The A To Z Of Mistakes In Rock Recordings

Pink Floyd, Nirvana, The Beatles, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Metallica and The Police... Even the most omnipresent of rock gods flub it in the studio – after all, you can always have another crack at it.

But what if the goof is right in the middle of a take too splendid – too fübertastic – to discard? Or the O.R.G. wants to save it as a sign their music is “honest”, or keep it as an in-joke that the public will never get, high audio streaming withstanding.

It’s fun to find these gaffes on your own and share it around. Let us help start your journey.

A = A Day In The Life

The final track of The Beatles’ masterpiece Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, A Day In The Life, was an ambitious undertaking. It had a 41-piece orchestra which arrived at Abbey Road Studios on February 10, 1967 in tuxedoes and were told to put on silly costumes like fake noses, stick-on nipples and gorilla paws.

It was to put them in the crazy mood to create "a tremendous build-up, from nothing up to something absolutely like the end of the world" near the song’s end, the players told to start with the lowest note of their instruments and gradually play to the highest.

Cost of the orchestra: £367, or £7,087 (AUD $13,571) in today’s money. In comparison, The Beatles’ entire first album from five years before had the price tag of £400 or £8,900 ($17,042) in today’s money.

The ork’s screechy scrawtchie was followed by an E-major piano chord struck simultaneously by three pianos and harmonium. The note lasted 42 seconds; the studio air conditioners could be heard toward the end as the faders were pushed to the limit to record it.

That wasn’t the track’s only mistake. "On one of the overdubs, Ringo [Starr] shifted position very slightly at the very end, causing his shoe to squeak," engineer Geoff Emerick wrote in Here, There And Everywhere. "This happened, of course, just when the sound of a pin dropping could be heard! A cross Paul [McCartney] shot him a sideways glance, and from the look on his face, I could tell Ringo was mortified. If you listen quite closely to the song just as the sound is fading away, you can hear it clearly, especially on the CD version, where there is no surface noise to mask it."

B = Beatles, The

Paul McCartney could be heard muttering "fucking hell" at the three-minute mark on Hey Jude after hitting a bum note, and laughing on Maxwell's Silver Hammer because John Lennon mooned him to show him how much he hated that song.

Lennon messed up the lyrics in the final verse of Please Please Me. He accidentally leaned his guitar on an amp and created a feedback squall, left in the opening of I Feel Fine and regarded as first the feedback sound on a record.

Far Out magazine revealed that on the final verse of Here Comes The Sun, George Harrison couldn’t decide whether the last line should be it seems like years” or “it feels like years” so he went for “it seels (sic) like years.”

C = Cough

About 26 seconds into Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, chain-smoking guitarist David Gilmour coughed during a solo, followed by a sniff at 0:31 and faint breathing at 0:35. The band left it in because it added to the ambience, but Gilmour swore off smoking after that because the raspy cough sounded so gross.

D = Dr. Zeus

Michael Stipe pronounced American children's author and cartoonist Dr. Seuss as "Dr. Zeus". When name checking him on R.E.M.’s The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite. He tried to sing it the correct way but had a giggle doing it.

E = Eminence Front

On the chorus of The Who’s Eminence Front, at about the 2:38 mark, singer Roger Daltrey went for "behind an” while guitarist Pete Townshend – who wrote the bloody thing – goofed with "it's an”.

F = Fart

At the 0:04 second mark of Roxanne by The Police, Sting tried to muffle a fart by leaning against a piano, and laughed when he realised the lid was open and his bum hit the keys.

G = Guitar-Tronics

Inspirational guitarists who used the latest technology to create new sounds often stumbled across them totally by accident – and couldn’t repeat them, much to their frustration. Jimi Hendrix was finishing off Electric Ladyland at the Record Plant studio in New York City when such a Tumblr moment happened.

His engineer and close collaborator Eddie Kramer recalled in a Q&A, "There was a period there where something was funky with the console and the phasing that I was doing. Jimi was sitting next to me and we mixed together, as there were no computers in those days. But all of a sudden, there was a sound that by some accident, made a strange thing happen.

"Jimi's guitar went 'woooof' right behind our heads, and we thought, 'What the hell was that?’ Jimi looked at me, 'Can you do that again?' I said, 'No, mate – I have no idea.' It was a mistake which I tried to duplicate but could never recapture!"

Kramer maintained they had stumbled upon "the beginning of sounds travelling behind you”, adding, "Had he lived, he would have been right in the middle of this amazing new technology, saying, 'Hey man, let's pan the guitar this way.’

