Rattling them off without a pause:
Beatles, Monkees, Wilburys, Steely Dan. That’s it. Oh, and the Rutles, though they weren’t a real band.
If I think about it, I can dredge their names from memory inside of a minute:
The Who
The Doors
Young Rascals
Moody Blues
The Police
U2
Bands I once knew all the members of by heart, and you might be able to drag them out of me under hypnosis:
Rolling Stones
Led Zeppelin
Talking Heads
Cars
Association
Turtles
Go-Go’s
Eagles
Fleetwood Mac (mid-70s lineup, of course)
When you’re in your teens, and in college if you went there as most of us did, you’re listening to a lot of music, sharing it with your friends, arguing about which artists/bands are better and which ones suck and why, you look at the CD booklets (back in the day) or album jackets (back in an even more distant day), and absorb a lot of details about the bands without really trying.
That stops happening after awhile. You get into your 30s, and nobody you know is even listening to new stuff anymore. Even if you still are, there’s nobody to talk about it with anymore. So you don’t even bother to learn the names of the two guys in They Might Be Giants, let alone more normal-sized new bands.
And it’s all downhill from there. Moving into the current decade, I love Cage the Elephant, but I can’t tell you the name of a single member of the band. I know who Florence Welch is only because her first name is part of the band name, Florence and the Machine. But when you’re in your early to mid 60s, you really don’t have anyone to shoot the breeze with about new music anymore, because even friends 20 years younger than you aren’t listening to it.
