i am sure that some, if not all of you are tired hear me bitch about bands releasing old live shows and about mcartney not being able to write a decent lyric with more than 2 syllables and jimmy page being the laziest man in the history of rock and roll, and i won't even mention townshend.

but........

i want to explain.

having been here since 1997, i have made and lost friends.

i have watched ICE magazine flourish, flounder and become extinct.

i had a phone conversation with pete howard that broke my heart.

i just love music, and i think that if the "old guys" would just put a little effort into it the muse might return. at least try. they will know if they succeeded just by the sales figures, and if it doesn't sell but the fans love it, then they succeeded anyway. it's about the music.

so, if i offend sometimes i really do not mean to hurt anyone, i just get frustrated when there is an endless parade of 40 year old live shows being released and 30 - 40 year old albums being "remastered" with bonus material that should have stayed right they left it the first time.

and my favorite band (CSN(Y)) is a good example. sure as a band they haven't released a studio album since "after the storm", but stills has released a few gems from his vault (although "man alive" was atrocious) and crosby's album of last year is just wonderful. and all threee box sets are, in a word, amazing.

at least they are trying.

thanks for reading.....please don't hate me.

renny

Good it be the frustration is just the fact of just getting old?

They have nothing to prove, they had done it! Our musician hero's ( I call them my friends as my girlfriend rolls her eyes) had worked so hard for decades and produced classic work that will live a century.

Why would they even need to try? Of course the musicians don't necessary need to do these releases and/or many of these releases are out of their control. But it is cool.

Whatever morsel, unreleased tracks, demos, live albums are released I looked as them as gifts.
Like finding long lost forgotten family pictures and letters

Its all up to us whether we support the release by purchase or not. Its an option and when reissues like Wilson remixes or MFSL or AF reissue I find that these bring added enjoyment to my life. Its help bring the magic and the reliving of some great moments in my life. The sound track of my life.

As for new stuff by our artists, some are working as hard as ever, Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and many others.

But again, my gosh, they are closing in on 70. I be happy to be just around. Everything slows down, our energy, our thought /creative process, voice, hearing. Its just getting older.

Don't lament my friend, its just the circle of life. Enjoy the gifts that are offered if affordable or if interested. If not, someone will derive pleasure from it.

I know I do.

Rick A.

It's your right as much as anyone else's here to have and express your opinions about music. I don't think you should feel badly about it at all. Nor should anyone take offense. We are all passionate about music, and I can't imagine why anyone would be offended by someone saying they do or don't like something.

I happen to love live archival music, and I would like to see more of it get released. I loved the CSNY 1974 set, and I'm loving Springsteen's live reissue campaign. But I don't expect everyone else here to feel the same way.

I hope you'll continue to voice your thoughts and opinions.

Bill

PS Anyone who likes Chuck Prophet can't be all bad

I usually agree with you

We are actually lucky that rock is still around and pretty vibrant after being born about 60 years ago! So of course the old fellas are long in the tooth and a little lazy producing new music. I know I can't get mad at them, they had their moment and now many of them are cruising into the retirement years. We just have to be happy that they are around at all.

With you on this, Renny. Been around as long, perhaps longer in human years. Mostly I read. Seldom do I comment. The mood has to strike and even then I have to think about what I want to say and decide if it adds to the conversation. I, too, had a lengthy e-mail conversation with Pete Howard once upon a time, to discover (I think) that it wasn't the money. It was the passion that was gone. Hard to accept. Easy to understand.

About the music, from my perch closer to 70 than to 60 (how can that be?), I think the music that strikes us, the music that stays with us (and this is strictly my opinion - feel free to assume I'm wrong) is the music we encounter as teens. Just shy of a decade seems about the length of time we take to find the music, explore it and settle on what it is that gets us through that formative, vulnerable period of time in our lives. It also seems, with rare exception, the long end of the period of time that rock stars or rock groups stay popular, in the public eye, selling the music and living the life, before they are gone or at least gone to the point where we realize we should have stopped buying their music two albums ago. Maybe it's the passion. Maybe it's the talent. Maybe it seems to them like it seems to us that they've written this song before. Maybe the people they were in their late thirties and forties are not who they were in their twenties and early thirties when we first discovered them.

So they put out what they put out or their record companies remaster what they remaster and put out and we listen and what they are trying just isn't what we are liking.

And maybe it's them, and maybe it's us.

Thanks for stirring me to comment.

No hatred here, sir. Frankly, a Who reissue thread without a comment from you would be like Chevy Chase not falling down at the beginning of SNL, or a Steven Seagal movie without a broken wrist, or a late-night Cinemax show without nudity.

There is little I can add to what has already been said, but it's a provocative thought, and I found myself going back to this phrase. Effort must be a limited resource, because there is certainly not enough of it in the world, or in each of our lives for that matter. I think if you look around at your friends or associates, you will find a shortage of effort in nearly every occupation. I see a growing angst and ambience all around me in so many occupations. So much potential and quality control sitting there ignored. Effort has become about as important a value as good grammar. Not.