Similarly, Joe Satriani got a hot-off-the-fire sound on Surfing With The Alien by combining a wah pedal and a harmoniser. He nailed the tone in an early take but then the harmoniser broke down. "When we finally got it working again, we weren’t able to recreate the original effect,” Satriani wailed to Guitar World in 2008. “It just sounded different. So, rather than screw up a wonderful-sounding performance that may have had a couple of glitches, we decided to just leave it, because it was just swinging.”

H = Heroin

Near the end on Velvet Underground's Heroin, Maureen Tucker’s drums dropped out for a couple of seconds.

The glorious Lou Reed-penned track started slowly, then built up faster and louder to its 7:12 finish. Tucker found as things got louder and faster, she couldn't hear the others. So she stopped assuming the others would too, so she could suggest they use headphones. “But nobody stopped, so I came back in. That’s the [version] we took. It’s infuriating, because you’ve seen us live, that’s a bitch, that song. I consider that our greatest triumph.”

I = Intro

The Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women was supposed to start with producer Jimmy Miller on cowbell and Charlie Watts on drums. Watts recollected at the time: “But either he comes in wrong or I come in wrong – but Keith [Richards] comes in right, which makes the whole thing right... It’s actually a mistake, but from my point of view, it works.”

Live, the Stones have never played that intro the way it was recorded.

J = Jammed Up

In Cortez The Killer, Neil Young and Crazy Horse took their time – over seven minutes and 29 seconds – to tell the story of the murderous conquistador Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico for Spain in the 16th century. But the narrative unexpectedly jumped. This was due to an electrical circuit blowing, causing the console to go dead. The verse and remaining instrumental passages were lost as a result.

"I never liked that verse anyway," Young shrugged when producer David Briggs told him. Similarly, Prince was in such a hurry to use the console he was installing in his new Galpin Blvd Home Studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota, that he insisted on using it before technicians finished.

As they worked on The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker from Sign O’ The Times, engineer Susan Rogers realised, to her horror, there was no top end. Prince was so engrossed that during the hours of no-stop recording he didn’t pick it up. But when he tied it off, he told Rogers, “The console’s kind of dull, isn’t it?” He was nevertheless so pleased with how the track sounded “different” that at one point he considered releasing it as a single.

K = Key To The Highway

Derek And The Dominos was a short-lived outfit formed in early 1970 by Eric Clapton (hiding from the glare of being a guitar god with a pseudonym), with US keyboardist and singer Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon.

When The Dominos were recording their Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs album in Miami, Clapton struck up a bromance with rising hotshot guitar-slinger Duane Allman, inviting him down to sessions at Criteria Studios. Some of these were jams on blues covers, with producer Tom Dowd running the tape recorder continuously. But Key To The Highway had a late intro on the record, as Dowd had left the control room with the console’s faders down. He heard the band start up and rushed back, yelling at the assistant, “Push up the faders!”

L = Lynyrd Skynyrd

The last guitar solo on southern boogie band Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama was played in the wrong key, in G, while the song was in D. Guitarist Ed King refused to change it because he received all the notes on the solo in a dream.

Around the 4:10 mark, during a pounding honky tonk piano interlude, you heard singer Ronnie Van Zant growling "My donuts! Goddamn." From the vocal booth, he could see his cohorts tucking into the sweet snacks he’d bought for himself.

M = Metallica

Kirk Hammett ‘fessed up to Guitar World of the wrong note on a solo he took on the track Master Of Puppets. "You know how you take an E string, you pull it down toward the floor away from the neck? I accidentally pulled down on the string, and it fretted out on the side of the fretboard.

“We heard it back, and I was like, 'That's brilliant! We've gotta keep that!' Of course, I've never been able to reproduce that since; it was like a magic moment that was captured on tape.”

N = Nerves

For years, it was thought Roger Daltrey’s stutter on The Who’s 1960s anthem My Generation was meant to epitomise a mod so filled with rage and pills, he couldn’t speak properly. But the singer came clean that during early takes, he was so nervous and uptight that he stuttered, and producer Shel Talmy thought it made the lyrics more effective.

O = On The Dock

The whistling on the final verse of soul singer Otis Redding on Dock Of The Bay was to be a hold-over until he came up with extra words. But he died before that happened, and it was released as was. It was used in Top Gun when Tom Cruise’s character Maverick recalled how his parents used to love repeatedly listening to the song.

Now that would have indeed been a feat, since Maverick’s father died in 1965 and Redding didn’t record the song until 1967 (the same year he died in, get this, a plane crash).

P = Polly

Nirvana’s Polly was about the real-life kidnapping, rape and torture of a 14-year old Washington girl returning home from a punk rock concert, written by Kurt Cobain from the view of the monster. Producer Butch Vig divulged that at the 1:55 mark, when Cobain came in with "Polly says" [pause] Polly says her back hurts”, he accidentally came in early but the band kept it in.

