Rock and Roll Lips: The 8 Most Influential Musician Mustaches

Music and mustaches have a long, loud relationship. The stage rewards anything that reads from the back row, and a well-grown mustache reads from the parking lot. Here are eight that changed the look of popular music, ranked by influence rather than by sheer size.

8. Lionel Richie

The 1980s Richie mustache was a neat, full chevron that paired perfectly with a velvet voice and a lot of soft lighting. It helped define the look of adult-contemporary pop for a decade, and it remains the go-to reference whenever someone says "smooth."

7. Hulk Hogan's Cousins in Country: The Nashville Horseshoe

Fine, this is a category, not a person. Country music kept the horseshoe alive through the 1990s and 2000s when most of pop culture had abandoned it. Think of it as an influence award for an entire genre that refused to shave.

6. John Oates

Half of Hall & Oates, owner of one of the most recognizable mustaches of the 1970s and 1980s. Oates eventually shaved it, which only proved how essential it was; the mustache had become a co-star. Few facial-hair moments have been mourned as publicly.

5. Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix's mustache was thin, loose, and almost incidental, which was exactly the point. Paired with the hair and the military jackets, it was part of a total look that said the old rules were gone. Psychedelic rock's facial hair followed his lead.

4. Frank Zappa

The Zappa is its own style: a thick mustache plus a small soul patch below the lip, worn with such commitment that it became shorthand for artistic eccentricity. Nobody else could pull it off, and almost everybody tried at least once in college.

3. Carlos Santana

Santana's mustache and guitar tone have aged together since the late 1960s, and both are unmistakable within a second. It is a relaxed, natural mustache, never overworked, and it is a reminder that some of the best mustaches are the ones left mostly alone.

2. David Crosby

The Crosby walrus was the mustache of the Laurel Canyon sound. Heavy, drooping, and unapologetic, it made the case that a folk-rock harmony singer could look like a sea captain. Generations of bearded, mustached singer-songwriters owe him a fruit basket.

1. Freddie Mercury

There was never any doubt. Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) adopted the thick, dark, closely trimmed mustache in the early 1980s, and it became one of the most famous pieces of facial hair in the history of entertainment. Queen's Live Aid performance in 1985 is, among other things, a mustache highlight reel.

The Mercury is a dense chevron, narrow and neat, sitting right on the lip line. Its power comes from contrast: a bold mustache on an otherwise clean-shaven face, under a voice that could do anything. It has been imitated at every costume party since, and the imitations only prove the original cannot be beaten.

Honorable Mentions

• Prince, whose pencil-thin mustache was as precisely engineered as everything else about him.
• George Harrison, whose late-1960s mustache helped launch the whole Beatles-era facial-hair boom.
• Ron Mael of Sparks, who wore a tiny, alarming toothbrush mustache on purpose, as performance art.

A Closing Thought

The best musician mustaches are not the biggest or the most complicated. They are the ones that become inseparable from the sound. You hear the first note, and the mustache appears. That is influence.