Gino Vanelli has reentered my consciousness, and per usual, it's not the early stuff that prog heads rave about:
I still say he looks like he's trying to look like David Hasselhoff in this video (or was Hasselhoff trying to look like Gino on Night Rider?). So who do you think made the worst bid to remain "relevant" to the pop music audience of the 1980's?
Grace Slick?
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
"Without your machineOriginally Posted by Scott Bails
You wouldn't be able to
Find pictures of me
When I was still sexy
ALL THE MACHINES SAY
WE'RE OK"
Yeah, I know those are the actual words to the song, but somehow they seem appropriate.
Oh, so many to choose from. I mean, there's always Rod Stewart, although his slide began long before 1980.
Rod Stewart. 'Young Turks' and 'Baby Jane' are the only songs I know of his from the 80s that I can be doing with...and the latter has that damned saxophone all over it.
Chicago
Well, I never had the albums, but besides those two songs, I remember liking Infatuation a lot. I mean, it's got a Jeff Beck guitar solo in it! How can you go wrong with Jeff?! And I like his version of Some Guys Have All The Luck better than the original.
His later 80's stuff though, I don't remember liking as much. That Bob Dylan knock off I thought was particularly obnoxious (but that might have been just because it was such a big hit).
Their slide began the minute Peter Cetera twisted the band's collective arm into recording If You Leave Me Now and Baby What A Great Suprise (Baby What A Terrible Song would have been a better title). And Terry Kath's untimely demise only hastened things. Oy!
Neal Young put out some real crap in the '80s - his Landing On Water album got him sued by his label.
Kiss took off their makeup to lose the gimmick and focus more on the music... then proceeded to put out their most generic material to that point.
David Bowie took up acting and put music on the back burner... oh, he still put out music - music that sounded like something an '80s actor would put out.
Styx. At least Neal, Bowie and Kiss recovered from their fall. Styx imploded and went away after their disastrous Kilroy tour. They've made various attempts at a return to form by what's left of the band but no one cares.
that's a terrible video but my brother had a black Ford LTD just like the one in that video. Can't remember what year it was but it was the last one that came with a big block V8 option. He wound up trading it for a Ford Fiesta.
David Bowie loathes one song he did in the 80s so much, 'Too Dizzy', he has removed it from his back catalogue altogether by taking it off 'Never Let Me Down'. Is that a first?
Well, I guess there were many, but a lot of one hit wonders as well. Stuff like Flock of Seagulls or Gary Newman, Cars.
Yeah, not the best era from Neil Young, but at least he was following his muse rather than put out something the record execs wanted him to put out. That said, I caught his 80's movie, Human Highway on Youtube the other night and it was embarrassingly awful.
Nah: I like those songs (Hell, I like Chicago XI). Well crafted pop songs with real brass parts? Whats not to like?..... (Yes, I do miss Terry Kath)
My take is that they Jumped The Shark the moment a Yamaha DX-7 made an appearance on their albums and songs -- It was all one big Downhill FM Synthesis Snowball from there............
Landing on Water was a great album!
How about Billy Sherwood?
[So who do you think made the worst bid to remain "relevant" to the pop music audience of the 1980's? ]
If I had to pick one it would probably be Stevie Wonder.
I'm guessing most people on here would say Genesis(which isn't really fair imo not to mention untrue since they were huge in that decade).
I'll go with:
Pat Benatar (after 1984 or so)
Blondie (after 1982)
Devo (what the heck even happened to them after 1981)
Lou Reed (he's great from a pop perspective he didn't do much in the eighties)
Jackson Brown (ditto above)
Black Sabbath ( I suppose many people didn't accept them without Ozzy)
Pink Floyd (they were still very successful but they were a different band and were having issues)
I'll second David Bowie. I like let's dance and the album after it(to some degree) but the fact remains they couldn't compare to his early stuff.
Stevie Wonder - Poor Stevie also couldn't live up to his seventies material. My vote goes to Stevie.
Also Foreigner and Journey both dropped the ball around 1985.
Do not suffer through the game of chance that plays....always doors to lock away your dreams (To Be Over)
It would probably be eaésier to list the few artistes that didn't slip badly in the 80's..
