Realizing, of course, there is no single answer, I am curious if anybody here personally knows (or knows of) any rock & rollers whose careers didn’t pan out. Did they manage to keep their toe in the door of some tattered edge of the business of are they working in a State Farm office in Peoria?
How are you defining “failed”?
Artists who just never got the record contract?
Artists who had a hit or two and then disappeared?
[QUOTE=Artists who had a hit or two and then disappeared?[/QUOTE]
Ideally this. But someone who got that contract but it never panned out would satisfy my interest too.
There are a huge number of venues which offer live music; why wouldn’t they simply play at those?
There is no such thing as a “failed” rock star. They are just people who had more success in the music industry than the vast majority of people ever will but less than the superstars. It isn’t an identity and many of them have plenty of other talents. Being a one or two hit wonder generally won’t generate enough money to set someone of for life so they go into the same types of jobs everyone else does.
To pick a random example, Vanilla Ice runs his own real estate company.
Even extremely successful musicians like Brian May of Queen have other interests. He earned his PhD in Astrophysics in 2007.
Others become doctors, lawyers, teachers, agents or even homeless.
I think that there’s at least two different sorts of answers here (and probably many more).
If you’re referring to musicians who were actual stars at one point (i.e., they had record contracts, they had songs which hit the top 40, etc.), but who are no longer broadly popular, many of them do stay in the business, though they are undoubtedly not making the sort of money that they did at a previous point, and they might well be doing another job to supplement their income.
A couple of examples that I know of:
Donnie Iris had a hit in the 1970s, “The Rapper,” as part of the band The Jaggerz, and then had a few hits as a solo artist in the early 1980s (“Ah! Leah!” and “Love Is Like a Rock.”) After his popularity on the national stage faded (his fairly nerdy looks probably didn’t help him, in the early days of MTV), he kept touring and playing shows, mostly in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, which is his home area (and where he’s still apparently fairly popular). He still puts out a new album every few years.
Toby Lightman is a pop singer / songwriter. She had a couple of hits from her first album in the early 2000s (“Devils and Angels” hit #17), but her second album didn’t do as well, and she lost her major-label record contract. She’s still active full-time in the business – she’s done several self-produced albums, she tours (though mostly in the Northeast, as she’s based in NYC), playing in small venues now. She’s had a number of her songs used in TV shows and commercials, and she does a lot of writing for other musicians. Her husband, whom she married a few years ago, isn’t a musician; I suspect that his income is a factor that lets her continue to work full-time as a musician.
Those are just two examples; I imagine that there are a lot of examples of musicians who had a hit or two, and when they were no longer stars, they eventually left the business entirely.
The second sort of answer, I suppose, is “failed rock stars” who dreamed of making it big, but were never stars in the first place. I know a bunch of guys who played in local bands, but who never got the big break (and were probably never quite good enough in the first place). Some still play a bit in bands that get occasional gigs locally, a few teach music. For the most part, they moved on to living “normal” lives, and playing rock and roll was no longer the focus of their lives.
This question is so broad that it has no single answer. However a lot of “one hit wonders” end up getting jobs in the music industry, eg working at a record label, or as a producer, or writing music for TV commercials / film / television, or they just keep touring but play small venues like 200-300 people and make a living off that.
Examples:
Because that type of life is tough. There are formerly very famous bands that do it but they can usually do better than struggling with life on the road for modest pay. Boyz II Men used to be huge during the 90’s. They stuck with it and are still around but playing in casinos - often not in a theater but as a side attraction on the casino floor. That downgrade has to be hard in many ways and I doubt any of them are making very much money off of it.
I know a guy whose brother had a few top 40 hit songs in the late 80s. He worked for one of the labels signing artists for a while and then at Billboard. I think a lot of guys/gals try to stay in the music business if they can .
Kind of an odd question
They are doctors lawyers carpenters mechanics teachers chemists accountants landscapers park rangers soldiers firemen cooks business owners insert any occupation you would like here
Is there something that dictates they have to be some 50 year old burned out shell of a drug ruined human being whose life was an endless failure?
Also what does “failed” mean to you?
There are many many phenomenally talented musicians who are far and above the talents of the “non failed” rockstars that did not make it to stardom for many reasons.
Stardom is mostly about marketability, not talent.
If you take a 600 pound woman who can sing Mariah Carey into a corner and make her cry mommy, make Whittney Houston sound like Johnny Rotten on a bad day and make God himself fire the Halleluja Choir, guess who you probably wont see on posters etc.
My point being, what does failed mean to you?
Not becoming famous does not mean failed, if it did then 99.998% of the worlds population would be deemed as failures i would guess.
Music might fail to pay the bills, but it does not necessarily mean you failed at music.
Music is art, and like any form of art, making money from it is not a guaranteed thing.
Let me build on this a bit with my example of Toby Lightman (obviously, I’m a fan of hers, and have been following her on Facebook for years).
