Yes, I've also got the sad impression that sales numbers are the primary driver for achieving awards.
Best regards!
I think of a good commercial band as one that was popular, filled seats, sold albums and had staying power but didn't point the way in music that others then followed. I assume we're talkng about Rock 'n Roll and it's much easier to name the artists and groups that did point the way and the list is still not at all short. At the highest level Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, John Mayall, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin, Eric Clapton...
From your choices, Led Zeppelin for sure was one of the most influencial bands of all times. In the 1970ies their influence was comparable to what the Beatles were in the 1960ies. LZ plainly was the groundbreaking hard rock band. And yes, they were, and still are, monsters in terms of success.
Best regards!
Best regards!
And I am one of those others! 👍
Long may Justin Hayward continue the Moodies journey.
I thoroughly recommend his Tuesday Afternoon Video Series.
The list of those "pointing the way" is always relatively short. Everything has a beginning. It takes a very small match to start a forest fire. All who were of value fall into the category of your first statement including those you named.
I think that I have seen them all, some several times unfortunately the series ended over a year and a half ago with three Justins, one playing the usual Gibson ES335, another playing a Telecaster, and another playing a Martin acoustic. All three sing in perfect harmony. There is obviously a DAW running on the system behind the Justins, but I don't recognize what I can see of it.
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Justin Hayward and John Lodge are the only Moodies still touring and making new music, but each has gone their own way. Ray Thomas and Graeme Edge both succumbed to cancer. Mike Pinder left the Moodies back in 1978 and took his Mellotron skills with him. There was one solo album called the Promise in 1976 and another called Among the Stars in 1995. Pinder made a statement about leaving the touring world to raise his kids, and was rarely heard from. Today all three of his kids are musicians. The oldest does mostly film scoring and similar work, but the two youngest have a band aptly named "The Pinder Brothers" with two released albums that are nothing like Mellotron Mike.
I have both of Pinder's albums in a CD box set.
The songs that Mike contributed to the Moody Blues albums rank among their finest.
The songs that Mike contributed to the Moody Blues albums rank among their finest.
We'll agree to respectfully disagree. While everything has a beginning music and musical genres are not linear, rather more like a branching tree. The big hitters of rock, or any genre create sturdy new branches that become sub-categories further branching and expanding. Hendrix only performed on the big stage for four years but his mark on rock is indelible. TDN has been out there banging away for over 50 years, but if I imagine they never existed I don't see the current musical tree missing any major limbs.
Seeing Hendrix play live (opening for the Monkees) was the event that killed my childhood dream of being a rock star. Working with some real (short time) rock stars while their record company railroaded them back into obscurity sealed the deal, so I went down the electrical engineering road instead, which proved to be the right choice.
Hendrix had mastered the Echoplex, a silver cube about 1 foot square seen on the floor in many of his 60's performances. I had to have one of those boxes, and several years later I did get a dead one cheap and rebuilt it. The Echoplex was a 1960's vintage looper pedal made with analog tape and vacuum tubes. The Moodies, Beatles, King Crimson and others used a Mellotron. It was the 1960's version of a sampling keyboard, also made with analog tape and vacuum tubes. In these cases, it was the new tech that defined the branch on the prog rock tree.
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.There are some semantics going on here as I don't disagree with anything you've said, just added my perspective.