Bent Fabric wrote:Some great shouts on here - Alice Cooper, Mothers, Elton John Band, Replacements, Love, Spiders, Velvets: all probably 100% unsustainable on some level (see Pink Floyd), but it's difficult not to lament the seemingly abrupt end of the original magic.
In the actual act of cooperation/collaboration/interdependence/shared space, you do get the sense that there's some basic finite feasibility to certain working relationships - one can easily look back and ask "How could ____ possibly think they'd be any good without ____", but the byzantine nature of those actual dynamics typically means that "the best version" was grinding to a halt in all sorts of other ways (so much that we don't know about one or more person's limited ability to coexist past some particular point/not self sabotage).
Still, I'm sure I look at these things as naively as anyone else - the picture of "the original four members" of any given thing (certainly, if they are all still living) carries with it some very unrealistic portent of long lost alchemy just magically kicking right back into gear. Never mind any number of factors (the good songs being long gone, the chemistry being dead as a doornail).
From the point of view of the band members, or the band leader when appropriate, so-and-so is never "classic", he's just the guy who is always complaining, who can't learn his parts quickly, or is an asshole. When you're in it, these interpersonal things take immediate precedence over whatever magic that particular group of individuals may have. And how do they know that the asshole guy isn't actually their Pete Best, whose sacking will actually lead to greater chemistry with someone else?