Q = Queries

You can’t count on liner notes to get credits right. Neil Finn revealed on Sydney radio how Crowded House’s single Show Me The Way was credited to Neil Finn and son Liam. Stressing it didn’t bother him in the least, he clarified, “I wrote that song myself – it’s credited by mistake. Liam is really embarrassed about it.”

During the Derek And The Dominos sessions, Eric Clapton heard drummer Jim Gordon play a piano piece and asked to use it for the outro on Layla. It was credited to Gordon but was co-written with his ex-girlfriend, singer-songwriter Rita Coolidge.

In 2016, Clapton got sued for $5 million by the estate of US bluesman Bo Carter for crediting song Corrine, Corrina to Leadbelly on his 1992 Unplugged album, which sold 7.7 million copies.

R = Roof

In the middle of The B-52s' Love Shack, the band stops and Cindy Wilson shouts "Tin roof! Rusted!” The whole band was supposed to come in together with that line, but Cindy jumped the gun and they figured it sounded better.

Neil Young hated the first pressing of his 1978 album Comes A Time: he told Rolling Stone, “The tape got damaged when it went through the airport or something. I had to go back and use a copy of the master – it was a copy, but it had better-sounding playback than the other one.” He bought all 200,000 copies of the stuffed pressing and used them as shingles on the roof of the barn of his Broken Arrow Ranch property in Redwood City, California.

S = Stones, Rolling

Early Rolling Stones recordings were low-budget and rushed. On (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Keith Richards hit a bum note on the 1:27 mark and came in late with his fuzz-tone around 1:35, while Charlie Watts’ 57th kick-drum whack was mistimed.

Mick Jagger’s tambourine was also off-time on Time Is On My Side, with tape glitches at the start of Heart Of Stone and the end of 19th Nervous Breakdown.

T = Temper Tantrum

Towards the close of 1993's Rearviewmirror from Pearl Jam's second album, Vs, you heard Dave Abbruzzese’s drum sticks hit the wall. According to Kim Neely's Five Against One: The Pearl Jam Story, he and producer Brendan O’Brien were clashing over his drumming style. Abbruzzese then punched a hole in his snare drum and flung it over the cliff the studio was built on in Nicasio, California. He was fired after the release of the album.

U = U2

One of U2’s greatest tracks, Pride (In The Name Of Love), about the 1968 assassination of African American non-violent civil rights campaigner Rev. Martin Luther King, wrongly stated he was shot "early morning, April 4" when it was actually 6.01pm local Memphis time.

Bono, who would of course hear the news in the early morning in his hometown Dublin, would change it to "early evening..." in concert. The acoustic version, heard on their 2023 album Songs Of Surrender, updated it to "In the evening, April 4".

Turn up the volume of the album version of The Unforgettable Fire, too: at the start you heard Larry Mullen hit his drumsticks together, then stop and say “oh shit!” because he came in too early.

V = Vague Instructions

For the second Jimi Hendrix Experience album Axis: Bold As Love, the guitarist asked his record label for a cover that was “Indian”. So they created artwork depicting the three musicians as Hindu gods, picturesque but arousing the anger of Hindus around the world and causing a ban in Malaysia that lasts to this day. Its biggest critic was Hendrix himself, who had meant “Red Indian” (as Native Americans were known then) in his request to give a nod to his Cherokee roots.

W = Wonderwall

At the end of Oasis’ biggest hit Wonderwall, you heard Noel Gallagher strum the riff of Supersonic.

X = X-Rated

Now a staple at weddings, graduations and funerals, Green Day’s Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) began when Billie Jo Armstrong hit the wrong note twice and dropped an f-bomb.

Y = You're Beautiful

A nervous James Blunt repeated the opening line "My life is brilliant" twice. The first one was snipped from radio edits.

Z = Zeppelin, Led

In line with Jimmy Page’s desire to keep ad libs and accidents in Led Zeppelin records, Whole Lotta Love retained the cough at the beginning. In the mid-section, where Robert Plant went “way down inside”, leakage from an earlier vocal take stubbornly refused to be edited out. So Page and engineer Eddie Kramer decided to spotlight the uninvited “singer”. Kramer said, “Jimmy and I cranked up the reverb and left it in. Big mistake? Happy mistake!’’

At 1:37 of The Ocean, Zep’s dedication to their fans, a telephone was heard ringing faintly – and at 4:11, Page hit a G string by mistake.

While recording Black Country Woman from Physical Graffiti in a back garden, a plane flew above. You heard John Paul Jones mentioning it, and Plant replying, "Nah, leave it.”