Alex is on the ‘Best of All Time’ lists for drummers in both Rolling Stone and Modern Drummer magazines. Too far down the lists IMHO, but still made the cuts.
Same with Ranker, Arena and The Top Tens. Not really sure what those are, but they agree with me, so I mention them.
[sub]granted, a lot of the drummers on the lists do nothing for me [/sub]
Not really true, as apparently he told his parents he was giving the rest of the members of The Band lessons, so they wouldn’t know the shocking truth, which was he was merely playing in a lowly roadhouse Rock & Roll band.
Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel were all at least competent musicians when The Band was formed in 1964 after originally playing under the moniker “The Hawks” (backing up Ronnie Hawkins) , although perhaps Hudson was able to give them useful advice or tips in the early going.
Well sure, but the OP was about one GREAT musician in a band who outshines the rest. Not bands where one member was rather more important than the others (which would be most bands I suspect). The Who are absolutely disqualified. All the members were iconic and Entwhistle and to a lesser extent Moon were highly influential as musicians.
With all due respect if The Who are a very bad example, this might be the worst :). REM are the antithesis of the one man band. You really can’t make the argument than Bill Berry was a better musician than Mike Mills or Peter Buck. While I agree the band never really recovered from his loss (I don’t own anything post New Adventures in Hi-Fi myself and unlike Michael Stipe I rank that one dead last), I don’t chalk that up to him being the heart and soul of the band. I chalk that up to them getting older and running out of interesting new material (happens to most bands that last long enough) and the four-part synergy being better than the three-part version.
But Bill Berry did not clearly outshine the others on their instrument to roughly quote the OP in post #7.
I think CCR and Smashing Pumpkins are both pretty good examples for the topic, as are bordelond’s classic guitar trio.
Larry LaLonde of Primus is a really, really good guitarist. Les is the best, but he doesn’t dominate his band members in anyway IMO.
There are probably lots of good answers that none of us have ever heard of, of the form: “______, the band that _____ was in when he was young, before he joined _____ and became famous.”
I’m not a Janis Joplin expert, but I’ve always heard that she deserved much better backup bands than any of the ones she had.
I’ve also heard the same about a lot of the backup musicians Bob Dylan had, especially in the sixties (before he hooked up with The Band).
Not loaded at all. Its a very specific question concentrating on one specific aspect of music, instrumental virtuosity. There is nothing wrong with a thread asking about groups where one person is more important than the rest. Its just not this thread.
There are quite a few examples of people who are at best journeymen on an instrument but know it well enough to write amazing songs on it.
I feel the same way about Blues Traveller. John Popper is so good that its ridiculous. Hearing the radio hits would make you think he is the band. He is the focus on stage but Chan Kinchla holds his own on guitar. They truly are a band and not just a backstop for the frontman.
Perhaps THE single most respected, revered and admired still-living “Musician’s Musician” (IOW, more or less all but unknown to the Great Unwashed Masses but immensely influential to serious music junkies and other musicians alike) would be a perfect example of this, namely one (Sir) Van Morrison.
Absolutely! Van is the Man.
That’s rather dubious, to say the least. First, the Band (then still the Hawks) were his first touring backing band at all, except for his legendary 1965 Newport Festival gig, where the band was Mike Bloomfield, Sam Lay, Al Kooper, Barry Goldberg and Jerome Arnold, basically an extended Butterfield Blues Band and a mixture of Chicago Blues veterans like Lay and hot new cats like Bloomfield, plus Al Kooper. I’d love to have these guys for my band at my first gig, that’s for sure.
As for studio work, the musicians on Dylan’s famous electric trilogy Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde had a similar mixture of experienced studio cats and hot new talent. Those liner notes read like a list of great and important musicians from that time.
Dylan did a many things and made a lot of mistakes, but he always had a knack for picking great bands all throughout his career.
ETA: looking up the few posts before, I have to say that Dylan in this way (and in many other ways) is similar to Van Morrison. He also always had the greatest guys in his bands.
We good.
How, exactly, do you assess bass talent? When you listen to, say, Time, you hear Waters laying in his notes right where they need to be. As an arranger, he seems really good at adding just the right canvas for Gilmour to spray his colour on. Also, Waters’ voice can be the perfect counterpoint to Gilmour (there are also some songs where Wright takes part in perfect-blend harmony).
Gilmour was able to build incredible bridges that even he struggles mightily to reproduce live, but the guitar and the middling-to-good singing seem to be the extent of his talent. Waters seems to be a much broader talent, and he has far greater emotional range in his voice.
Now, Syd, that would have been an interesting talent to see develop.
Sam Andrew was a great guitarist (and all-around musician) - sure, he’s not of Janis’s class, but that’s sort of like judging the rest of the Jimi Hendrix Experience against Jimi.
I personally never had any problem with Waters bass playing, someone who I knew was very anti Waters seemed to be saying there was claims that Gilmour played the bass half the times in the recordings and that Waters wasn’t good enough and playing live was a problem.
I had strong opinions that Momentary lapse wasn’t an actual Floyd album, and they hijacked the name, it was a Gilmour solo album and Floyd would be dead without Waters, after Wright and Mason disappeared into living off Dark side funded cocaine habits. I suspect the “couldn’t play the bass” might have been some sort of emotional slur and perhaps half confused story from another band.
Personally thought Division Bell was much more a floyd album than Momentary. It featured people who actually liked classic Waters Floyd.
Tomorrow
Steve Howe
Yes
How’d I do?
I… don’t disagree ;).
However, I’ll note in passing that both he and Smith played guitar for Siouxie and the Banshees, which shows how influential this band was in spite of its relative lack of mainstream success.
I want to say The Divine Comedy but that’s a joke, given that the band is basically Neil Hannon doing almost everything plus a few other people now and then.
A couple of weeks ago I was watching a clip of Janis Joplin and Tom Jones singing together. Now, I like Tom Jones and he’s a talented and successful singer, but watching him sing with Janis was like watching the winner of a college track meet, saying “Wow, that guy’s fast!” and then seeing Usain Bolt blow by him like he was standing still. She was in a whole other league.
But what about Gene Frenkle?* 
*Actually producer David Lucas.
Terry Williams was no slouch either…check out his work with Rockpile.
Todd Rundgren’s ‘Something/Anything?’ was a two record set where he played all the instruments and sang all the vocals.
So which guy in the band was the superior musician? Was it Todd or Todd?