I'd say Art Zoyd and Univers Zero re among the few that did rather well in the 80's... too bad hardly anybody knew it back then
I'd say Phil Collins (and Genesis), Neil Young, Bowie and Michael Jackson (not that I ever was a fan of the Jackson 5) were the worst offenders... though the first and the last never got better.
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
I like Black Cars!
I vote Rod.
I will continue to give Grace Slick a pass on the 80's, although I think she should have scrapped the idea of solo albums after her masterpiece Dreams and JS for me officially ended with Winds of Change. Slick was legendary enough that I forgive everything when she hit the point in her career where she basically threw on the contract filling cruise control to grab her retirement fund and then split.
Prog musicians seemed to have a serious meltdown-and I don't mean Genesis. GTR would have been better had they not the Mickey Thomas/Steve Perry clone doing vocals...
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
It's not that the singer has a "top 40 radio friendly" voice, so much as the fact that there's a singer at all. The band was built around two top flight and relatively famous guitarists (with virtually all publicity hinging on this point), it was named GTR, the album cover shows a burning guitar, etc. You'd have expected a much more "guitar intensive" album, wouldn't you? Of course, that's also down to the songwriting and production. I mean a producer can advise the band to leave room in the arrangement for more guitar heroics, and he can also ease up on the synths in the mix.
Yeah, I know the synths were triggered from the guitars, but so what? If you weren't familiar with the publicity surrounding the album (which included a "making of the album" special that aired on MTV), you wouldn't know those were guitar synths. You'd just look at the back cover of the record, see that the record was produced by Geoff Downes, and said "Oh, great, the keyboardist hijacked the album!". I mean, it was to the point where they had to bring a keyboardist on tour, which was either done so that neither guitarist would be "relegated to playing rhythm guitar" (official statement at the time) or because the primitive MIDI guitar technology couldn't cope with the band's onstage (which quite probably was the "real reason").
Of course, it didn't help that they were working for frelling Clive Davis at the time. I remember Hackett saying years later that "every guitar lick had to be negotiated" which presumably meant that Clive (or whichever one of his henchmen he had micro-managing the project) kept saying "No, no, you don't understand, today's audience doesn't want extended guitar solos, they want obnoxiously, endlessly and redundantly reiterating the refrain! Would you PLEASE give me a record I can actually sell, I mean is that too much too ask?!" (remember Big Trouble In Little China?! OK, imagine Lo Pan reciting that bit of theoretical record company backstabber spiel, and you'll get the point I'm making).
I guess we should be thankful Davis and his flunkies didn't mix Howe's laud out of The Hunter, or insist on leaving the nylon guitar coda on Imaginging, or insist on bumping the two instrumentals (there should have been more) in favor of "more singles".
I wasn't thinking so much of "one hit wonders" so much as people who had established careers who tried a little too hard to appeal to an audience who probably were too young to remember their earlier classic records. The Allman Brothers Band two early 80's records on Arista come to mind. There's synthesizers on those records! Synthesizers! On an Allman Brothers Band record! Two of them, in fact!
Dickey Betts said once the first record they did for Arista wasn't bad but "the other one wasn't worth a...ya know". Thanks again, Clive!
As for Devo, I liked some of the songs on Oh, No! It's Devo, but I think the only did one more album after that (the one with the Are You Experienced cover on it) before their initial break up. I still think Peek-A-Boo and That's Good are cool songs.
Neil Young wasn't so much trying to "keep up with the kids" so much as just going in whichever direction he felt like going, which as stated above pissed David Geffen off to the point of litigation (though I think it was the entire string of albums that Neil handed over to Geffen, not just Landing On Water, that brought up on the record company kingpin's wrath...I believe the official statement was that Neil was making music "not representative of the musical styles associated with the artist" or words to that effect).
It is some paradoxical that Kiss took off the makeup to prove that the makeup didn't make the band, and then started releasing mediocre records. But when one of your songwriters (if he tended to only write one or two songs per album) leaves, and one of your other songwriters is hanging out in the wrong part of LA instead of being in the studio, your output is gonna suffer. Collaborating with Desmond Child didn't help matters either (though to be fair, a couple of those songs where Child's name appears on the byline are rather good).
