Allow me to expand on a theme that several posters have touched on. If we consider The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, etc., as being “great,” but disqualify them since they are not American, shouldn’t we consider what American bands are considered great by other countries as we choose?
This opens things up a bit. I commented on Cheap Trick earlier and it’s certainly the case that they are/were hugely popular in Japan. At the same time, they weren’t that popular in the USA in that era. A similar situation applies to quite a few American bands.
Were they popular in Japan more because of their musical skill or their image? I don’t actually know. But yeah, certainly some bands in America never make it big here but are HUGE in other countries.
I think this thread might actually be better if it were broken down into decades. I might just do that with a separate thread, and I need some time to think about the choices. But just as far as the 1990s, mine might include:
Sublime
Weezer
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Smashing Pumpkins
No, Nirvana doesn’t make the cut for me, not in terms of the musicianship and range of the others. Nor do Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Jane’s Addiction, or numerous other contemporaries of the above bands, despite having a lot of good songs, they don’t approach the level of the others in my opinion.
Weezer were consummate masters of the art of power-pop, had good lyrics while maintaining a sense of humor and irony, and while nothing they played was ever really all that musically complex, they had chops to spare.
Sublime, same exact thing (both Rivers Cuomo and the late Bradley Nowell posessed a unique ability to turn on a dime from abject sincerity and tenderness, to outraged and indignant shouting, with their vocals. Elvis Costello did the same thing very well, a decade or so earlier.) And Sublime had unique reggae and Latin American influences as well. I think Nowell was one of the coolest all-around musicians of all time and he died far too young.
The Chili Peppers and Smashing Pumpkins, for their stylistic range, musical chops, continuing influence on other musicians, and at least in the case of the RHCP, an insanely good bassist who’s also just a very well-educated musician and all-around intelligent guy, despite his punky exterior.
Little Feat and Skynyrd are in the same boat for me — I love about a dozen of their songs, and all the rest suck. I rarely listen to them any more, but in each case I’d be fine with a “greatest hit” collection.
But, oh! The Replacements! I forgot about the Replacements! Yep. They’re the greatest American rock band ever.
Simon & Garfunkel (or Paul Simon solo/with various groups, including Garfunkel)
Boston
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Frank Zappa with various groups
Gotta give a nod to Guitar Mozart, his brother and friends: Van Halen
Ozzy with Randy Rhoads
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Maybe not danger (danger would be Charles Manson rather than Marilyn Manson :)) so much as transgression. According to the different places & times they live in of course. Being morally or culturally shocking in various ways, instead of actual violence. I guess flirting (harder and harder) with danger can be part of it, but maybe not always.
I like the Mats too (Replacements -> placemats -> mats, in one of the only instances I can think of anything in American pop culture approaching British rhyming slang), but I don’t think they’re enough of a household name to be what I’m looking for, which is an American equivalent to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Replacements are sort of a musician’s band; most serious musicians dig them, everyone else seems generally unaware of them outside of the upper Midwest.
Put that way, it almost has to be the Beach Boys, doesn’t it? I figure you get the name recognition with those forty Top 40 hits — which I figure cemented them in the public consciousness as the default answer to the “name a surf rock band” question, even if they often enough got away from that — and I figure that’s why they got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the same ceremony as the Beatles.
Some players in (for example) Zappa’s band (others too, just that this one came to mind) had a level of musical skill that most others in the genre were not even qualified to dream of.
I think what I just said raises more questions than it solves, though. Because I think that while in bebop (for example) the players with the mind-blowingly esoteric skill set really are the best, it seems as though what makes the rock&roll market “tick” is not the same at all - that in rock music, someone who has taken the time and trouble to learn to count to a number greater than 4, and to play counterpoint and so on, has turned himself into a less-marketable freaky character, rather than a master of his craft.
Y’know, if someone from another country had showed up at my doorstep in 1969 and said “I would bery mooch like to being seeing the Ultimate American Musical Experience,” I would’ve taken them to San Francisco to see a Dead concert. Preferably outdoors.
Hmmm, I could’ve fudged by choosing one of their shows where they were part of an afternoon/evening, with Santana and Quicksilver and Tull or ooh, the New Orleans Pop Festival had everyone from the Byrds to Dr. John to Janis! – and I think they played a gig (in Boston?) with the Velvet Underground and the Fugs…
Yeah, that’s what we all like to TELL ourselves. That rock and roll is about danger, about not giving a damn what ‘the man’ wants and so forth. But it’s not true.
Thesis: Rock and Roll is, and has always been, the music of middle class white kids. It has, at times, been performed by poorer people as entertainers…but that has always been the case. Poor people perform for better off people who then seek to identify with them from a safe distance.
Or, to draw out a metaphor, Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl might flirt with his mechanic character, but she’s still going to Sarah Lawrence and marrying an orthodontist.
Or, more horrifically, Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen will show up at all his shows but she ain’t gonna invite him to meet her folks.
It’s easy to tell ourselves we’re ‘authentic’ and ‘keeping it real’. But if the metal bands and punk bands lived the lives they lived, they’d be dead. And then their contribution ends. How’s Cobain, Hendrix, Nowell and others fairing these days?
In the end, ‘Subdivisions’ is a better description of the average life of a rock fan than ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’. We vicariously take chances and court danger through others because, deep down, we KNOW that’s a stupid-ass thing to do.
I am not sure we disagree. The music is intended to appear dangerous - that’s a key selling point to Rock’s “brand” - that’s my point. Now, whether it actually is dangerous is a whole ‘nother question.
I suspect it’s like labeling food Organic - a small % truly is and the vast majority does what it can to claim association. That doesn’t change the fact that Organic is the key criteria in that case. Same with Danger and Rock.
We’ll always get bogged down in definitions here. We’ve seen that very thing in this thread. But Buddy Holly wasn’t dangerous at all. He just wrote great songs around a basic blues structure. Ditto for The Beach Boys, Journey and many others.
Sure, Link Wray was a great guitarist and his myth has brought him a bit of ‘bad boy’ substance. But Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys wrote and performed much better songs just by taking a snapshot of what was going on around them.
Hell, Elvis himself was an attempt to package ‘dangerous’ (read: black) music into a safer format. The entire concept is founded on ‘dangerous, but not really’.
There’s always the undercurrent in rock and roll between the critical darlings who don’t sell and the better songwriters who do. It doesn’t prevent such things from happening. Hell, the Monkees are derided publicly. But those are tight, well written songs that are performed well.
Or The Sweet. Ballroom Blitz and Sweet FA are held up as great mid-70s songs that get people moving. But they were as much of a manufactured band as The Monkees. Nikki Chinn and Mike Chapman wrote those songs for them to appeal to the suburban kids who wanted to think they were dangerous and edgy but had to get to school in the morning.
I’m not making fun, here, get me. But songwriting is a craft, and I prefer to see it done honestly instead of the opposite.
