All the best bands are British; British music is derivative

Cafe Society
21

Your conclusion is far too sweeping but there is a grain of truth to it. Major American rock acts tend to be solo while major British acts are often groups. This has been the trend since the 50’s when most of the great acts that came out of the first wave of rock n’ roll were solo (e.g., Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis). As to why, perhaps it’s because–deep down–individualism is stronger in America than in Britain.

This is not to say there have not been great American rock bands. A couple I would mention would be The Replacements and REM (who I know some people may regard as being too “soft” to be considered rock). Likewise, there have also been a few notable British solo rock acts like Elvis Costello and Elton John (even though he really hasn’t done anything interesting in 30 years).

Also, you mentioned Lou Reed as being a solo act. However, before going off on his own, Reed was a part of The Velvet Underground which was a highly influential American rock band.

22

Marley: I really liked your point about the Southern-ness of the Blues, and, well, I think you’ve inspired me to search out some more Allman Brothers. Suggestions?
OneCentStamp: I love when people misunderstand me, but their misunderstanding ends up being more interesting that what I came with in the first place. For the record Aerosmith’s songwriting credits are all over the place, including a few not written by anyone in the band in the first place.

I also forgot about Queen, who shoots my OP to shit.

23

And I’m in total agreement that my OP was waaaaay too sweeping. I’m prone to hyberbole. I still think the sentiment stands, though.

24

Not waving the flag here, as I think the question is unanswerable, but I should point out that Hendrix only got famous due to his sojourn in Britain, where he was backed by a British record label and band. And Graham Nash is English too.

25

Good point. That’s true of a lot of American “bands”: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins …

Los Lobos.

26

This just proves that it takes two or more Limeys to equal one good old boy. :smiley:

27

Thanks very much. I write for a living, and if I can’t write persuasively about the Allmans (I’ll skip my credentials), I doubt I can write about anything.

Not knowing which albums you’ve heard, I’ll say At Fillmore East is the biggie. It’s considered by some to be the best live album ever. The original version is a classic, and the version called The Fillmore Concerts has a few extra tracks. So either one will do. Eat a Peach is their best studio release, although it’s about half live. :stuck_out_tongue: Their first two albums (highly underrated) are easily found as a single-disc set called Beginnings. You can find all of those in your average record store.
But I’ve been touting their live show, so if you don’t have At Fillmore East in some form, I’d recommend one of their archive releases. I include the link because they are essentially impossible to find in stores. The first two of those shows feature Duane Allman, and I’d say the 9/19/71 is the best. It’s one of the last shows he played, and it really shows what the band was doing at that time.

In the interest of full disclosure, not that I’m making a dime by sending you over to the site or anything, I sometimes freelance for Hittin’ the Note magazine.

28

I’m heading out on tour tomorrow. Will pick up some Allman Brothers for the road & let you know, even if you don’t care in the slightest, what I think. Being only 25, you know, I missed out on a lot of the great late 60s, early 70s stuff, even after attempting to educate myself retroactively. Thankfully, the late 90s were a wasteland of shitty music, which gave me time to learn.

29

Sonic Youth, Pixies, REM, Cheap Trick, Husker Du, Nirvana, Metallica, etc…

30

I do care what you think, and I agree about much of what was happening in the late 90s. And you’re actually older than I am. :wink: Good luck on the road.

31

…Jane’s Addiction, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Fugazi, Minor Threat, Bad Religion, Devo, the Stooges, MC5, the Misfits, Kiss, Slayer, Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds…

32

The Doors.
CCR.
CSNY.
The Allman Bros.
Aerosmith.
Queensryche.

The Doors.
CCR.
CSNY.
The Allman Bros.
Aerosmith.
Queensryche.

The Doors.
CCR.
CSNY.
The Allman Bros.
Aerosmith.
Queensryche.

What I say three times is true.