But then I look at the back half of that phrase — "the muse might return." I have trouble visualizing a muse who chooses to retrace her steps. I imagine a more been-there-done-that attitude. She opened your eyes, kicked you in the ass and you found your path. Her job is done. She is flighty and has moved on. It is now up to you to take what she gave you and do what you will. Hence comes experience and self-effort to replace the search for who you are and the edginess of youth and discovery. Are you a one-album band or a much rarer Mile Davis who can reinvent himself? It's all on you now. Perhaps talent itself is a limited resource doled out in uneven amounts to us all. Yes, you may meet the muse further down the road, but that would strike me more as an incidental moment, bumping into her as paths cross somewhere along the line. "A little effort" — yes, I'm all for more of that. ...Wouldn't mind better grammar in the world either.

I'm always amazed that for most of these musicians, that muse was evident in their 20s and that's that. You have that creative burst in your late teens to early 20s and then life gets in the way.

and for the old guys..........the heyday of their drug use (or abuse).

I don’t know that “the muse” is necessarily the issue. Once an artist achieves a certain amount of success, suddenly he or she is creating music in the context of a variety of expectations—fan expectations, critical expectations, and commercial expectations—and such expectations tend to compete with “the muse”. It is rare for an artist to meet the expectations of all three on any consistent basis.

Yes, there are certain individual performers such as Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan who continue to write, record, and tour at an age in which most people—particularly those who have achieved financial success and security—tend to retire, and who are able to dictate to their record label, for better or for worse, what they will and will not be commercially releasing.

But in an age in which newly recorded studio music is intended primarily to promote tours, and not its own sale, it's pretty clear that both Dylan and McCartney are exceptional cases; other actively touring, “legacy” artists are either locked into multi-album major-label recording contracts signed just prior to the decline of physical media (Springsteen); releasing new studio albums on a string of small labels (Alice Cooper); or releasing new music on their own label (Pearl Jam).

In addition, as an artist ages, the pressure to remain successful from one year to the next also undoubtedly affects “the muse”; should one album fail to live up to expectations, any subsequent album will be considered a “comeback attempt”. Years of daily singing can damage a voice, and musical talent can also deteriorate with age. Such long-term expectations are undoubtedly magnified for female artists who must also face criticism for “not being as hot as she used to be”. Again—is this a case of an artist losing their muse, or failing to meet expectations?

In the end, fans of aging rockers generally aren’t clamoring to experience artistic growth—they’re clamoring for more of the same. KISS fans want KISS to write songs about drinking and/or fucking (not to mention using newer bandmembers to impersonate original members); Who fans only want to hear Townshend songs that were written prior to 1974—and that Roger Daltrey, not Pete, sing them; and Madonna fans aren’t interested in going to a concert to see her singing while seated at a piano or strumming a guitar. That's just the way it is.

I've mentioned that before also. I really think much of pop/rock is built around emotions & hormones; which severely moderate by the time most of us hit our 30's.

Glad you mentioned hormones, (drugs, SEX, & rock & roll) is very important in the equation. By this time the groupies have long gone and it is the wife (or number of them from an alimony perspective).

Rick A.

Good perspective.

Rick A.

I've got a slightly different take on this, because I think that even moderate success can have a huge impact on a musician's career.

First, there is the oft-repeated cliche that you have your whole life to make your first album, and six months to make your second. So for new and up and coming bands, their first album is often a "greatest hits" type album of the first 3-5 years of their career. Songs dropped because they don't work, songs changed, songs added. But that first album is often culled from 2-3 albums worth of material, and so it's disproportionately good.

Second, is the reverse of "necessity is the mother of invention". If the first / second album of a band is successful, the band gets not only gets all the different demands on their time, the desperation of making it as a band goes away, because all of a sudden the 4 guys in the band don't need to count out French Fries to make sure everyone gets their fair share. but without that desperation, and maybe without the desperate circumstances and environment, a lot of the source of their material goes away. Their lives have changed, and they've lost the necessity, and lose a lot of the invention as a result.

Third, try "Good is the enemy of Great". Sure, we can all name a handful of bands who have recorded the same song 1000 times and called it a career. But for most musicians, they're trapped between trying to keep their existing fan base - who like one sort of music - and chasing their creative spirit, which may completely alienate them. Metallica is the one I am most close to, since I know people who came to blows over the Black Album. But a lot of bands are content (ugly word in this context, ain't it?) to keep putting out the same old thing. And in general, once you hit your late 20's, you're supposed to start settling down, and this leads to a repetitive sameness that is a brutal hit to creativity.

Finally, is the very real fact that a musician may still be following his or her muse, but the fan's musical tastes have evolved, leading to the artist and the fans parting ways. In some cases, it becomes retroactive (what was I doing listening to Redfish Kingpin or Young MC), and in others, it becomes "I know it's good, but it just doesn't reach me" (Neil Young for me a lot of the time). To the whole "Why the hell is Blackmore playing a Mandolin?" thing.

Ultimately, if you think about where most of the passion that drives creativity comes from, it's amazing that as many bands make it past 10 years as do. They have to come up with something they care about beyond their day to day lives to inspire them once they get past that first creative burst and evolution. and if they don't, and their creative spirit takes them in a different direction, I thank them for the enjoyment they gave me, wish them well, and look for something else that touches me the way the artist used to.

Jason

renny, no worries from me.

Differences of opinion are what makes this place so great. Your passion for music is what drives you.

When I read opinions here (yours and otherwise) that I don't agree with, I just shrug and move on to the next thread for the most part.

Unless it's Smiff, because he's wrong about everything.