I don’t think it’s this. Songwriters get a lot more royalties. Pete Townsend made far more money than the rest of The Who because he wrote the songs. John and Paul made more than the other Beatles because they wrote the songs. So when the band leader and main songwriter goes solo – and doesn’t break up the band – it makes no sense to me. I could see personal relationships and tensions getting in the way and causing the main songwriter to want to leave.
I think you’re on the right track with the business angle though. Maybe they just want to sign with another label and the band is under contract to a label they don’t like? So they go solo and make a record or two with another label?
OK, whatever. I believe you’ve missed my point, which is unchanged if you take
And insert the words “of commercially successful bands” after “pack.”
My point being that when you’re listening to a song 50 years later, you enjoy it to the extent that you enjoy it, regardless of all that (increasingly ancient, just like us) history. Who did what first doesn’t factor into that much if at all anymore. It’s good or it’s not. It’s survived the test of time, or it hasn’t. It’s worth listening to for the 756th time, or not.
His last two albums have been much more in line with his Husker stuff - on his latest tour, he’s been playing “Real World”, “In A Free Land”, “Divide and Conquer”, “Chartered Trips”, “Flip Your Wig” and others that fit in with his new songs well.
Well, yeah, but that’s the wrong comparison for the frontman thinking of going solo which is, how does what he’s making now (his fraction of the money from the record contract and live performances, plus his 50% or 100% stake in the song royalties) compare with what he thinks he’ll get if he goes solo (all the money from the record contract and live performances, plus all the money from the royalties)?
If the money the band gets from live performances and the record contract is a triviality compared to the money the front man gets from song royalties, then sure, going solo makes little sense. But is it? While the money from song royalties is undoubtedly good, I can’t see how it would eclipse the money from the records and performances.
That’s true, but keep in mind that (IMO) there are two kinds of greatness. There’s Beethoven-type greatness, where an artist comes early on a new scene (not necessarily first) and sets the standard for that scene. Any later artist, now matter how good ends up having to deal with the great trend-setter. Brahms’ first symphony is dubbed “Beethoven’s 10th” and even contains quotes of Beethoven symphonies to show that, yeah, Brahms knew he had to pay respect to the master.
The other kind of greatness is Bach-type greatness. Bach came at the very end of an era. The genre he was composing in went out of style in his own lifetime and he was partially forgotten for some years. Bach is great because, in retrospect, we can look at his work and say that it’s the crowning achievement of a particular trend or genre. Bach was great because he was very, very, very good at what he did and because he benefited from centuries worth of history and successfully perfected the form.
For more recent examples, in electronic music, Kraftwerk are Beethoven-great and (with not much hindsight) Flying Lotus is Bach-great.
The Beatles were Beethoven-great. Penny Lane is a jewel of a song, but it’s not just very, very good. It’s Great, with a capital G, because even if you managed to write a song in the same style that was as good or even better, it would still “sound like Penny Lane.”
My point, with regards to greatness, is that the Beatles set trends. They did so because they were very, very good. However, because they came early, they also had the advantage of having a huge field to reap. If I want to write a really dirty-sounding, loud song with lots of screaming and distortion, I have to at least acknowledge that there is probably years worth of music like that out there already. My only shot at greatness is to synthesise all that and cut a track that’s the epitome of the genre. When McCartney wrote Helter Skelter, there was almost nothing like that, nothing to acknowledge, everything was there for the taking. This gave him the freedom to decide what a loud, dirty song should sound like.
My point is that you can’t possibly keep on setting trends for ever. At one point you will lose the freedom of deciding what things should sound like. What should a rock band doing Caribbean music sound like? In 1967 no one knew, and that’s why Obla-di-obla-da sounds like what it does. 15 years later, though, there were probably dozens of British artists doing reggae, and even imagining Obla-di-obla-da becomes much harder because the form has crystallised.
Paul McCartney has done a lot of crap, no argument. I wish I could un-hear his latest collaboration with Kanye West. However, he’s still a far above average musician. A song like Queenie Eye shows that he still “has it”. It also sounds like Lady Madonna and Penny Lane. Paul couldn’t have written Queenie Eye in 1968, and if he wrote Lady Madonna in 2013, you’d end up with something like… Queenie Eye, I guess.
I really liked Body of Song but a lot of that might have just been a sigh of relief after Modulate. District and Life and Times were okay. I was totally on board with Silver Age about half-way through “Star Machine” and have thoroughly enjoyed everything since
I assume you’ve seen that tribute concert Dave Grohl put together at the Disney Concert Hall back in 2011 … ?
