Agreed. It’s like age & money changes a man.
How someone, who took his name from Bluesology members John Baldry & Elton Dean, leave the UK & come to the USA, show up at WABC-FM studios in NYC on 11/17/1970 and perform to a small group of 100 people where he reportedly banged the keyboard with such passion blood & flesh were flying everywhere…
Go on to release such crap as:
Philadelphia Freedom,
I’m Still Standing and
Candle in the Wind
Is beyond my comprehension.
Jay Farrar.
I don’t have a nomination, I just want to say that Andrew Lloyd Webber never rocked, and U2 never rocked as hard as they did on Achtung Baby.
I would say “Them’s fightin’ words!” but I haven’t heard Terroir Blues yet. Is it that bad? The samples on Amazon make me think it is.
Clapton. Although he didn’t write many of the best tunes he played on, he’s taken mellow to new extremes. :rolleyes:
Another Canadian act - The Headstones. They kicked ass on Picture of Health and Teeth & Tissue and then…nothing. Their only songs to get any attention after that were pretty gutless (Cubically Contained? feh).
I’ll add another vote for The Tragically Hip. I like most of their stuff since Trouble at the Henhouse, but none of it even comes close to Road Apples or Day for Night.
And how about Pearl Jam? There are few albums that I truly regret buying…Riot Act comes damn close. Binaural, too.
Wow. Have you heard “Dreamland”. No, wait, have you heard “Heathen”?
If answers are positive in both cases, I rest my…uh…case.
We’re just from a different planet. 
Oh, but you can slowly start adding Tori Amos to the list. Another couple of albums like this and she’ll be doing the golden oldies. 
But in actual fact, I think I should eat my words…hen I think of this, I don’t really mind any of these people changing. Okay, I might nominate another dozen, but that’s the way life goes, every single change in life would cause a change in art. Some of these people wrote intense stuff, because things that went on in their live and their hearts were intense, sometimes unbearable. Some of them, had they continued to move at that speed and burn so strongly and beautifully, wouldn’t be here today. I’m not just talking about drug abuse and rock’n’roll lifestyle, I’m talking about the fact that a lot of these men and women at some point, found a comfortable place in their lives, that not only enabled them to survive, but it made them feel…well…comfy. And that doesn’t always serve your creative instincts well.
So I’d rather enjoy the brilliancy they had and not scorn them for churning out diamond, after diamond.
I agree completely with gaba here. I write poetry (yeah, who doesn’t?) and churned out a lot of stuff 2 years ago during a really intense period of my life. Quite a bit was pretty good stuff, not publish-worthy but items I don’t feel I need to bury or burn right now. Since then the intensity has died down and so has the quality of my work as well as the volume. The impetus simply isn’t as powerful anymore to vent that raw, sometimes really painful, emotion.
To carry gaba’s analogy out, it takes a lot of pressure to turn carbon into diamonds… and the pressure will eventually kill ya.
My thoughts exactly. How can the guy who belted out “Landlord” and “Truth Hits Everybody” be the same cupcake who is doing that “Desert Rose” adult comtemporary crap?
I’d just like to add: It doesn’t necessarily mean it takes unhappiness to create brilliant work. (I think there was a thread on this board a while ago, discussing whether personal misery is aprerequisite of a brilliant album… I don’t agree with that necessarily). But intense emotions definitely fuel great creativity, because it needs a movement of some sort. If everything stands still, the wheels just aren’t turning anymore.
Puhscuzeme? The Hip’s recent work is damned good. It’s just different. The Tragically Hip’s music has sort of settled into being a great soundtrack for Gord Downie’s amazing lyrics. Which is definately a good thing.
I agree. I just saw him, and he keeps up with the kids just fine. And is totally hot. Totally.
Some of us like that cupcake. I have been listening to Sting and the Police for 20+ years, and I have enjoyed listening to the changes in Sting. His music is more nuanced and complex now, instead of just banging on a bass - that was great back then, but his musicianship has grown and so has my ear for it.
Can’t read the OP’s mind, but I think we’re talking about the latter.
IMHO, both good to bad and hard to marshmallowy are the rule. It might be more of a challenge to list rockers/bands that haven’t gone marshmallowy over a two-decade or longer career in the public eye, than those who did.
Going soft doesn’t always mean going bad, but it’s more the rule than the exception, in my observation. One category of artists particularly afflicted by this, IMHO, is frontmen who go solo. Without bandmates to keep them musically honest, they can go rather rapidly from their creative peak to poppy to bland/saccharine. McCartney, Clapton, Sting (sorry, Gingy), even Phil Collins (not that Collins was particularly edgy to begin with). Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland were far from Rock N’ Roll HoF on their own merits, but they worked with Sting, not for him, which gave them the standing that no studio musician had to keep him from losing his way musically while they were still together.
I was ranting the other day about how Chicago turned into Air Supply. I got a lot of blank looks. I think it’s 'cause I’m old.