If you had to, could you name all the members of any rock band of the last 30 years? We can all name people here and there but rarely can name everyone in a group like we could with Led Zeppelin for example, back in the 1970s.
Somehow, things got more anonymous and in the process we lost so much. I was thinking about this the other day when listening to Wings Over America which features Jimmy McCullogh, who played guitar. I like his sound and of course, he played on the final Stone The Crows album, as well as being in Thunderclap Newman and having his own band who was supporting Mountain in 1972 on a UK tour.
There are loads of other connections to bands I could make in relation to Jimmy who tragically died of a heart attack at just 26. The point is, Jimmy was very much a single thread in rock’s giant rug and could hardly be called famous in any meaningful way and yet, in my world, I know him and who he played for. How do I know him but couldn’t tell you who plays bass for, say, Coldplay.
Partly this must be an age thing. I wanted to embrace rock n roll as a teenager and know all about it. And I was a complete sponge for it, frequently devouring all the information on an album sleeve, from the engineer to the backing vocalist. It all went in and it stayed. Even now I can recall say, Ten Years After’s bass player when I can’t remember what day it is.
Obviously, I’m not quite like that any more but even so, a band like Coldplay is huge, so you’d think they’d all be as well-known as Chris Martin.
Take Barclay James Harvest for example. They were very much in the second division of 1970s prog bands and probably lower than that in the 80s. Nowhere near as big as Coldplay but even so, I know that Wooly Wolstonehome played keyboards and John Lees guitar. This is partly because I’m a nerd but I’m convinced something else is at play here because this wide scale anonymity of band members is cultural.
Partly, vinyl as opposed to streaming, encouraged browsing information on the sleeve, while listening to the record, so we naturally absorbed a lot of information about the musicians. In my world, it was important to know this stuff in order to sit at the top table of rock. I fully acknowledge this wasn’t to everyone’s taste but it was my world and I could indulge my passion to my heart's content. Could I now? You can’t browse a download in the same way.
I recall looking at my copy of Thin Lizzy’s Live And Dangerous and reading with fascination at the list of equipment used on tour. There seemed to be a recognition that rock fans wanted to know stuff like this and that it was all part of the artform. I firmly, perhaps naively, believe it wasn’t just product, it was an artistic statement with cultural heft. Do I feel like that about a Coldplay download? Not really. The romance is not there any more. It all feels like product that is transient and worthless in cultural terms.
This might not be such a big thing except when you consider what legacy this is leaving. You might recall Steve Gadd plays the drums on Aja and what a magnificent piece of work it is. Imagine if that was just some anonymous (and much worse) drum pattern on Pro-Tools. It’d be so much more functional and cold. Disposable. The music industry is encouraging functionality and disposability, probably because it’s profitable to do so and in the process is making music which it’s easy to consume but not to fully appreciate. This might sound like an oldie bemoaning his lost youth. But I think it’s more than that, greater than that. It’s about how we create and know about musical art, as opposed to just anonymously churning out product.
An oldie bemoaning his lost youth...