Just bumping this to include Krugman citing Connolly and Krueger on the fact that, for well-known bands at least, income from live performances dwarfs income from recordings and royalties combined: that such bands make about 1/10 as much from song royalties as from live performances, and about 1/7 as much from their share of selling recordings as from live performances.
So if you’re Sting back in the early 1980s, you might be thinking - correctly - that if you’re splitting everything but the song royalties evenly with Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, you can make a lot more as a solo artist, even if you’re only half as popular as a solo act as The Police was as a group. And that’s even more true for the frontman of a four- or five-man band.
Just two kinds of greatness? Which kind was Springsteen? Elvis Costello? The Clash?
I think the only way this division works is by dividing music into small enough subtypes so that every great artist or band is either the groundbreaking or the perfecting artist of some small niche.
The problem with an artist having done decades of crap, is that few people care anymore if he does something good; practically everyone’s tuned out. How many Boomers have any idea that Queenie Eye exists, and how many younger people care?
My first reaction was “Yes” but then I remembered Alan White’s album was actually pretty good. Squire’s was tolerable, and Howe’s was abysmal, much to my disappointment being a big fan at the time. But I completely forgot about Banks. I bet it’s good stuff!
I was never a Wings fan back when it was released. But I saw Sir Paul in say 2007 or so, and it was an incredibly kick-ass show, one of the better shows I’ve seen. And I noticed something: I liked a lot of those Wings hits (including a few non-hits) as much as a lot of the Beatles stuff. Funny how some material grows on you when you don’t think you’re even listening to it. The man has a true gift for the catchy tune, and I’ll forgive him his mis-hits.
The Dixie Chicks’ offshoot efforts (Court Yard Hounds and the Natalie Maines solo) both struck me as kind of weak.
10,000 Maniacs’ viability without Natalie Merchant is questionable; to a lesser degree, so is hers without them. 10KM have released four albums since the split; one peaked at 103 on Billboard, and the others simply never charted. Merchant’s first three solo albums showed marked diminishing returns (I honestly wasn’t aware she did anything after Ophelia), but she signed on to Warners’ Nonesuch label and rebranded herself as a folk musician, to some success, so I don’t think we’ve heard the last from her yet.
Tim Booth separated from James
Paul Heaton separated from The Housemartins/The Beautiful South
John Squire and Ian Brown separated from The Stone Roses
Boy George separated from Culture Club
Noel and Liam separated from Oasis
Susanna Hoffs separated from The Bangles
Dolores O’Riordan separated from The Cranberries
Both Peter Wolf and The J Geils Band suffered after their split. Wolf’s stuff was better but still…you struggle for a decade as the perennial opening act, finally hit it big and then “musical differences” tears you apart.
Elvis Costello without the Attractions. Still good but…
Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe without each other (and Billy Bremner and Terry Williams).
Respectfully disagree. Both Lowe and Edmunds made great music on their own. Rockpile was great, of course, and the line between Rockpile and Edmunds as solo act could get pretty blurry at times (some Edmunds albums were pretty much Rockpile records released under his name).
And Lowe has had a quirky, oddball sensibility up until the present day. I’ve kept up with his work.
It might be that their solo work doesn’t quite qualify as Rockpile spinoffs – they both had careers before Rockpile, separate careers during Rockpile, and afterwards. Rockpile just happened to be something they got together to do once in a while.
How about Dave Davies? He never did anything particularly memorable as a solo act (IMHO, of course). Poor guy, he was (is) a decent guitarist, and he had a unique vocal sound that worked pretty well in the Kinks, but he’s always had to live in the shadow of his brother Ray.
I think it should be pointed out that during the Beatles years McCartney and Lennon had to compete with each other for space on each album. They even had to make room for a few Harrison songs. Think of all the (crap?) songs that didn’t make it on the albums because of lack of space. I’m sure that John regularly told Paul that this or that song sucked and shouldn’t be on the current album they were making AND vice versa. George Martin also had a role in keeping lesser songs off the albums. McCartney, Lennon and Harrison probably wrote plenty of crappy songs during the Beatles era; we just didn’t hear them.
However when they went solo, there was no longer any competition for space on the album they were making. Nor was there anyone that they had to listen to telling them this or that song sucked.“Everything” (crap) and all made it on the album.
Eh, if we’re going to talk about members of Yes going solo in the context of terrible albums, Rick Wakeman’s stuff demands a mention.
Honestly, while it’s been a long time since I’ve heard Squire or White’s solo stuff, most of the solo Yes projects can pretty much be described as “What happens when a prog rocker is left to their own devices with no moderating influences”
