Long Live Bands! (OT) (Music Notes)

Today I woke up without an idea in my head. When I was 14 or 15 years old, my father pushed me to take a three-day analysis of aptitudes from a research foundation in Washington, D.C. founded by an interesting character named Johnson O'Connor. One of the aptitudes that was measured was called ideaphoria, which was also the title of one of O'Connor's books. Basically it means the flow of ideas. Here's a short page from the J.O'C. site with a description of what ideaphoria is and how to best cope with having either lots of it or too little of it. Me, I'm good at coping with the too much part. But don't have nearly as much practice coping with the not-enough side.

I was sick yesterday—weirdly sick. Nothing about it felt familiar. I think I might have gotten bitten by a radioactive alien spider. I hope it gives me strange superpowers.

I started feeling better at about 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon, and I feel fine again today. But this morning I was suffering from low ideaphoria for whatever reason. Usually I can sit down in the morning and think a bit and come up with something to write about. I've never done much forward planning in all my years of blogging. It's just "pick a topic." Sometimes it works, occasionally not so well.

Music videos
Lacking an idea, I thought I might pass along a few factoids from Rick Beato about the decline of the kind of music I grew up thinking was normal: blues-based rock played with electric guitars by ensembles, usually of friends, called bands. A while back, Beato posted a video claiming that, if you exclude bands and solo acts from the last century, there hasn't been a single No. 1 rock hit by anyone in the past six years that features an electric guitar solo.

I thought that video would be easy to find, but no, it's not. For one thing, you can't skim videos for the information you want. You just have to lay there like a seal on a ice floe, gazing at sludgey videos till your brain glazes over, and still can't find what you need. [Remainder of rant redacted; you're welcome.]

Then there was this video of his I watched just the other day about the demise of groups. Bands. Absolutely fascinating. He references a British talk show host, Richard Osman, who counted 140+ weeks with No. 1 hits by groups/bands in the first half of both the 1980s and '90s. He's talking about the British charts. Number of No. 1 hits by groups/bands from 2020 to now? Three. The rest are all solo acts and duos, solo artists teaming up together, that sort of thing. The group, the band, Osman claims, has "completely disappeared" as the core form of musical acts. Rick Beato then goes on to say that he put together a list of the top 400(!) acts on Spotify, ranked by number of monthly listeners, going back 10 years, again excluding bands that had formed prior to that. Only three were bands.

Well, I thought this was going to be an easy topic to research, but oh, so wrong, rock-star-breath. You think there's a lot of information out there about photography? It's dwarfed by the amount of information there is available about trends in music. David Bennett, another excellent YouTuber, says in a video called "When Did Rock Stop Being Pop?" that rock and roll had fallen out of popular favor completely by 2010. I don't want to go too far into this; you can use search engines too, and this is off-topic, so I'm going to bail at this point.

Rock is dead, bands are gone, the guitar is over
So popular music is no longer rock, bands are gone, and the electric guitar is passé. Of course, that might not be the end of the world. Bennett notes that jazz was freed by falling out of the pop mainstream, pushed out by rock. He's a jazz musician, so he's well situated to know about the energy and vitality of the jazz scene since it became a niche. He thinks the same thing might happen to rock music, now that it has decoupled from popular music and become a niche itself, pushed out of the mainstream by rap, hip-hop, and Tik-Tok solo acts and their songwriter-producers.

As one of several reasons for the demise of bands, Beato names "Band dynamics, adding, "it's hard to be in a band. Forming and maintaining a band is challenging due to the interpersonal conflicts." Sure got that right. Band members infighting and breaking up and reforming has been an integral part of the music scene for decades, and always a locus of interest to fans. (The very next video that YouTube suggested on my feed was called "The Messiest Band Breakups in History." Fleetwood Mac? Simon warring with Garfunkel? The Beatles?)

Bands might be gone, and guitars might be over, and rock, at this point, might be pretty far along toward becoming a much smaller niche based on a type of pop from the past. But consider this comment that was at the top of the pile under Rick Beato's video about there being no more bands, written by a guy called @jefftaylor5884:

Session/live musician here in Nashville. In a 35 year career in this town, I’ve seen the changes you are talking about here and elsewhere. All your reasons at the end are spot on. However, as difficult as it is to be in a band and promote one nowadays, my greatest joy in this business has come from bands that I have been a part of. There is something so wonderful about an actual community of creative people working to bring beauty into a broken world in a live surrounding. At this stage in my career, I still enjoy recording for various artists, but playing in a half dozen bands across genres in a town that loves live music is the most satisfying…. None of it will garner 100 million views or followers, but that matters little here. Watching people moved in real time does. Long live bands!

