Your most hated bands/groups

And that's one of the best songs of the '80s. Not to mention Girl in Trouble is a strong song. It was a good album.

 

I denounce this.

 

With most genres of music (country, jazz, bluegrass, etc.), it's more who do I like. So I'll confine myself to my favored classic rock and go from there. These are bands that I actively and aggressively turn off if they somehow slither on to my XM Radio: Journey, Boston, Blondie, Metallica, Def Leppard, REO Speedwagon (with the singular exception of Golden Country), Heart, Styx and any song in which Stevie Nicks bleats, er, sings.

Among the bands that I liked from one era that turned to crap after a certain point in their careers, I offer the following: Genesis (great prog rock band at the outset, never recovered when Steve Hackett left), Blue Oyster Cult (first three albums were tremendous, after they had a hit with Agents of Fortune, not so much), Kansas (see BOC), Fleetwood Mac (they were already headed downhill well before Buckingham & Nicks showed up), Jethro Tull (I LOVE Stand Up & Benefit, Aqualung has its moments, although they've all been played to death on classic rock radio, but after that the good stuff is rare), most of Bob Seger's catalog after Night Moves, U2 (everything through Rattle & Hum is great, most of the rest is pretentious shit), Santana (guitar legend, but his material after Caravanserai is mediocre), Little Feat (never should have reformed after Lowell George died) & ZZ Top (one of the great blues-rock bands until they drank the MTV kool-aid and became a parody).

There are probably others that I can't think of right now, but I'll leave them for later.

 

Agree for the most part on ZZ Top, but -- and this is gonna sound weird -- Eliminator is an underrated album. The couple MTV hits got all the love, but the rest of that album is great. Under Pressure, I Got the Six, TV Dinners, etc.

 

The Beatles.

 

Styx and Triumph were huge bands when I was in high school. Despise both, just complete shit. My brother was a huge Supertramp fan and played the shit out of Breakfast in America to the point where I threatened to throw the record into the street. But now on the rare occasion I hear something from that album on the radio, like "Goodbye Stranger" I can dig it. I don't get the acclaim for Coldplay and Radiohead.

But I avoid genres I don't like: rap, hip hop, bro country, whatever disposable, utterly forgettable pop music is the flavor of the hour.

As for the Beatles, I have read every major Beatles book there is to read, know the story inside out and loved the power of their early singles through Revolver. But I have little use for everything from Sgt. Pepper on, with the exception of some of the stuff on Abbey Road.

 

Some of my feelings on the previous posts relate to my age and experiences, and some to acts that just grated on me or who really struck a chord.

I was about eight when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. There was a good bit of music in my parent's house, and mom got my little brother and I our own records, but they were Disney records and some folk and well, mom music. Bless her heart though, because after the Sullivan show she bought me the first two Beatle albums on Capital. They were my gateway drug to Rock and Roll. Not just the Beatle songs, but the covers on "The Beatles Second Album" - Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Smokey Robinson and Motown in general ("Money", "Please Mr. Postman"). They broke up when I hit high school, so they were literally the sound track of my youth.

The first real honest to god rock show I ever saw (as in not the high school gym) was Fleetwood Mac and Deep Purple on the "Machine Head" tour. The Mac was post-Peter Green, the Kirwan/Welch version. I remember them playing playing "Black Magic Woman" and thinking that they were covering Santana instead of vice versa. I was 16, it was 1972, I was young and ignorant, lol. Good show. I was in Birmingham when the "Buckingham/Nicks" album came out. They were very popular here, in pretty heavy rotation on the local AOR station. I really liked the Mac up through "Tusk" or so, and then tapered off as the quality of their releases did.

I liked the Eagles up through "Hotel California". When "The Long Run" came out trying to follow it, it was obviously totally overproduced to try to reach "perfection". Up until then they had been a prototypical California country-rock band and I was very much onboard. After that point, again, I began to step way back. I saw them on the "Long Run" tour and they were ok, but not as good as previously.

That said, I saw Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles on a double bill at the Omni in Atlanta in 1976, the Mac touring "Rumors" and the Eagles "Hotel California", and that's still in my top ten, maybe top five live shows all time. That was a huge hit of excellent new music all at once, damn fine show.

Boston lost me early. I saw them at a "Toys for Tots" Christmas concert also in the Omni. Boston's first album was out and they were riding pretty high, so high in fact that Tom Scholz insisted on closing the show after Styx, who was touring behind "Equinox", which is one of their best, if not the best. Styx let Boston close but were obviously pissed off, as they came out and absolutely burned down the stage. It wasn't quite "Ok, Killer, follow that!", but it had that feeling. Boston had about three really strong songs, but the rest of the set was mediocre, and they were far more a studio than live band. People were leaving in droves. The only rock show I ever saw more people leave early was a Steven Stills and Manassas show when Stills was doing about an ounce of coke a day, and he really sucked hard. Screw Boston, too much the same song.

 

Never saw Boston live, but I definitely buy your claim that they were more of a studio band. Scholz was known to be a real perfectionist in the studio, and that doesn't really transfer that well to the live stage.

 

We're talking the mid Seventies as well - so the digital tracking and overdubs that are common today were not around. To be honest, it wasn't that the live show was all that bad. It's that they had one album out, and two or three good songs. The rest of the show was filler, bad filler. People would have waited it out if Styx were the headliner, but since Sholz had insisted on closing there was nothing to keep people from walking out.

 

You have a lot of the same experiences I've had, being the same age, although my parents weren't cool enough to buy me Beatles records. It was mid-1965 before I started really listening to rock-and-roll, and when I did, I went all in. I also saw Deep Purple in early '72, right before they released Machine Head. They had Uriah Heep and Buddy Miles Band opening the show. Became a big prog rock fan after I saw Yes in 1973 on their tour in support of Close to the Edge, then a year or so later when I saw Emerson, Lake & Palmer on the legendary Brain Salad Surgery Tour. Those were two bands the subsequently quaffed a little too deeply of the prog part of their genre and forgot the rock part.