Good Lord. In the first place, she referred to someone who only *knew *Guinness from Star Wars, not someone who thought it was the peak of his career. It’s possible to only know him from Star wars and have no other thoughts about his career whatsoever.
More importantly, however, it’s possible to care little for movies at all without being blindingly culturally illiterate. It’s a bit of tunnel vision to suggest otherwise. You may as well say that anyone who doesn’t know who Cecil Taylor is is culturally illiterate. Or Ornette Coleman.
There is more to culture than movies. Much more. And saying that not knowing about one actor proves blinding cultural illiteracy is a statement of staggering snobbishness, elitism, and self centeredness.
Van Morrison doesn’t like to sing “Brown-Eyed Girl.”
Jonathan Richman won’t play “Roadrunner” any more, but that might be because he doesn’t like the way it sounds without a full band (he tours with just a drummer).
Slight hijack: JUST as I was reading this post… and I mean EXACTLY as I was reading it… ‘Only the Lonely’ came on the radio. The hair stood up on my arms. To have the words sang as I was reading them… very creepy.
Vanilla Ice grew to rue ever recording “Ice Ice Baby.” He destroyed MTV’s master copy of the video on some show one time. However, he did make a nu-metal-style version of “Ice Ice Baby” called “Too Cold” in the late 1990s.
I think EVERYBODY in the band except Dennis DeYoung hated the entire “Kilroy Was Here” album and tour.
Dennis has always been a theater buff, and he conceived the album as a theater piece. The rest of the band wasn’t keen on the idea, and they REALLY hated the stage show that DeYoung conceived to go with it. The stage show that accompanied “Kilroy” was wordy, and had long stretches with no music. Audiences can get VERY bored and antsy during shows like that. And when they performed the show in front of crowds that came to rock out… well, not surprisingly, they heard a lot of boos, and had to dodge a lot of thrown debris.
Tommy Shaw and J.Y. were furious at DeYoung for alienating the fans (and putting the rest of the bad in danger) to put on a mini-Broadway show, when the band and the audience just wanted a normal rock show.
IIRC from the Styx Behind the Music, the band wanted to ROCK…and instead, they found themselves doing this odd rock opera. Tommy Shaw in particular despised “Babe” (from an earlier album, 1979’s Cornerstone). One of his bits from when he would tour with Damn Yankees involved someone playing the opening keyboard lines to that despised #1 pop hit, and for it to be either smashed or played off stage (I don’t recall–been a while since I saw that BTM). The impression I got from that entire episode was the Dennis DeYoung had an ego beyond rationality. I recall Styx got back together and went on tour, without Dennis who was being his diva-self, and he lamented “But there IS no Styx without me!”
Now, back to the topic at hand:
Outkast seemed to grow tired of, then loathe, “Hey Ya.” I saw it performed live on some award show, and then lead singer opened it by saying, “And now, for the last time…'Hey Ya,” goddammit!"
Indeed, Tommy Shaw claims his alcohol & drug problems (thankfully a thing of the past) were directly triggered by the Kilroy Was Here fiasco. Too bad, really, because I’ve seen the show on DVD and I kinda like it, in a lame & campy sort of way.
In other classic rock news, Journey guitarist Neal Schon was no fan of “Open Arms” – he would often refer to the song as, “Sounds like Mary Poppins!”
Matthew Fisher of Procol Harum indicated how tired he was playing “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” that he wrote “Going for a Song” to indicate his displeasure (“Please don’t make me play that song again”). Though maybe he changed his (Oh, hell. I can’t avoid it) tune when he tried to get songwriter credit.
I think The Who’s Pete Townshend kind of hated Tommy for a while, although he got over it. The massive success of the album saved the band from otherwise near-certain financial ruin, but I’m sure they all eventually got tired of playing the whole thing in concert. (IIRC, John Entwistle once referred to Tommy as a little deaf, dumb, and blind albatross around their necks.) But Townshend in particular was frustrated that his later projects couldn’t match Tommy’s success. His planned follow-up rock opera Lifehouse fell apart (most of the songs wound up on Who’s Next). Quadrophenia sold well but not as well as Tommy, and it proved difficult to perform live at the time due to the need to have all the sound effects on tape.
If you want a very charming book to read My Name Escapes Me by Guiness. He kept a diary in his later years in life for a newspaper and in it, touches upon his Obi Wan part just a little bit. I totally fell in lurve with him over this book and about two months later he died. It bummed me out.