I looked him up. Jeffrey Joseph Taylor, who is almost exactly as old as I am, is a member of Time Jumpers, a group of ten elite Nashville session players who play western swing together (now there's a niche!) for their own enjoyment. (He plays the accordion in the band, which is going to make my friend Bob Burnett happy.) Vince Gill played with Time Jumpers from 2010 to 2020.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Gary: "The man from Nashville knows whereof he speaks. My wife and I spent a few days in Nashville recently. We saw the Time Jumpers and greatly enjoyed the show. Another member of the band is Ranger Doug from the old-timey cowboy group 'Riders in the Sky.' There are innumerable places to see great live music in Nashville. (Avoid lower Broadway with the crowds and 'Nash Vegas' atmosphere.) Another fine, small venue is the Station Inn. Bluegrass at night and a gospel show every Sunday afternoon. You can get lost in the harmonies. We only scratched the surface and we plan to return."

Sean: "If ideaphoria were in the dictionary, it would say: See Richard Osman. He has produced and hosted some of the UK’s most popular entertainment shows and writes the successful crime novel series 'The Thursday Murder Club,' one of which is currently being made into a movie. Since starting the series, he has aimed to write a book a year. He also co-hosts the popular podcast 'The Rest Is Entertainment,' where I heard the stats about the decline of bands in the charts. Interestingly, Richard’s brother Mat is a member of the much-loved rock band Suede, which formed in 1989 and is still going strong."

Jeff Hohner: "The other day I was listening to one of the new solo pop acts you describe as having replaced the rock band pop hegemony of yore. YouTube kindly fed me song after song of his. All were catchy but all sounded the same. The guy is obviously talented but like most artists has only one ‘voice.’ My immediate thought was, I wish he was in a band. I wish he’d team up with other musicians to bounce off of, to push him in different directions, to help him edit, to add complementary musical elements and sonic textures…. Everyone’s loss."

Patrick Dodds: "For months now, I've been listening to lyrics I have written accompanied by music provided by Suno. I'm not exaggerating when I say it has changed my life."

Joe Kashi: "This seems to be a reflection of a larger societal change. The decline of groups of all sorts, including broadly based community organizations and religious observance generally, has been well documented by Ron Putnam, former Harvard dean, in his book Bowling Alone (2nd. Edition,2020 ) Dr. Putnam was recently interviewed in The New York Times about this trend toward solitary activity, which apparently started in earnest in the 1970s. That was earlier than portable electronics or even personal computers, which apparently gave an extra push. In the same vein, the Surgeon General has recently been warning us about the debilitating effects of increasingly prevalent loneliness. I suspect that Dr. Putnam would have been most interested in the confirming data about the decline in bands and the rise of solo 'superstars.'"

Lawrence Plummer: "Wow! Sorry, but this does not compute. Living in Seattle and being a very big supporter of KEXP, I'm exposed to an enormous amount of 'bands'! Guitars are everywhere. This weekend I attended a KEXP sponsored show featuring Cloud Cult, a 'band.' They are an experimental indie rock band from St. Cloud, Minnesota, started in 1995, with seven members. If you haven't given it a try, I would strongly urge you to tune in to KEXP (KEXP.ORG) and give them a listen."

Comments

[John Krumm]

Duluth has a rich, active and low-key live music scene, and I really need to get out to more live shows. Our most famous export of course is Dylan (born here, but that's about it). Second most famous, perhaps, is Trampled by Turtles. We have a great local music festival called Homegrown, a truly wide variety of quality bands, from death metal to swing to a surprisingly entertaining and inventive one man band (who makes all of his own instruments, see https://tim-kaiser.org ).

The fact that bands are disappearing makes me think of the classic work of sociology, Bowling Alone. There's a new movie about it called Join or Die. See https://www.joinordiefilm.com .

[Albert Smith]

Being in my upper 60s, I can't think of any new music that I listen to. I have a thousand (no exaggeration) CDs, most of which replaced vinyl and tape formats, so my music is mostly old classic rock and real blues. All the music that I listen to has prominent guitar, but it predates your criteria by decades.