33

[ul]
[li]The Doors - granted, and the only true exception to the OP that I can think of from that era. REM are the more recent example.[/li][li]CCR - fails under the one-man-band rule.[/li][li]CSNY - one Briton and one Canadian. In any case a supergroup whose members made their names elsewhere first.[/li][li]The Allman Bros - IMO fail because they do not compare to the groups in the OP: short duration, lack of international impact, and lack of originality - they were good at what they did but did not change music. Many British bands fail under the same criteria.[/li][li]Aerosmith - specifically excluded by the OP.[/li][li]Queensryche - snort.[/li][/ul]

34

Actually, to nitpick, there are as many American bands in the top 5 of that list as there are British. Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead are American, Beatles & Stones are British and U2 are Irish.

I do get what you’re saying, though.

35

It took 31 posts to mention The Byrds?! THE folk/country/rock & more band…

The first million selling rock’n’roll record was in fact a “band,” Bill Haley & the Comets.

Big points for the UK (we couldn’t name these?!): Kinks, Zombies, Move, Hollies, Yardbirds.

Great American bands not mentioned:

Love, every Motown group, Chambers Bros, Isleys, Parliament &/or Funkadelic, Rivingtons, Cramps, Ventures, Blondie, Devo, The Cars, Capt Beefheart & His Magic Band, Kaleidoscope, Tommy James & the Shondells, The Standells, The Music Machine, The Turtles, The Nazz, The Grass Roots, Paul Revere & The Raiders, The Cryan Shames, The Left Banke… the list could go on all day.

I mean there’s also your Journey, Kansas, Kiss, Guns’n’Roses, Motley Crue etc etc. I’m not as enthused about them but they have their fans.

Alterna-wise you have your Stooges, Heartbreakers, Dead Boys, B-52s, Minutemen, Negativland, Butthole Surfers, New York Dolls the list goes on and on.

Nearly every band I named did much better on the charts (many times over in most cases; check out a copy of a Whitburn) in the US than many of the British bands named, and if not at least were/are considered pretty darn good by the critics. By either standard or in combination the thesis is not supported.

I absolutely love British bands from the 60s/70s but song for song, album for album the US holds its own and more. It should; there are 5x more people here & the music was originated here. I have about 4,000 LPs & hundreds of singles, mostly from the 60s-70s & I can assure you that the US was doing some great stuff at the time.

Canada & Australia should get their (major) props as well, and some countries that were churning out great stuff in the era that have been overlooked until recently by some rock geeks like me include the Netherlands, Turkey, Cambodia, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Japan… quite an era globally for music!

36

My Boldings

John Cale is Welsh

Northern Irish = British

37

My Bad, U2 are from Dublin, not Belfast, my mistake - carry on.

38

I don’t get this; Queen are pretty much British aren’t they? (Freddy Mercury maybe came from Zimbabwe or somesuch, still…)

39

Crandolph writes:

> . . . every Motown group . . .

And that reminds of a general problem with the bands listed so far. The height of the Motown era, approximately from the early 1960’s to the early 1970’s, was the greatest period of rock and roll, in my view. Why haven’t people been mentioning those groups? In fact, why haven’t people been mentioning black groups in general? Several possibilities occur to me. Some people are going to claim that that’s not rock and roll at all but something else. The heck it isn’t. The Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Motown groups were all listening to each other when their best songs came out and considered each other to be their competitors. It was all rock and roll to them. The current trend in only listening to one narrow style of rock and roll didn’t exist then.

Some people are going to claim that the Motown groups in general weren’t bands in the same sense since they didn’t do their own instumentals. That’s true, but certainly the instrumentals were just as good and just as important as those in the other bands mentioned so far. There was a floating group of studio musicians who did the instrumentals and they were as important as the singers themselves. This brings me to another complaint that people are going to make, which is that the Motown Sound was corporate rock. That’s true in some sense, since the most influential people for the Motown groups were the president of the company, Berry Gordy, and the Holland/Dozier/Holland writing/producing team. So what? If that’s how great rock is produced, that’s how it’s produced.

I think the problem is the mental image people have of a rock and roll band. It’s a bunch of guys with guitars and a drum set who’ve been together a long time and who write their own stuff. Now that’s true of some great rock groups, but it’s not true of all of them or even most of them.

40

I don’t get this; Queen are pretty much British aren’t they? (Freddy Mercury maybe came from Zimbabwe or somesuch, still…)