Call them villains, anti-heroes, outlaws: there’s a fine line between a loveable rogue with a streak of the devil and a menace to society.
To celebrate the release of The Suicide Squad today (July 30), the DCEU movie that puts the baddies in the frame (and often quickly out of the frame again, having dispatched with them), we look at music’s great outlaws. Is it just us, or is too long since we heard about a pop star shooting up a telly?
Jim Morrison
The lizard king with an errant ding-a-ling
Who: As the acid-fried face of drop-out culture, the establishment were never going to look too favourably on Jim Morrison, frontman of LA psych-rock band The Doors. But while his band were trying to open the doors of perception, Morrison’s exhibitionism meant he was instead pushing against the doors of county jail.
Peak outlaw moment: “Do you want to see my cock?”: six words that landed Jim Morrison in a whole heap of hot water, being that he said them on stage to 10,000 fans at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium on March 2, 1969. While it’s never been confirmed whether the cosmic Doors singer did whip out Lil’ Jimmy for the crowd’s delectation, the Florida State Attorney’s Office issued a warrant for his arrest and, a year later, Morrison was sentenced to six months in prison. He died in Paris waiting for his appeal.
Grace Jones
Men fear her; Disney World banned her
Who: As accomplished an actor as she is as a singer, Grace Jones intimidated even her Conan The Destroyer co-star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who apparently felt she was “too tough”. Perhaps he’d been watching TV in 1981 when she attacked host Russell Harty live on air as she “felt he was not being proper”.
Peak outlaw moment: Earning a lifetime ban from Disney World following a 1998 performance in which she repeatedly flashed the child-heavy audience.
Ol’ Dirty Bastard
Caught out by a Mac attack
Who: The phrase “troubled genius” could easily be applied to the Wu Tang Clan’s most famous son, whose talent for hit-making features with artists including Kelis and Pras Michel was matched by his talent for getting into bother with the boys in blue.
Peak outlaw moment: In 2000, ODB busted out of court-mandated rehab and went on the lam like an old-school outlaw, even popping up at a Wu-Tang record release party in New York City. He was finally caught at a Philadelphia branch of McDonald’s, where he was signing autographs for fans in the car park.
Keith Moon
The one-man hurricane
Who: Brainless Tasmanian devil or situationist artist exploring the beauty of destruction? Whichever way you view the hellraising behaviour of The Who’s late drummer, “Moon the Loon” had an appetite for destruction that you can’t help but admire.
Peak outlaw moment: Moon celebrated his 21st birthday on his 20th birthday, August 23, 1967, as a small white lie meant he’d be allowed to drink in Flint, Michigan, where he found himself that day. And drink he did, reaping havoc on a Holiday Inn in a $24,000 rampage that began with a food fight and climaxed with a Lincoln Continental car being rolled into the swimming pool with Moon, naked, behind the wheel. Moon broke a tooth in the mayhem and the police escorted him to the station via a dentist. Legend has it that Moon was so blitzed he didn’t require any additional painkillers. He did, however, pick up a lifetime ban from Holiday Inn motels.
DMX
Played cops and robbers – with himself
Who: The outpouring of grief following the death of DMX on April 9 this year showed what a folk hero the New York rapper was – and how the establishment had come to accept him, with plans recently announced to erect a statue or name a street after him in his native Yonkers.
Peak outlaw moment: In what must rank as one of the wildest celebrity benders of all time, DMX went on the rampage on June 24, 2004, speeding around a JFK Airport car park with a police light and siren, pulling a vehicle over and pretending to be an FBI officer. He was ordered to pay $240,000 in damages to the driver, Sergei Priporin, but was unrepentant. DMX said: “[Priporin] was just totally disrespecting my authority. Not that I really had any authority… but what if I really did have the authority?”
Miley Cyrus
Always sets tongues wagging – usually her own
Who: Though it was her role as TV’s squeaky clean Hannah Montana that made her famous, it became clear that Miley was cut from a different cloth the moment she rode a wrecking ball naked into the pop charts. An advocate for marijuana smoking, an early proponent of gender fluidity and instigator of the most notorious twerk of all time (up against Robin Thicke; tongue hanging out, MTV VMAs 2013), Cyrus can only ever be expected to do the unexpected.
Peak outlaw moment: Joining forces with the likes of Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne to produce her ‘Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz’ album, an explicit, ultra-trippy record released outside her record deal. She and smoking buddy Coyne even have matching tattoos.
Jimi Hendrix
The draft-dodging guitar god
Who: Hendrix electrified the wailing heart of the blues and became a totem of anti-establishment expression when he mangled and reconstructed America’s national anthem at Woodstock, where hippies gathered to turn the generation gap into a canyon.
Peak outlaw moment: Plenty of US musicians of the 1960s lived in fear of the draft and expressed ethical oppositions to the Vietnam War. But Jimi Hendrix – who was a soldier in the US Army – was a shoo-in for a trip to Saigon, and would have been sent to fight had he not declared his homosexuality to the forces in 1962 and been discharged from the 101st Airborne, such was the policy at the time. The small matter of him not being gay didn’t seem to matter. Hendrix buggered off to Britain, formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience and set about changing the face of rock music.
Cher
She believes in life after love – but not in driving licences
Who: From a distance, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out if the 1959 police mugshot of a young Cher is the woman who’d go on to be the “Goddess of Pop” or a young Elvis, king of the same. A bona fide juvenile delinquent, she’d taken her mum’s car out for a spin without permission – or a licence.
Peak outlaw moment: Every time she goes on Twitter, where she famously and repeatedly referred to former President Trump with the toilet emoji and speaks her mind no matter what. Asked how she was celebrating Madonna’s birthday one year, she replied “with a colonic”.