Guitar does have its young fans though. I spend a lot of time on YouTube watching the so called reaction channels. You can see 20-somethings listening to songs that we have heard thousands of times for their first time and just watching their expression when Jimi or Stevie crank out a killer solo can bring joy. These channels have comment sections that are mostly 50 year olds and higher complimenting the youngsters for being open to the old stuff and recommending follow on songs to try.

Young people like guitar but you can't auto tune bad playing and a 15 minute attention span doesn't allow for them to replicate what the classic guys did after years spent "woodshedding" until they mastered the instrument. It's easier for them to steal, ops, "sample" an existing riff and put their auto tuned vocal over it. I doubt that in 50 years 20 year olds will be sitting on YouTube listening to the current music.

[Omer]

I don't criticize younger generations' efforts whether in music or any other kind of art because change may well be beyond my understanding. And while I no longer try to keep up with the latest, I have yet to hear songs like "Marquee Moon" by Television, or "Kitty's Back" by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band.

Living in the past. Sigh.

[larry]

“Bands might be gone, and guitars might be over”

Hardly. Beyond the “No. 1 hits” and “top 400” is a world of bands, with or without guitars, and guitarists, with bands playing with them. I keep accumulating more than I can possibly listen to properly. Just this month, I’ve been trying to absorb recent music (again, with or without guitars). Fontaines DC (“Band of Distinction”) :), Goat, The Necks, Richard Hawley, Cowboy Junkies, Tindersticks, Nick Cave AND The Bad Seeds, The Blue Aeroplanes, and on and on. I really can’t keep up.

[Jim Kofron]

Hey Mike,

Yeah, maybe with the #1 stuff--but there are still a bunch of 'bands' as we would think of them performing--some older than us, some much younger. I saw Cage the Elephant in Chicago about a month ago. Dada before that. Going to Riot Fest this weekend to see a bunch of great acts (Dead Kennedys, the Hives, Beck, Fall Out Boy, etc...). I saw the Snuts in March at a small club in Chicago--a young Scottish alt-rock indie group. Going to see alexsucks open for IDKHow in November. Lots of great music to support!

[James]

1. One relatively recent, but kind of forgotten AI was Pandora, which classified all music along these terms. You don't have to listen to all the sludge. You make a machine do it for you. Is it right all the time? No, but you can get it to give you confidence scores, so you can go and look at the edge cases. A good model will let you update it based on what you find.

2. Sorry, not sorry, but I've tried with jazz after ... Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. Jazz is just ... done. So is rock, by the way. But so what? Listen to and make the music you want. Heck, even take and print the photographs you want.

[Terry]

"It used to be all about rock. Now it's all about the rock star."
Jeannie Bead ( Dead Like Me, season 2, episode 7 )

Today the "pop" music scene is all about marketing for money.
So-called classic rock radio stations don't really play the classics of rock, which would necessitate going back to the 1950s. They instead play mostly the same crap, over & over again, from the '80s, and aren't we all sick of it?

.... ~77% of total revenue from sales of recorded music goes to the top 1% of artists and bands... with streaming revenue, the concentration factor is higher : the top 1% of artists and bands get 90% of streaming revenue...... Wanna be a rock star?
This is one of the major reasons why there are a declining number of bands, of all genres, in popular music. Recording is rarely profitable, but live shows are still going strong. Rock bands today don't care about radio time, they care about tours.

And... rock bands are very much alive and well, electric guitar solos and all. You're right Mike, rock is no longer a part of "pop" but there's still a lot of great rock. There's thousands of bands all over the world; prog rock is stronger than ever.

And many of the sub genres are extremely interesting, like psychobilly, and pirate metal, and stoner rock, and RIO bands, and... but hey.....

Aren't we hear/here for photography?

[Lars Jansen]

Now I know I'm out of touch with what's 'hip and now', but when I look at what is usually performing in the several smaller venues I frequent, there are still a lot of bands, and with electric guitars. Sometimes maybe centred around a single person or duo, but that's nothing new either. Then again, I was never one to follow mainstream music and still looking out for the latest post-punk band.

[Tom Burke]

That was unexpected - a reference to Richard Osman on TOP! He’s not just a TV presenter, he’s also a very successful writer, specialising in what has become known in the UK as ‘Cosy Crime’.

Bands: like you, I grew up in the pop group/rock band era, though I can remember them first appearing. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? - the guitar group appeared, had a long life, and has now vanished, at least as far as new groups are concerned. About 18 months ago I was in Mississippi visiting my daughter and we took a day trip down the Delta, calling in at (among other places) Clarksdale. There was a Blues festival about to start and at one point in our brief exploration of old Clarksdale we saw a band setting up. There were all of a certain age, however; whereas the young African-American guys in the coffee co-operative we’d visited a block or so away were almost certainly humming hip-hop, not the Blues.

