Never ever say never, especially when you've never heard the tracks in question! Sometimes mono drums are exactly what the mix requires. I've read advice from a number of well respected mix engineers saying to start your mixes in mono. Get the bulk of your leveling and EQ done before touching any pan knobs. If you can get everything sounding good, with all the instruments contributing where they should, with them all piled up in the center then you're most of the way there and stereo positioning is just the icing on the cake. Stereo separation can sometimes hide problems with frequencies clashing between instruments, or phase problems which will only pop up when it collapses to mono. In mono it is immediately obvious what instruments are stepping on each other and can be a lot easier to figure out what to do about it. While I wouldn't say that it's the Right Way to Do It, I have had some success with this method, and have been doing it more and more lately.
Why do you care what it sounds like in mono? Because (believe it or not) most people do not do most of their listening on headphones even today. Almost nobody sits exactly at in the "sweet spot" at the apex of the equilateral triangle with the speakers. They listen on laptops or ipod docks or stereos that are across the room, or any number of other situations where the listener is much further from the speakers than they are from each other. In this situations your hard-won masterpiece of a stereo sound stage loses all meaning.
And this is exactly the reason that unusual panning schemes can work. As was mentioned before, a lot of the early "stereo" recordings are LCR panned with maybe drums and bass on one side and guitars/keys on the other. There's been a bit of a trend back toward this style lately. Low's album Drums and Guns has some pretty extreme panning going on, also. If you listen on headphones it can be a bit difficult, but put them up on a real stereo and walk away and the mix comes together pretty quickly. It's actually a bit closer to "real life", in the sense that if the band were playing in your living room there'd be a guitar amp over there and the drums over there and the bass amp maybe somewhere over this way. There's like more space in each speaker for the individual instruments, and the room provides the mix.
That said, google "bass management VST".