Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen
by Sam Smith
6.20.04

For some time – a few years, to be honest – I’ve been trying to imagine how some artists get better with age (or at least retain the level of energy and creativity they exhibited when they were younger), while others go completely to hell. Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Graham Parker, Van Morrison, these are people who you can still count on, even if you think that the old stuff was better. All of them have had high spots in recent years that at least nudge the 4-star mark, and you still have a sense that the next thing they release could turn out to be brilliant.

This column isn’t about those folks. No, this little list is dedicated to the first-to-worst club, a set of artists who once ruled, but somehow found a way to deteriorate as the years passed. In some cases – and these are the ones you’ll find at the top of the list – you have people or bands who went from legitimate greatness to breathtaking suckitude. In other cases you have people who simply lost their edge or were abandoned by their muse. They aren’t exactly forging new frontiers in suck, they’re just muddling along, mere shadows of their former selves.

So here it is – Lullaby Pit’s Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen list, with thanks to a few friends of the Pit who contributed suggestions and pointed out people I had somehow overlooked (or repressed, as the case may be....) The criteria are subjective, as always, but fairly simple – who soared the highest, then fell the lowest?

2. Sting
The gods help me, because The Police were one of the most amazing bands in the world, and they were hands-down my favorite band. Their white reggae innovations helped fuel the New Wave, which remains one of the most interesting little revolutions in the recent history of popular music, and they forged a sound that nobody, nobody, has ever quite been able to emulate. Now he's devolved into, well, Sting®. His first three solo albums weren’t bad, but by the time Ten Summoner’s Tales rolled out you could smell the froot booty in the air. He teamed up with Rod Stewart and Bryan Adams in an ultimate Best2Worst Trifecta Moment to do that damned song for the Three Musketeers soundtrack, and if you weren’t convinced by then that the train had jumped the tracks, all you had to do was pick up 1996's Mercury Rising. Give that a listen, then get back to me.

3. Rod Stewart
At one time, Rod Stewart was rightly considered one of the best singers in all of rock, and he wasn’t a bad songwriter, either. He’d been in Long John Baldry’s band (something he has in common with Elton John, in fact, although Baldry now tells Rod Stewart jokes during his shows – apparently the difference between a bull and Rod Stewart is that with the bull, the horns are up front and the asshole is in the back). His stint in the Jeff Beck Group was just unbelievably awesome. He was the singer for The Faces, a group that current bands still imitate. And his early solo career was damned good, too, up until about 1977 or so. Then something went tragically wrong. In a nutshell, he seems to have gotten more concerned with stardom and less concerned with doing music that was worth a fuck. Now he has legions of frustrated middle-aged housewives heaving their high-waisted size XXL panties at him, and he seems to enjoy it. More power to you, Rod.

4. Beach Boys
Pet Sounds to "Kokomo." “Good Vibrations” to “Wipeout” with the Fat Boys. The top of the creative world to the county fair circuit. I could go on forever, really, but it all boils down to this: Brian Wilson to Mike Love is about as best-to-worst as it gets, and Wilson’s recent solo work proves it.

5. Jefferson Airplane/Starship
The Airplane was one of the most important and influential bands to emerge in the US during the ‘60s, and their legacy still endures despite the best efforts of goddamned Mickey Thomas and Craig Chaquico. I go to shows now and I hear echoes of Grace Slick in the oddest places, and sometimes I wonder if the artists working that vein are even aware of the debt they owe. But in the ‘70s the band started fragmenting, and Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship (an iteration that had some pretty decent moments, notably 1975's Red Octopus), but then in the early ‘80s Paul Kantner left and, after some intense lawyering made sure that the “Jefferson” part of the name was “retired,” we were left with “Starship.” You might remember “We Built This City,” and if you saw them live on that tour you know that they both opened and closed the show with that little homage to what they were pretending to be. You also know that Chaquico had abandoned time-wasting activities like practicing his guitar in favor of posing, strutting, and prancing shirtless in front of his mirror (a strategy that drove the teenaged girls wild, by the way). And you know that Grace, who was back on board, had been reduced more or less to Mickey’s backup singer (they did let her do “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” but only after the crowd was forced to endure a five-minute synthesizer wank-job intro solo). If there’s a hell, Mickey Thomas is not only going to be in it, he’s going to be music director.

6. Metallica
Hands-down the most important metal band of the ‘80s, and probably  the second or third most important metal band ever after Zeppelin and/or Sabbath. Kill ‘Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, and the black album – hell, did even Zep do four in a row that were that good? But then, apparently, the band’s contract with the devil expired. The aptly titled Load, then Reload, now St. Anger – and somewhere in there they also found time to become spokesdupes for the RIAA. Pay Lars, indeed, but not for this crap....

