bobzilla77 wrote:Thompson Twins' Tom Bailey
It really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
I went to the Twins' Wikipedia page and..yes, once that moniker gets introduced (2014), it does sound increasingly "Tourrettic" with each subsequent re-iteration.
I also see that they have quite a few more hits than I remember.
Yeah, I suppose I really don't know what drives me to project so much hypothetical misery onto someone like him. How could I possibly know?
I certainly wouldn't mind touring this summer, singing through some gigantic P.A. while the punters file in. Having a song you wrote 35 years ago that means something to a number of people is also...yeah, you're right. That might be nice.
I just don't know what it means to be in Smashmouth.
There's a local act who had a minor "third wave radio grunge" hit, and they're out on some "late alternative rock era" package tour this summer. I know another dude who has been in the current performing company of The Romantics for over a decade now, and however rote festival season might seem as a person creeps into a certain stage of life (the same hotels, flights, shuttle buses, hospitality suites, etc. year after year - and this is by his own narration), my own ideals about the performing arts may be lofty in a way that only I need them to be. A lot of people who play to thousands of people a night (even as sort of "filler" entertainment) well into middle age and beyond might feel some profound "All I ever wanted was to make music" fulfillment and gratitude. Life, to some extent, is what you make it.
But...you know, I've got this book about Led Zeppelin's concerts. Probably needs to be updated. They were a well documented act, and it sort of goes through every gig from their first to their last and explores - in, to my mind, compelling detail - the ongoing journey of that ensemble onstage from night to night. If you know and love this stuff, you know they were sort of the 1970s rock equivalent of a great small jazz combo. The arrangements and the approach were incredibly fluid, as was the repertoire up to a point. That someone could even be bothered to document their heavily bootlegged live career in such a fashion speaks to an often captivating range of one off musical events. Same with The Who. There's scarcely a note they played onstage ca. 68-70 that doesn't sound like incredibly powerful and high stakes telepathy (of the Grateful Dead, I will only say that I find them severely lacking in comparative "oomph"). Frequent magic, if you will. They say Woodstock was them at their worst and...I've been worshiping at the altar of that version of "Sparks" for decades.
I guess if you've had any real taste of that kind of volatility and flexible expressiveness, chemistry, and communication (I feel like the right musicians together are often able to "take a big drink from the well" and frequently spur each other on to some unrepeatable event or response), it may haunt your dreams forevermore. It can't necessarily happen every time you go in front of an audience, but..,surely it's fair for some percentage of performing musicians to require it as a feasible possibility.