne — started celebrating the demise. It was really a funeral.” Phil Everly was enraged that his partner was drunk and screwing up song lyrics, so he smashed a guitar Pete Townshend-style and stormed off the stage. They wouldn’t play again for 10 years. 

As Richard and Linda Thompson, Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, and Sonny and Cher can attest, forming a musical act with your spouse is a very dangerous proposition. It can be a lot of fun when the marriage is thriving, but what happens when you hit a bumpy path or separate? Who wants to be in a band with their ex? This didn’t seem like it would ever be an issue for Sonic Youth because the marriage of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore lasted for decades. But in 2010, Gordon discovered text messages on Moore’s phone from another woman, leading to their divorce after 27 years of marriage. “One morning I got up to do yoga,” Gordon wrote in her memoir Girl in a Band. “Thurston was still asleep, and I looked down at his cell[phone]. It was then that I saw her texts about their wonderful weekend together, about how much she loved him, and his writing back the same things.” She eventually went onto his laptop and discovered many more exchanges and even a “porno-like” video. The band carried on for a couple more months, but called it quits a few months later.

By 2020, Nineties alt-rock band Live should have been an efficient money-making machine. They had enough hits (“Lightning Crashes,” “I Alone,” “Selling the Drama”) to keep them on the road for eternity, and the four members were childhood friends with deep roots. But guitarist Chad Taylor, drummer Chad Gracey, and bassist Patrick Dalheimer brought an investor named Bill Hynes into their business orbit a decade earlier. They are bitterly divided over what happened next, but what’s clear is that Hynes created such a mess that frontman Ed Kowalczyk felt he had little choice but to fire all three of them and reboot Live with new musicians. Odds of a reunion feel very slim. “I don’t ever want to play with Chad Taylor again,” Gracey told Rolling Stone. “The best way to deal with a narcissist is to not deal with him, so I don’t want to. Every time he opens his mouth, he’s either manipulating you, trying to control you, or bully you.”

Liam and Noel Gallagher had a combative relationship before the two brothers even formed Oasis in 1991, but they managed to stick together throughout the group’s many ups and downs over the next two decades. “[Liam is] the angriest man you’ll ever meet,” Noel once said. “He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.” It wasn’t until a backstage incident August 28, 2009, in Paris that the partnership finally splintered for good. They were at the end of a long tour, and had recently had to cancel an appearance because Liam had laryngitis (Noel claimed he was merely hungover). That night in Paris, Liam lunged at Noel with a guitar in hand as they waited to go on. “He started wielding it like an ax, and I’m not fuckin’ kidding,” Noel said in 2015. “And I’m making light of it because it’s kind of what I do, but it was a real unnecessary violent act, and he’s swinging this guitar around, he nearly took my face off with it. And it ended up on the floor, and I put it out of its misery.” After smashing the guitar, Noel stormed out of the venue. They didn’t play that night, and they haven’t played since.

The Beatles essentially invented the concept of a band breaking up, and the ugliness surrounding it set the tone for every breakup that followed. Rock historians have been arguing about the exact cause of their split for over 50 years, and even the members of the band can’t agree on what did it. “After Brian died, we collapsed,” John Lennon told Rolling Stone in December 1970, in reference to manager Brian Epstein, who had guided the band through most of the Sixties until his death in 1967. “Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us, when we went round in circles? We broke up then. That was the disintegration.”In a 2018 interview with Howard Stern, Paul McCartney said that Lennon was the actual cause of the breakup. “There was a meeting where John came in and said, ‘Hey guys, I’m leaving the group,’ ” Paul said. “All that money we’d earned, and all that fame we earned, was going down the pan. There was this guy that was going to take it all. It was that close. I was going, ‘No guys. We can keep it. We don’t have to give it to this guy.’ ”He was talking about Epstein’s eventual replacement, Allen Klein, an incredibly divisive figure in rock history who briefly managed both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. McCartney was the one member of the group opposed to bringing him on board. The others would eventually realize that McCartney was right to have doubts, but not before Klein’s negative influence drove a major wedge between McCartney and the other Beatles. McCartney was especially upset at Klein’s decision to let Phil Spector come in and complete what would become Let It Be, adding strings to “The Long and Wind Road” without his permission.Yoko Ono has been wrongly accused of breaking up the group up at several points in the past. And while there’s no doubt that her presence alongside Lennon at recording sessions late in the band’s career rankled the other members, pinning the entire dissolution on Ono is grossly unfair and simply ahistorical. “She certainly didn’t break the group up,” McCartney said in 2013. “I don’t think you can blame her for anything.”“I don’t think you could have broken up four very strong people like them,” Ono said, “even if you tried. So there must have been something that happened within them — not an outside force at all.”In the end, what broke up the Beatles was being the Beatles. They were four men who were simply exhausted by fame, fights over money and control, and, sadly, each other.