Ozzy Osbourne
Pissed on the Alamo, pissed off Texas
Who: The Black Sabbath frontman has always given the impression of being a man who’s just woken up in the middle of a hurricane, quietly trying to figure out what’s happening as all around him chaos rules. Mostly, his hellraising has harmed him more than others.
Peak outlaw moment: The State of Texas sees itself as being a place slightly removed from the Union, a contested territory that won its independence the hard way – and The Alamo, in San Antonio, is the sanctified site that represents their struggle. It is not, therefore, a place that most Texans are amused to find a pissed Brummie heavy metal singer taking a slash on, as Osbourne did in 1982, leading to his arrest.
Cardi B
Does the B stand for Bandit?
Who: Cardi B’s creds as rap’s favourite bad girl are indisputable, but even her fans were shocked when video surfaced of her describing how she would lure men to hotel rooms, drug them and rob them for the money. Cardi was unrepentant, explaining that extreme poverty pushed her into it.
Peak outlaw moment: A 2018 arrest for brawling in a strip club. It doesn’t get more badass than that.
GG Allin
Part-performer, part-petri dish
Who: New York was the crucible for the earliest wave of punk, but even in the time of gobbing on the mosh pit, punk provocateur GG Allin pushed audience sensibilities too far for most with his mix of nudity, injury, blood and faeces-flinging. In essence, it’s the kind of behaviour that the Jackass crew turned into family entertainment, but the people weren’t ready – Allin claimed to have been arrested over 50 times.
Peak outlaw moment: Every time he took to the stage, gigs would frequently end with a trip to the hospital or the police station. Allin died in 1993, a year after an arrest in Austin following a show in which an Austin police officer noted audience members “running away from the stage gasping and covering their faces”, according to the official report, which also had comment from a man who’d been struck by an airborne turd.
Foxy Brown
Rage Against The Nail Bar
Who: Foxy Brown – Inga DeCarlo Fung Marchand by birth – had everything going for her as a Def Jam-signed rapper, but a fiery temper led to an incident that has come back to haunt her more than once.
Peak outlaw moment: In August 2004, a New York City nail bar overcharged Brown for a mani/pedi, having only completed the pedicure and forgotten the manicure. Brown, in a rage, assaulted two employees in the resulting altercation, resulting in three years probation and anger management classes. Brown broke the former and found herself in jail. Clearly, lessons were not learned: in 2011 she was kicked off a cruise ship following a rage incident over… a manicure. The same year, she was arrested for mooning her neighbour. The cheek of it!
John Lennon
The ‘national security threat’ one from The Beatles
Who: The Beatles legend was established as an agitator – rightly or wrongly – when an off-the-cuff comment in a British tabloid claiming the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus” (hey, they had more Number Ones, at least) caused not a raised eyebrow in the UK but became a Very Big Deal for the religious right in the US, who set about burning Beatles albums and memorabilia in funeral pyres. It was when Lennon chose to up settle in New York with his wife, the artist Yoko Ono, that the authorities started to take notice, not least because it coincided with the couple’s “guerrilla artist” period when they preached peace but dressed like militia in berets and fatigues.
Peak outlaw moment: Lennon’s life in New York was typified by reclusive stretches punctuated by big, public benders. His “lost weekend” with Harry Nilsson is the stuff of New York legend, a dadaist days-long pub crawl in which they for some reason rumbled around the city with tampons glued to their foreheads.
Tyler, the Creator
Banned by Theresa May; approved by us
Who: The provocative frontman of Odd Future was winding up the British establishment right from the start, posing as a member of the Royal Family for a 2012 NME cover. It coincided with a chaotic tour that clashed with William and Kate’s wedding, an occasion Tyler told NME he “couldn’t give a shit about”.
Peak outlaw moment: It was his provocative lyrics that earned Tyler a ban from Britain endorsed by then-home secretary Theresa May who, in some kind of fountain of irony, misunderstanding or simply Tory hubris, said he was inciting homophobia and couldn’t come over to play. In the ensuing years, Tyler continued to celebrate and interrogate his sexuality in a series of acclaimed albums, while Theresa was briefly a Prime Minister, apparently.
Johnny Cash
Prison entertainer, condor killer
Who: The self-styled “man in black” may have only seen the inside of a prison as a performer, not an inmate, but he certainly struck a chord with the men he went to entertain – his ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ must be one of the few songs written with an incarcerated audience in mind.
Peak outlaw moment: Cash was sued by the US government in 1965 for starting a forest fire with his burning truck in Los Padres National Forest in California, destroying 500 acres of land and killing 49 rare condors. Cash eventually settled for $82,000 – even if he insisted he didn’t care about “those damned yellow buzzards” he’d accidentally flame-grilled.
Elvis Presley
A man with a gun in need of a TV remote
Who: The face of rock‘n’roll rebellion, Elvis mostly stayed on the right side of the law – his one court appearance happened following a scuffle at a gas station in 1956 when his car was besieged by fans and the owners of the garage demanded he move on. Presley, it turns out, had a mean haymaker punch. Nonetheless, Presley lived a baller life: the car racing, burger-flying hootenanny he and his crew enjoyed is the stuff of legend. The FBI had no less than 683 pages of files on the star, mostly for his protection from extortion, and Elvis even toured the FBI headquarters with Richard Nixon.
Peak outlaw moment: That story you’ve heard about Elvis shooting his own TV set is, apparently, true. “Elvis just shot out things on a random basis,” a spokesman for Presley’s home and museum, Graceland, has said.
The Suicide Squad is out in cinemas on Friday, July 30.