What’s happening is that old bands are just carrying on (if they can) or re-forming. Here in the UK a tour by Oasis has been announced - for next summer. Dates have been announced, tickets have been sold, and bets can be placed on whether or not the shows will happen, given the incendiary relationship between the Gallagher brothers (Noel, on Liam: “he’s like a man with a fork in world of soup…”). What with old bands that never die and all the music of the last 70 years available instantly to everyone, it can’t be easy being a young musician today.

[Zyni]

Is strange world. If you play the guitar (as I do) and sometimes look at guitar shops and online, there are many many people buying guitars, and I suppose they play them. I do not know if the market for guitars has shrunk, but it is not small I think.

And if you look at types of guitar and particularly amps and fx then at least it seems like a great number of people use very 'high-gain' sounds, so very 80s-and-later rock and metal. Perhaps this is just because it is easier to make a guitar sound like something other than that you can't play well if you crank the gain, but perhaps also it is that this is the music a lot of people like. Yet it is not now popular music!

Would be tempting but wrong to draw conclusions from this I think.

(This sort of music is not what I play: I am far from that world so anything I think about is is probably wrong.)

[Kye Wood]

In my 20's I'd go out dancing in clubs every weekend. I'm 58 now.

But I vividly remember thinking back then, God, when will this horrible rap music fad be over? Urgh!

Clubs played top 40 songs. Once rap entered the top 40, it was ruined. Ever try to dance to rap?

Music has just been dumbed down, is all. To the point of destruction. What a bummer.

[Robert Roaldi]

If you did not know, Richard Osman has written a series of crime mysteries involving a group of retirees, The Thursday Murder Club. They can be quite funny.

[Keith]

Once I realized my hearing was degenerating (I don't hear higher frequencies unless it's really loud, and wear hearing aids to compensate) I stopped caring much about music. Why spend big dollars on stereo equipment that produces sounds I can't hear? And autotune, don't get me started.
Somewhere there's a video of Billy Joel letting a member of the audience play the piano while he sings New York State of Mind. They had never met, let alone performed together, but the result is magical.

But music, like photography, or painting, or sculpting, or dancing, or any of the other arts is a form of expressing ourselves. It's never perfect, and never quite the same as anyone else, and it shouldn't be. That's part of the charm.

[robert e]

It was in a conversation with a friend's daughter that I realized that my universe of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century pop preferences is summarized these days as "guitar-based" music. It is undeniable (more accurately described as guitar/keys-based, IMO, but keys are eternal in western music, while the rock era is uniquely guitar-centric), but I was nonplussed by the change of perspective, like I'd suddenly found myself in a box, in an attic. But I wasn't surprised, exactly. Any Guitar Center store told the story--customers are mostly middle-aged or older guys, some with kids in tow. Box or no, it's part of me, just like big bands, crooners, and orchestration were part of my parents' cohort.

When they go right (primarily meaning that they're part of otherwise healthy lives), bands can be beautiful and enriching relationships and pastimes. But "Messiest Band Breakups" must be a long video. Heck, the reunion of Oasis made headlines a week ago. Clearly, many newsrooms are still run by aficionados of guitar-based music. For anyone interested in such things, I recommend the documentary Some Kind of Monster, which chronicles the breakup of Metallica and how marriage therapy saved the band. Given the "rock band's" colorful, often dark history, it's amusing that it is now a popular, sanctioned children's activity, with private "Schools of Rock" everywhere, and even official after-school programs, promoted for their positive effect on personal and social development. But as a supervised, guided activity? Sure, it makes as much sense as any other music- or theater-based program (it's mostly arena rock).

My problem with today's pop music is not about instrumentation but about a professionalized slickness that manifests in recordings as a sterile, facile and overbearing style of production. If my generation's pop music was guitar-based, this generation's seems to be producer-based. That in itself may not be good or bad, but its current manifestations mostly leave me cold. To me, much of it is missing a natural intimacy present in earlier pop music, no matter how loud, though maybe that's just my aging self not relating. Plus, this is a natural evolution of arena rock and music videos, so I feel the blame goes way back. And maybe this simply comes down to taste. Even in classical music, I prefer chamber ensembles to orchestras or solo recitals.

