Ten Years

So I mentioned yesterday (slash this morning) that if you're a great rock band, you've got about eight to ten years of absolutely first rate work, followed by an almost inevitable falling off.  I'd like to take a moment to try and make my case and then we can talk about the implications.

1) the Beatles.  Considering they were only a recording band for eight years, I think this is somewhat generous - I'm essentially giving them everything they ever did as groundbreaking.  I'm comfortable with this for two reasons - look at where rock music was in 1962; they were groundbreaking.  The entire genre of rock music evolved in response to them, and they stayed at the forefront until they broke up.  I don't think you can oversell the Beatles; everything we think of as natural for a rock band - they write their own songs, record their material, put out albums instead of just singles - was because of them.  So yeah.

But this is where I'll get the hate mail comments - look at the solo careers each of the major three songwriters in the band embarked on (if you're confused, Ringo isn't one of them.)  Paul had a couple of great songs on his first couple of albums, and Wings was a good band, but good isn't what we're talking about.  George had one absolutely great album's worth of songs left over from the last couple of years with the group, and he quickly settled into the same kind of McCartney mediocrity.

And John.  For all the Lennon history revisionists out there, John's solo career was no better than Paul's.  Half a dozen good songs, and I'll give you "Imagine" as great if you'll give me "Maybe I'm Amazed."  That's it, really.  A covers album of old rock classics.  I put the last significant song, album, or recording of any kind by a Beatle no later than 1971.

2) Bob Dylan.  He came on the folk music scene a little earlier than the Beatles, but his first album was pretty derivative (if also pretty original for a debut) and though a lot of his early protest songs are famous and much loved, they also aren't very good.  "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" is great, but I don't think we can start the clock running until 1965, with Bringin' it all Back Home.  "Gates of Eden," "Maggie's Farm" - this is his first truly great album.  Dylan is more problematic than the Beatles, partly because he took a break from music, and released some crap albums starting in 1970.  Call them his Yellow Submarine period, and I'll say 1976's Desire is his last great album.  My favorite song, "Isis" is on it, and after that he went christian, then came back, etc.  I.e., while he'd have great songs from time to time, he never really had an album to match his late sixties work with the Band.

Rather than spelling out every career, let me just bookend a couple here.  Rolling Stones, you could say Aftermath (1965) was the real start of it, but their truly great period was from about 1968-74.  Also, Some Girls (1978), though that's much less of being on the cutting edge, and more of a last gasp a la Abbey Road.  If you want to give them 13 years, fine, but I think of it as six, with one semi-great album leading up to it, and one great on on the way out.

David Bowie - a couple of good songs, but didn't really get it together until 1971 with Hunky Dory.  I think Bowie is interesting, because he was on the absolute cutting edge, but of several different genres.  One of the original glam rockers, then changed his sound to "plastic soul" on the uneven but occasionally sublime Young Americans, then reinvented rock on every album through Lodger.  Seriously, let me pause here.  Station to Station, Low, Heroes, Lodger.  How many bands ever get a run like that in their careers?  (Unless you're one of the other three I mentioned.  Still, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps came out in 1980.  I count nine years.

I'm not trying to say every band starts to suck ten years after they write their first great album.  First off, not everyone gets that long.  Neutral Milk Hotel's just this side of perfect In the Aeroplane Over the Sea never got a followup.

My other point though, is that great bands tend to be characterized by three career stages - early work, which might be indicative of their talent, but is usually uneven; middle/mature period, which usually has a string of several albums, where you start wondering if they are capable of bad albums; and a later period, which usually has it's share of bad albums but often still manages to be occasionally interesting.  Bowie's last two albums have been highlights of his non-seventies career, for example.

I don't know how inevitable this is, or how interested I am in the predictive power of this theory, but I will say, that even without counting to ten, a couple of things are clear.  Pearl Jam is past it, Radiohead is running out of time, and the White Stripes don't have a whole lot longer left.  I also think Kings of Leon are on the verge of entering their own can-do-no-wrong period.