5 Bands That Nearly Died from Excess and Came Back

I explain how Aerosmith made their 1976 masterpiece ROCKS in total chaos, then very nearly threw it all away as the band came apart at the seams before they cleaned up and roared back in the late 1980s.

That arc, near collapse to comeback, is one of rock's oldest stories. Here are 5 more bands that almost did not make it and found a way back.

1. Guns N' Roses

At the turn of the 1990s Guns N' Roses were the biggest band on earth and quietly falling apart. The chaos that fueled Appetite for Destruction curdled into missed shows, lineup blowups, and members in real trouble. The band splintered for the better part of two decades. The comeback was the long game: members got healthy, old wounds slowly healed, and in time the classic lineup reunited for one of the highest grossing tours in history. Proof that even the most broken bands can find their way back to the stage.

2. Motley Crue

No band lived closer to the edge. Bassist Nikki Sixx famously flatlined after an overdose in 1987 and was revived, an experience he later turned into a song and a brutally honest book. That scare, and others like it, eventually pushed the Crue toward getting clean. They survived the wreckage, told their story without flinching in The Dirt, and kept selling out arenas decades later. A genuine cautionary tale that also became a comeback.

3. Red Hot Chili Peppers

The Chili Peppers learned the cost of excess the hardest way, losing founding guitarist Hillel Slovak in 1988. The band nearly ended right there. Instead they regrouped, and the eventual arrival and recovery arc of guitarist John Frusciante helped power their biggest records, from BloodSugarSexMagik to Californication, an album openly about coming out the other side. They turned survival itself into some of their best music.

4. David Bowie

By the mid 1970s Bowie was living in Los Angeles in a famously dark period, his health and grip on reality frayed by a punishing lifestyle. Rather than spiral further, he did something radical: he fled to Berlin, cleaned up, and reinvented himself completely, making the experimental Low and Heroes records that are now considered career high points. Bowie did not just survive his worst stretch. He turned the escape from it into a masterpiece.

5. Black Sabbath

The band that invented heavy metal nearly buried itself in the late 1970s as the excess caught up with everyone, which led to them parting ways with Ozzy Osbourne in 1979. Both sides looked finished. Instead Sabbath reinvented themselves with Ronnie James Dio and a second classic era, and Ozzy, after his own long battles, rebuilt into one of the most beloved figures in all of rock. Two comebacks out of one near ending.

More on What Rocks: 5 Bands That Survived Losing Their Singer, That Time Ozzy Bit a Bat, and 5 Classic Albums Made by Bands That Couldn't Stand Each Other.

Well there you have it! 5 bands that stared down the end and made it back, from Guns N' Roses to Bowie's Berlin escape. The excess nearly took all of them. What makes them legends is not that they partied hard. It is that they found a way to survive it and keep making the music. The comeback is the real headline.

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Rock on.

PJ Pat