She’s based in New York; she has come out to Chicago to play several times in the past few years. She’s played at a venue called City Winery, which has live music nearly every night, and is a pretty upscale place, for a small music venue – looking at their upcoming events, you can see that they have a number of recognizable names playing (Don McLean, Taylor Hicks, Kathy Mattea, Los Lonely Boys, etc.). Their venue seats about 150 people, I’d guess, but when Toby has played there, she’s played a “solo acoustic” set – and she’s acknowledged that, while she’d like to bring along a backup band, she isn’t able to afford it; the amount she’s making from that City Winery gig isn’t enough to cover more than one plane ticket and hotel bill, and still make it worth her while.
When she plays local gigs in the NY area, she’s playing at similar, small venues, but as she doesn’t have to fly to get there, she’s often able to bring along other musicians.
Here in Chicago, we have tons of live music venues, but most nights, the smaller ones have local / regional bands playing.
It’s VERY common for entertainers who never really made it big to say they were grateful they didn’t, because they realized that being a huge star would have been something they couldn’t have handled, but they were grateful for the success they had.
There are an enormous number of performers who are not widely known, but make a respectable living in a smaller-than-global market, whether or not they ever have a major “hit”.
Some of the venues are cruise ships (not to be sneezed at!), Vegas-type lounge acts, and studio musicians. I live in an area that attracts many tourists every summer, and we have many musicians from other places, like Nashville, who come here every year and play many local concerts. This is not always their only income – some are successful songwriters, for example – but they are by no means in Elton John or Sting’s class of stars, income-wise.
To me ‘failed’ would tend to be people whose personal issues got in the way of greater or more sustained success. It might also include people who refused to accept they should at some point make another career in real estate or a medical technician or whatever else. From what I’ve read the live music business is nothing like it used to be at the lower levels. Musicians who could make a good living in say cover bands can’t anymore, and I’d assume that flows somewhat uphill to formerly ‘famous’ acts. If you’re struggling to make a living, that’s a problem, for anybody.
But as several posts have pushed back, if you’re one of the very small % of rock, pop etc musicians, professional and amateur, who had even one hit record, and you figure out your life in a reasonable way after that, I don’t see how you’re a failure. Also the distinctions can be pretty arbitrary. I’ve been fan of some musical acts which never became that famous where I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t blockbuster stars.
I had a friend who recently died of a heroin overdose. He had some good years in the 90’s and early 2000’s and then the group just started fading. They would do a euro tour once a year but it was never enough money to sustain them until the next year. He never could adjust to the idea of just going to work each day.
OP here.
In my thinking person can “fail” at something without being a “failure” (i.e. "loser.) Many people seek fame (for the purpose of my question I’ve isolated “rock stardom”) and for very few does it pan out. For no reason I can explain I’ve always been curious how their lives are playing out.
Silly, I know.
I wouldn’t say he was failed, but someone I have worked with was at one point a member of a fairly successful British glam-rock band in the early 1980s. After that group broke up, he played with several other bands before moving to Costa Rica where he became an artist, illustrating field guides to birds.
It’s not silly, but the question as posed is overly broad. Some disappear entirely (like Hermann Szobel) some stay in the music business on the business side, some continue to perform with new material and/or bands, some write songs for others, and some simply find something else to do with their time.
If you think of 10 different people who you would ask the question of, I’d be willing to bet you’d find a bunch of different answers to the question “what ever happened to -----?”
I think it is very much a case of YMMV so you can only talk about individual experiences.Of the people I know to greater and lesser extents who have had some degree of concrete success in the music industry (NB I wouldn’t classify any of them as failed rock stars):
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A friend of a friend’s band first two singles went into the UK top 10 and their first album was a UK number 1 and went (UK) double platinum. However though their 2nd album was a moderate success (UK number 10), it was very much diminishing returns and their 4th album didn’t chart. However that initial success was enough that they still seem to be earning a living from touring ten years on.
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My cousin’s band are quite hard to categorize playing something that owes debts to classical, jazz, indie and ambient. However their 1st album was a leftfield nomination for the Mercury Music Award (the UK’s most prestigious music prize) which meant they got a lot of exposure. Their style of music meant they were never going to be commercially huge (they usually get categorized as a jazz band). Almost ten years after their debut album on they still earn a living touring and I believe their music is often used on TV.
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Another friends of a friend band were arguably the biggest rock band in the world at one point, with their first four albums all going at least platinum in the US. They’ve been going for over 25 years and their last album was a UK number 1 and US number 3.
Of those people I know who seemed on the verge of success at some point, but didn’t really have a breakthrough:
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Some one I went to school with was in a couple of ultra-trendy (signed) indie bands that briefly looked like they might breakthrough to mainstream success, but both bands seemed to break up quickly. I believe they work for a QANGO now.
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The lead singer of a local band that were at some point getting rave reviews in the music press, but never had that breakthrough is now running a successful local restaurant.
Conway Twitty , after a hiatus, re-emerged as an even bigger country star. During his in-between years, I saw him singing in a booth on the midway of a rural county fair in Quebec, and nobody was paying any attention to him. I actually felt very sad for him at the time, seeing how he had literally hit the bottom, about as low as you can go and still be in show business. Ten feet away, people were throwing balls at milk bottles for stuffed animals. He probably slept in one of the trailers with the carneys that night.