I got talked out of Warren Zevon, but then someone came along and commented that he would like have had some stuff to say about old age, and maybe there’s some merit to that idea. There’s a reasonable chance that he would have said it in a unique way.
Zappa has been mentioned, and he’s been one of my top favorites since the early seventies. I think he would likely have gone more seriously into the classical side of things, which doesn’t lend itself to “hits” as we commonly think of them.
But I read a few years ago in another forum that someone was saying he thought that Zappa was already feeling sick from cancer as early as 1988, and as a result he more or less let that band break up before the tour finished rather than take more proactive steps to keep things going. He just didn’t feel like dealing with the hassle. Of course, this is so highly speculative that it wouldn’t be worth mentioning in a serious analysis of his work, but in a discussion like this…
If you want to wonder what Zappa would have done if he hadn’t died when he did, you MIGHT (heavy on the “might”) posit that, being healthy, he would have been more vigorous in those years and that he would have made different career choices during that time. In particular, I’d hate to think about not getting The Yellow Shark, but as a trade-off for twenty more years of what he would have done…
Well, it’s all about preference, and, FWIW, I prefer others over Johnson, too. Even if he was the first to combine what others were doing, he wasn’t necessarily doing those things better.
Eh, there was a lot more to Brando than obesity. Beyone an initial snicker over a fat joke the first time or three I heard it, I’ve never understood the humor derived from making him out to be a freak. There’s a lot about him to be admired.
This is always my vote for this hypothetical (with Jimi Hendrix being an extremely close second). I think Buddy Holly gets overlooked a lot by the general music fan; since he died before the Beatles popped, I think he gets filed away as belonging to another era. The chunky glasses and the suits don’t help; he can seem almost…quaint? But if you really, really listen to his music, you can hear the foundations of so much '60s rock and roll. What would another just 5-10 years have brought about? Would the British Invasion have spurred him to even more creativity? Would he have evolved or changed enough that he would have had a different influence on the Beatles, and the Stones, and everyone else?
I believe Jim Croce and John Lennon still had a great more to give (Lennon appeared to have emerged from his long-term domestic haze and becoming creative again).
Certainly the world would have been the recipient of many more masterpieces had Mozart and Chopin lived past 35 and 39 respectively.
Though no spring chicken at 56, when you premier the 9th Symphony (the greatest masterpiece of all time, IMHO) 3 years before your death, you’ve got to wonder what greatness the world was denied by Beethoven not living to 66, or 76.
You just must have different standards to judge an actor. It’s not that Brando got fat, it’s that he turned into a jerk. Him and his ego were responsible for at least half the problems with Apocalypse Now. And that’s just one example.
“Hits” are hard to come by fairly often. Most artists have a 2 year peak of popularity then decline after that. They may have a “comeback” hit or two, maybe not.
What Holly did was influential. However, even with him, he’d seen a decline in chart performance from That’ll Be The Day and Peggy Sue. Would he have had some sort of comeback hit? Fairly likely, but not everyone did, and it could be some novelty thing like A Boy Named Sue or My Dingaling. Would he have continued recording? I think that’s quite likely. Would he have remained relevant? With as fast moving as things were at the time, I think “Oldies Circuit” is probably the most likely outcome. It happened to others.
carlb:
I think Buddy Holly gets overlooked a lot by the general music fan; since he died before the Beatles popped, I think he gets filed away as belonging to another era.
And the Beatles might not have landed as they did if Buddy Holly had lived, if Richie Valens had lived, if Elvis hadn’t gone into the army, if Jerry Lee Lewis hadn’t married his cousin, and if Chuck Berry hadn’t been arrested. By 1960, it looked like rock music was past-tense, a short-lived fad. Crooners and girl groups took over and popular music was defanged. The Beatles and their contemporaries (Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers and so forth), got their inspiration from Elvis, Chuck, Buddy and so forth. Luckily for everyone that they were a few years behind us! But if the Americans had lived/stayed civilians/stayed out of trouble, the Beatles probably still would have been the Beatles, but it’s less likely they would have been the juggernaut that they were. I mean, it’s always presented as “American teenagers didn’t know it, but they were starved for music that wasn’t treacly, sung by guys who didn’t look like mannequins.”
The chunky glasses and the suits don’t help; he can seem almost…quaint?
Nowadays, that look is retro. If you wait long enough, almost anything can become ironically cool.
I’m thinking it was John Lennon because he was assassinated at an age where he should have had decades more in which he would have been wonderfully creative.
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Roy Orbison yet. I wouldn’t put him at the top of the list, but he was experiencing a career resurgence at the time of his death, and it’s not hard to imagine that he could have gone on to have more big hits.
It’s not just the people that died or had misfortunes. The perception of the gulf between the 1950s rockers and 1960s rockers existed. Sha Na Na was at Woodstock. Parodying a style of 10-15 years earlier. It would be like having a fake hippy band at Live Aid. The difference between the two is that a lot of the late 1960s acts were still active in the early-mid 1980s. Yes they had updated their sound, mostly. But they were still there. The 1950s just seemed like a different generation, even for the one that were still around and recording. Elvis, the hugest of them all, made a comeback and had legitimate hits, but I think even he was seen a little differently than what happened from Woodstock to Live Aid.
Yeah, Sha-na-na was an outlier. The Beatles made a conscious effort to stay ahead of trends, if they had kept the suits, the boy band tunes, “don’t do drugs kids” they’d have augured in worse than the Bitch Boys. There was basically a license to print money starting about 1965 or so.
The Beatles had to evolve, they would have been supplanted by Monkees/Herman’s Hermits and legions of others anyway. The younger brothers and sisters wanted their own versions.
There was plenty of charting rock in the early 1960s, Dion, Four Seasons, Roy Orbison, Del Shannon all were popular then. Plus Motown really took off. It was pop music and the primitive rock sound was going to evolve regardless.
