Rightly or wrongly I think that musicians tend to not improve musically after they get famous. I’m not talking about writing better songs. I mean getting better at the technical aspects of playing their instruments.
I think Rush is an exception. I feel Lifeson continued to grow and better himself as a player at least through Hemispheres. Geddy had to get better due to the groups compulsion to play increasingly complex music live the same way it was recorded. Neil Peart would say he got better when he went from matched grip to traditional grip far into his career.
I believe another exception is Slash. I don’t know if it was the songs or the substances that kept him from playing better with GnR. His playing since has been much better. See the below video. He’s great throughout but I especially love his work starting at 4:35.
I think this applies to the entire Monkees… started out as kind of a TV gag, but then they responded to fame by buckling down and cultivating some actual talent. Sort of the opposite of what I’d expect from most people in that situation.
George Harrison and Paul McCartney definitely got better from that early Beatles stuff. Paul didn’t just get better on bass, he also picked up tons of other instruments. George’s technique improved tremendously, and he picked up the sitar along the way.
To be fair, in this case, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith (Tork in particular) had been working musicians for years prior to becoming Monkees. That’s not to say that they didn’t get better over time, as well, but the two of them were, in fact, skilled musicians before joining the TV show.
On the other hand, Micky Dolenz (the Monkees drummer) was primarily an actor (and singer) prior to the Monkees, and didn’t really know how to drum (though he took lessons and got better over time).
The video of Pleasant Valley Sunday is pretty bad. Mike and Peter look fine. Micky is vaguely swiping at the drums and Davey looks like how a little kid would look pretending to play bass.
Interestingly, between the four of them, there was a guy who knew how to play drums. Unfortunately, it was Davy, and the producers wanted him (as their designated teen idol romantic lead) in front of the band, rather than behind a drum kit.
Zappa didn’t put an extended guitar solo, the thing he was arguably best-known for later on, until Hot Rats, which was released five or six years after the first MOI record. Whether he had the chops before that I couldn’t say, but the intervening albums were either full-band efforts or experimental orchestrations like Lumpy Gravy.
The Clash? I remember hearing a story about when the Clash were first starting out, rehearsing their sound in private but not playing live yet; they went to see the Ramones play live. Afterward they met the Ramones and complemented them, saying 'we’re not ready to play live, we’re just not that good yet".
The Ramones answered “don’t worry about how good or how ready you are-- just get up and play”.
I mean, the Ramones were by no means musical virtuosos, even by the standards of Punk. If the Clash thought at the time they were not as good musically as the Ramones, there must have been some room for improvement there.
Richard Thompson never was exceptionally famous, but he had some early success with Fairport Convention. I remember reading an interview where he said he was embarrassed to listen to his early recordings because his guitar playing was still so bad, and comparing his playing on his later solo recordings to the Fairport stuff confirms this assessment. He only later became the virtuoso he’s now.
I agree that Clapton became better on guitar over the years, but the most obvious improvement IMHO is his singing voice, which got better and better throughout his whole solo career.
Peter Gabriel played flute in Genesis. Burton Cummings played flute in The Guess Who. The Marshall Tucker band had several flute players. Ray Thomas of the Moody Blues played flute.
Yeah, I should say, as much as I love Tull, Anderson’s enormous self-regard pretty regularly bleeds through in his interviews. The fact that he sees himself as the only flautist in rock is not a total surprise.
I agree his singing improved with his becoming more comfortable with being the front man singing and leading on guitar. However I find his current bluesman voice, forced and unpleasant. Sorry Eric, no matter how much you try, you’ll never have the angst and raw power of a true bluesman.
That said, along with his being influenced and pushed to excellence in his guitar work by Duane Allman, his singing on Layla and the other songs with Derek and the Dominos is the closest I’ve heard to his pouring out his heart like a true bluesman.