The problem with Styx wasn't that they made Kilroy Was Here, the problem was that Dennis DeYoung had hijacked the band and forced the other guys to do not only the album but the "musical theater" wannabe show that they took on tour to promote it. If you'll recall, the show begins with something like 5 or 6 minute film, that sort of sets up the Kilroy story, then Dennis appears onstage, singing Mr. Roboto to a backing tape (whilst Tommy Shaw wanders around the stage with this "WTF?!" look on his face), followed by a lengthy bit of dialog (these guys would have made good B-movie actors), before the full band appears onstage and actually launches into a fully live song (as opposed to just the keyboardist pretending to be Robert Preston with the accompaniment of a pre-recorded tape...Dennis should be thankful he's not doing crap like The Last Starfighter right now!).
Maybe if Dennis hadn't been so hell bent on proving that rock n roll and Broadway don't mix, the band wouldn't have gone down in flames the way it did.
I was gonna suggest that it's easy to not "slip" when you're making extremely "out there" avant garde music that ignored mainstream concerns to begin with, in which case you can name a whole Motherfrelling drenload of artists who try to "impress the kids".
But then I remembered Magma's Merci album. I actually enjoy that record, but I can see why many don't: drum machines (and you thought Phil Collins using a drum machine was obnoxiously redundant), over reliance on synths, and the opening song's "Ooh, ooh, baby" refrain (at least I'm assuming that's what Stella's singing, there could be a Kobaïan that sounds exactly like "Ooh, ooh, baby" ...of course, for that theory to work, there'd have to be Kobaïan phrases that sound exactly like the rest of the English lyrics on that album).
All true, but Neil Young's output doesn't really jibe with what the original poster was asking, which was "So who do you think made the worst bid to remain "relevant" to the pop music audience of the 1980's?"
Neil Young got sued for making music *without* as much commercial potential as his earlier stuff. His most obvious turn of style to remain "relevant" was Trans, which is widely regarded as one of his only good '80s albums.
According to one of the Crazy Horse guys, Neil actually recorded those songs with them, then overdubbed the synths and vocoder stuff later. Reportedly, he became fascinated with the vocoder while working with ways to communicate with his son Ben, who has cerebral palsy. Supposedly, the "repetitive" nature of the songs on Trans and Re-Ac-Tor were the result of the speech exercises he was performing with Ben.
The weird thing about Trans is, it's famous for the synth heavy material, but there's like three songs, I think, which were recorded for a completely different record, which was to be called Island In The Sun. Apparently, that was actually the first record he offered to Larg...er, I mean Geffen, who didn't think the record was good enough. So Neil went back to the synth tracks, which he had actually recorded toward the end of his Reprise contract, and worked on those to produce the majority of the material that ended up on the album.
Oh, and according to Wikipedia, the infamous lawsuit was apparently the result of both Trans and Everybody's Rockin', Neil's rockabilly follow up to Trans. So at the time, Landing On Water hadn't been made and thus, didn't even come into it. I think what happened was Geffen was expecting Neil to make records like either Harvest or Rust Never Sleeps, and needless to say, that's not what Neil gave him.
Yeah, I agree with your assessment of Grace... and Wrecking Ball was not a good album... but until Dreams, she was almost flawless
However, for GTR, I find that mentioning them is out of context, since they didn't exist in a way or another the previous decade (despite H&H being in their respective group).... just like citing Asia wouldn't fit in this thread, since they didn't exist in the 70's...
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Another contender could be Tull... I really don't like the trilogy A/TB&TB/UW (though only UW really stinks shit)... Ok, they returned to a lesser catastrophic trilogy Knave/Island/Catfish later on, but still, 80's Tull doesn't any fare better than Yes or Genesis or Moody Blues
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
I mentioned GTR because the direction Howe and Hackett went with this. You have two highly noted guitarists out of the 70's. How do you go from "Spectral Mornings" and "Flight of the Acolyte" to "When the Heart Rules the Mind"? I understand though the situation.
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
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