[KeithB]

We seem to be seeing a band’s breakup in real time with the fight onstage and tour cancelling by Jane’s Addiction.

You might want to read Bono’s Surrender, he goes into the early stages of forming U2 and music in general.
The most important accessory for a band: a van.

[Gary]

Did my comment about Nashville get lost?

[Kirk]

Austinites (people who live in Austin, Texas) live in the self proclaimed "Music Capitol of the World." Between the orchestras at UT, the Opera companies, and 24 hour a day rock n roll you can watch live performances almost endlessly. Oops! I forgot C&W, progressive C&W and the like. Home of Willie, mostly the home of Lyle Lovett, and so many more. And you know what? Young people here (at least some of them) grow up wanting to be in a band, an orchestra, a combo, etc.

In the recent past you could have caught live Jazz at the Elephant Club on Congress Ave. and if there was a movie production in town you might be sitting at a two top next to Clint Eastwood...he was a regular at the club. If you love live music, infinite bands, an endless supply of venues and good music I can't understand living anywhere else. Plus we have photography. A nice side bonus.

[dave]

Albert typed:

"I spend a lot of time on YouTube watching the so called reaction channels."

Those are fun to watch! Seeing the younger generation react to Jimi at Monterey playing guitar with his teeth (on Hey Joe) never fails to amaze the reactors! When they realize it was nearly 60 years ago, they are doubly-stunned.

A couple of times, I've heard the reactor say, "I wish we had music like this today."

The "matching to the grid" of the computer recording program has removed the feeling from most of today's music.

Don't get me started on pitch correction usage, especially on the older songs! (As Fil of Wings of Pegasus [https://www.youtube.com/@wingsofpegasus/videos ] noted, the pitch correction producers are looking at the screen rather than listening to the music.)

[Howard]

Sadly reading this post while listening to a tribute of JD Souther, who just passed away, on Paul Ingles PRX broadcast.

[Peter, in Boulder]

Great timing for this story. I saw Johnny Marr at The Paramount in Denver last night. If the guitar is over, nobody has told him yet.

[Stephen Jenner]

A few years back there was a craze for so-called ‘raw music’, where allegedly all of the studio manipulation of a recording was removed and the resulting piece was published on CD.

In my view, the best of these was 'Willie Nelson - Crazy: The Demo Sessions’.

However, as is the practise with everything that attracts the filthy lucre, there followed a torrent of copycat publications, of which I bought a few. Hardly any of them were any good (for my ears), they did however, load a few more units of currency into the greedy hands of the one or two companies that dominate recorded music.

Which is, I suppose why they do it, and why, every so often one acquires the odd gem.

[Stephen Jenner]

Further to my other comment, and something that came to mind after I hit the button…

I feel that context has a huge role to play.

---------------------------------------

When my mother-in-law toppled from her perch, a local fiddler was hired to play a dirge.

To date, I have never heard a more electrifying sound, it made me shiver right through to my marrow.

Note that, although my wife and I had been married for more than twenty years (now nearly 50 years), and I had sat in the same room as her mother, by the same wood fire, on countless occasions, the stroke that had robbed her of any English language that she had known, and most of her mother tongue too, I had never had a conversation with her.

Perhaps some of its beauty can be drawn from the fact that it was alive, and I will never hear it again!

The brain is an enigma, and I wonder whether humanity will ever unearth its secrets?

[louis mccullagh]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosions_in_the_Sky
3 guitarists and a drummer.
NO VOCALS
Been going 20+ years. Touring the world.

Being out of touch is one thing but not knowing about them after 20 years is isolation.

[Phil]

I think it's both true and false that guitar groups have declined. The difficulty is that it's hard to compare the music world (or any cultural form) directly with that of 30+ years ago.

Clearly it's true that fewer of the most popular acts are guitar groups. (Which I'm fine with: if popular music never evolved we wouldn't have rock music in the first place.)

But it's also true that music listening is spread much, much more widely these days than it was decades ago. The "long tail" of listened-to musical acts is longer and thicker.

There are plenty of people listening to rock groups that aren't among the most played music acts in the world in 2024, just as there are many people listening to disco, country, gospel, house, throat singing, or any other genre. "All" music is now accessible in a way it never was when we had to rely on radio stations and vinyl records to hear music, and to hear about it.

I don't even know how you would quantify the vast changes in musical listening across genres, given the huge technological and cultural changes that have happened this century. But simply comparing the most popular acts doesn't paint anything like a full picture of the entire music industry, or all music listening or performing.