Bands That Get A Couple Albums In And Falter

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Ziggy C
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Bands That Get A Couple Albums In And Falter

Post by Ziggy C »

....continued from a different thread.....
The suggestion was offered that by the time Help! came out, that the Beatles may have been tapped out of good original material. Of course it was temporary, and they certainly rose to the challenge and changed music history even further.

So....

Many bands go through a period of growing pains. They schlog it out in the clubs for a few years, with little or no following. Gradually they gain some traction. In the meantime, they have at least a couple albums worth of original material that they've accumulated, honed, polished, and performed. Then they are "it." They hit it big. The first album often presents the best of the material that had been collecting during the hungry years. It has at least a few tunes with hit potential, has excellent flow, and zoom!...up the charts it goes.

The second album collects the material which didn't cut it for the first album, but which still consists of mostly fully-formed and polished songs. It gets released and zoom!...onto the charts. Sometimes it makes it as high as the first album. Sometimes not. Many times this second album sounds like it could be a continuation of the first album. And then....tapped out.

One band which comes to mind is Van Halen. Anyone who has followed their history and acquired the demo's, early versions, etc., can see that by the third album, Women And Children First, they were mining the dregs which did not make it onto the first couple albums. And by Diver Down,....well let's just forget that one..
Anyway, VH are a band which had tapped out after their second album. Yes, they came back. Yes, Fair Warning and 1984 are awesome. And even some of the Van Hagar stuff is awesome, too.

Another band might be Rush. Many would agree their third offering, Caress Of Steel was a big miss. Maybe a couple good songs. But side 2 was (and still is, IMO,) awful. Yeah, they recovered and figured out who they were for the very next album, 2112, and onward.

Another band, Guns N'Roses. Had enough for Appetite For Destruction and then an EP. And then....tapped out. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan. Saw them play a few times in the early 90's. I dig Slash's Snakepit a bit more....a bit more bluesy and raw. However, the 2nd GNR album, Use Your Illusion, while racing up the charts and receiving all kinds of accolades, to me was a case of the emperor's new clothes. One or two songs (Civil War and You Could Be Mine,) a lame cover of Live And Let Die, a slightly more tolerable cover of Knocking On Heaven's Door, an overlong plodding (and bo-o-o-o-ring November Rain), and the rest of it subpar filler. For two albums.... Yeesh!! Tapped out.

Can you think of any other bands that went through this kind of growing pains? Did they break free and pull out of it to see even greater success? Did they break up too early? Did they keep going and release mediocre record after mediocre record?
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Re: Bands That Get A Couple Albums In And Falter

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Re: Bands That Get A Couple Albums In And Falter

Post by Ziggy C »

A Boston band that didn't fare as well as Aerosmith did a few years later.
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Re: Bands That Get A Couple Albums In And Falter

Post by mojofilter »

Deaf School is the now-legendary other band from Liverpool. They played a theatrical kind of music that has been likened to Berthold Brecht, and cabaret, with a rock vocabulary, but a mountain of other influences evident. "Discovered" by Derek Taylor in 1975 when he worked for Warner Bros in the UK, he got them signed, and they released "2nd Honeymoon" in 1976, right in the face of the punk movement. This is a superb album. It earned them legions of fans, but it didn't have any radio hits and didn't sell a lot of copies. If they could be compared to anyone, it might be 10cc, in that both played "art pop" - but the similarity ends there.

Then the label started interfering with their vision, wanting them to play more like a punk band, to be commercially viable for the company's benefit. But they weren't one, and their second album, "Don't Stop The World" (1977) had the last remaining bits of their original format, along with some not-so-memorable harder music to try to appease the Warners. The label was so desperate to break them in the States that they repackaged their first two albums as a double, but that didn't sell much, either. Their third album, "English Boys / Working Girls" (1978) is sort of like a different group, having been denied the opportunity to expand their vision because of the current music scene, not fitting into it, but contracted to issue songs into that void. If any band could be truly said to be ahead of their time, it was Deaf School. They were the right band at the wrong time.

