—————————————————— Workplace Ear-Destroyers | Houston Press

Classic Rock Corner

The Five Worst Bands to Listen to at Work

The doldrums of the day job. Everyone knows this struggle, including all your favorite bands. Chances are if you're reading this, you like more than a few bands who simply can't make enough money to fund themselves through touring, record sales and merch in 2015, so they work day jobs, too.

Yes, we all feel the suffering of the boring day job, and the one thing that's a respite for many is the radio. If you're lucky, you can tune in to whatever you like. If you're like most of us, you have to listen to a preordained playlist created by a company like Pandora, or, even worse, commercial-supported radio. Either way, there's probably some songs you like, and probably a good deal you hate.

However, no bands are better for ruining an already terrible day at work than these five. These are the bands we'd all love to hear leave the airwaves forever, regardless of what chart they managed to top 30 to 40 years ago.

Steve Miller Band I'll cop to this: "Fly Like an Eagle" is a cool song. However, anything else this band ever put out is straight hot garbage; you know, the wet and sticky kind you see and smell outside of fast-food restaurants. That's the only thing comparable to stale, moldy tracks like "Take the Money and Run," with its obnoxious "ooh lord" refrain, or "Jungle Love."

Everyone knows the only good "Jungle Love" is by Morris Day and the Time. You never hear Morris or Jerome on the kind of radio stations we're subjected to at work, though. You only hear crap like "Rock'n Me" or "Jet Airliner." Ever notice how all these songs basically sound the same, too? Fuck Steve Miller.

Bachman Turner Overdrive BTO is pretty much the same band as Steve Miller Band. If I didn't possess this vast wealth of useless musical trivia, I'd probably be hard-pressed to tell you which band did "Takin' Care of Business" or "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet." It's the same tripe: same awful lyrical content, same terrible guitar tones and same bland "'70s rock guy" vocal melodies.

This is an era that possessed luminaries like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, pushing forward against the boundaries of rock and roll and inspiring generations upon generations of amazing music. But instead we're subjected to this kind of gratingly inoffensive love-makin'-in-the summertime shit. BTO is the worst thing Canada has ever done to the United States, and that includes Justin Bieber. At least he's interesting.

James Gang Look, the Eagles border on joining this list, but they possessed some additional ingredient that made them more interesting. Maybe it's Don Henley using the word "goddamn" in "Life in the Fast Lane" that made it seem like they had more balls, or the mysterious, potentially satanic overtones of "Hotel California."

Either way, the Eagles were the only band where Joe Walsh wasn't a stupidly annoying prat. His solo work was at least tolerable, but go back to James Gang, and you're in trouble. Tasteless riffs, those same vocal melodies Walsh uses in every song he's ever written, and useless drum fills that served to exacerbate how masturbatory the whole project was.

That retch-inducing white-boy funk of "Funk #49?" Get the fuck out of here, Joe Walsh.

List continues on the next page.

KEEP THE HOUSTON PRESS FREE... Since we started the Houston Press, it has been defined as the free, independent voice of Houston, and we'd like to keep it that way. With local media under siege, it's more important than ever for us to rally support behind funding our local journalism. You can help by participating in our "I Support" program, allowing us to keep offering readers access to our incisive coverage of local news, food and culture with no paywalls.
Corey Deiterman