They split up and ceased recording after the third album, and played sporadically in various combinations over the next decade, during which time their legend grew by word of mouth. The New Romantic music era came and went, when the public and the radio might have been more receptive to their unique style. Other popular bands started to mention them as inspirations to them in their formative years. In 1988, most of Deaf School re-formed and played several sold-out shows in Liverpool, which yielded the album "2nd Coming." The remaining members reunited in 2006 to play more shows, each with guest appearances by several famous people from other bands. They have continued to play limited tours in the years since. Deaf School have made two more albums in 2015 and 2017. Those didn't get any airplay, either, but what do record and radio executives know about music? The fans bought them, because they love the band. They started earning that legend, from the opening bars of "What A Way To End It All" in 1976.

Here they are on UK television in 1977 playing two songs. The first, "Taxi" is from their second album.

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Re: Bands That Get A Couple Albums In And Falter

Post by rtbcIII »

So...is the other other Liverpool band The Teardrop Explodes? 8-)

But seriously, Deaf School is a great choice. It's also one that underscores - as you note - the industry's then-growing obsession with marketing, one that led a lot of fine square pegs to be arbitrarily hammered into round holes. I recall there was originally a more expansive term to describe a lot of this era's music - Art Rock. Alice Cooper, Bowie and Zappa could all fit comfortably into that rubric, as could the final days of Mott and early incarnations of The Stranglers, Sparks, Roxy Music, Kate Bush, Talking Heads, et. al. But alas, ”Art Rock” wasn't gonna sell many parachute pants, day-glo sneakers or asymetric haircuts.

The early, wildly diverse days of L.A.'s KROQ-FM were very different from its eventual ROQ of the 80s cliche. That's where I first recall hearing Deaf School, amidst sets that could also dare sandwich AC/DC, Waylon Jennings and the Sex Pistols. Another unlikely KROQ fave - ”Sugar Boogie” from Ohio's Molkie Cole and their sole, eponymous album on Janus. But the one that really stuck with me was Tonio K.'s 1978 debut Life in the Food Chain. Still hailed by a few lonely critics playing The Greatest Rock Album game, it's variously smart, angry, ironic, dead-eyed and darkly hilarious, a record that seemed hellbent on standing California pop's mellow reputation firmly on its head. Which seemed an unlikely feat for a debut artist (real name Steven Kerkorian) who hailed from an Armenian immigrant family in Fresno, the state's dusty agricultural center, and whose greatest musical accomplishments to that point had been a 1966 pyschedelic/surf rock single for Liberty and a couple '70s albums with Buddy Holly's former band, The Crickets.

Tonio made more albums for more labels - seldom this brilliantly unhinged - but none ever clicked with the public after Food Chain's limited, all-too-brief radio exposure. Yet he became an industry fixture anyway, a songwriter's songwriter recorded by Burt Bacharach, Bonnie Raitt, Aaron Neville, Chicago, Al Green, Vanessa Williams, Wynona Judd and others.

The Food Chain line-up includes The Band's Garth Hudson, along with an unlikely trio of guitarists - Albert Lee, Dick Dale and Earl Slick (who does most of the heavy lifting). It's also alleged that there's an AK-47 being discharged on-tape in the midst of it all. ”The Funky Western Civilization,” ostensibly a dance song, got most of the airplay. And while Blondie's 1980 ”Rapture” garnered much ink for being the first pop song from a white artist to feature a rap break, Tonio actually did it a couple years earlier on this track. Even better, it's by Joan d'Arc. In French. But my personal favorite is ”The Ballad of the Night the Clocks All Quit (and the Government Failed),” an apocalyptic, Earl Slick-driven locomotive shuffle with a Buck Owens-tinged middle eight - and the greatest lyrics Bob Dylan never wrote. If there's such a thing as antimatter in The Eagles' universe, this album is it. Here's a sampler.







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Re: Bands That Get A Couple Albums In And Falter

Post by Ziggy C »

Couple other bands come to mind. The B-52's and The Cars.
The B-52's were on their way up in 1979 with their first album. That was followed fairly quickly by their second, "Wild Planet," which had perhaps a few tunes which might have fit nicely on their first album, but which also included a bunch of filler. And that was pretty much it for them for a few years until they found their groove again.
The Cars, nearly the same scenario. Their second album, "Candy-O," had a bunch of songs which were in circulation around the time of their first album. But again, although it went up the charts, it wasn't nearly as impressive a release. But their third album, "Panorama," went out in left field. I like it. But it's not mixed or EQ'd well. It just doesn't sound good. But the mood is what I dig. However, the album wasn't well-received. And it found its way to many a used record bin, along with their fourth album, "Shake It Up."
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