7. Van Halen
There’s some argument here, so I’ll give you a choice. My take is that when they replaced Diamond Dave with Sammy Hagar they went straight to hell. Dave seemed to understand and enjoy the joke, whereas Sammy didn’t realize there was a joke. Others thought Hagar was fine, and some think he was even better than Roth, so for those folks, we have a second option: when Hagar left and they replaced him with Gary Cherone, the band went straight to hell.

8. Aerosmith
I fought hard not to put Aerosmith on the list, because I actually feel like they've had some moments in recent years. But in the end, I had to hold their last couple records up side-by-side with Toys in the Attic and Rocks, and as much as I genuinely like these guys, I'd be stupid to pretend that two stars and five stars are the same thing.

9. The Eagles
From Desperado, One of These Nights, and the landmark Hotel California to Hell Freezes Over.... The band seemed to have a pretty good idea after The Long Run that the gig was up, and had they had the sense to leave it alone they wouldn't be on this list.

10. Chicago
Chicago has had significant commercial success throughout its career, with chart albums in five straight decades. The critical value of their music has been less consistent, however. Their early success was built on an inventive blending of styles, with the whole emerging as something decidedly larger than the sum of the parts. But after Terry Kath’s death, the band evolved into the creature from power-ballad hell, and the head of the beast was Peter Cetera. Each effort was schmaltzier than the last, and aggressively so, and after Cetera got too big for the band and moved on into solo suckdom, Chicago reacted by...finding a guy who sounded like Cetera so they could keep cranking on the formula. Sad, sad....

11. Bryan Adams
I heard Adams’ Cuts Like a Knife and thought, damn, this boy has got something. Unfortunately, the “something” turned out to be a secret yearning to be Michael Bolton.

12. The Bee Gees
This is less about the successes that the band once attained (which were noteworthy, if not the stuff of legend) than it is the unspeakable depths they plumbed as the house band for the disco movement. Many bands have soared higher, but precious few have sunk lower.

13. The Rolling Stones
No questioning the “heights soared to” part of the equation, is there? The Stones are one of the greatest bands in rock & roll history. But when was the last time they did something great? Tattoo You in 1981? Some Girls in 1978? Been a long, long time since they added to their legacy, folks.

14. Bruce Springsteen
I don’t think that Bruce has stopped trying, but like the Stones, it’s been a while since he produced something that added to the case for his greatness. Up through Born in the USA he could do no wrong, but then he got married, got divorced, dismissed the E Street Band, got married again, and since then he hasn’t done anything much to get excited about except The Ghost of Tom Joad (you like The Rising? Go back and give Born to Run a spin and see how you think the two compare). I remember the line from “Dancing in the Dark” – “I’m just about starving to death.” Right, but he’s not starving anymore, and it shows. With his second marriage he found happiness, apparently, and for some artists, happiness kills their muse. I think Bruce might be one of those people.

15. REM
With every new REM release, I keep hoping for another lightning strike, while expecting it less and less. Through the ‘80s they released six studio albums (plus the Chronic Town EP), and the worst effort in the bunch was Green. Green was an okay enough record, even though it clearly didn’t measure up to their previous work on any standard except sales. This was followed by Out of Time, another likeable effort that nonetheless didn’t quite stand up to the earlier work. But then out of nowhere we got Automatic for the People, and absolute masterpiece and easily one of the top CDs of the decade (it was #3 on the Lullaby Pit Best CDs of the ‘90s list). So based on that comeback, I have held out hope for the last ten years that they have another great record in them. And they still may, but since then we’ve had four remarkably average-to-ho-hum releases, and I’m on the verge of concluding that they’re done.

16. Pearl Jam
Actually, it didn't take the mighty very long to start falling in this case. Ten, the debut release, was #8 on the Pit's Best CDs of the ‘90s list and the two follow-ups were defensible efforts. Then they just jumped off a cliff, quality-wise. I respect that they're doing what they want to do and they'll never be on anybody's top sell-outs list, but sadly, artistic integrity and suck are not mutually exclusive concepts.

17. Duran Duran
This may seem like a pointless entry, depending on how you feel about DD. For my part, I thought they stroking along pretty well up until they split to do the Power Station and Arcadia projects – basically, the first three records were pretty darned solid. Then they put it back together after their little hiatus and produced Notorious, and that was about that. What’s eerie, though, is listening to the band talk about it. They said in an interview that they felt those first three records weren’t very good, that they were too consumed by the demands of style at the time (and by this, I assume they’re implicating the whole MTV thing), and that the newer stuff (speaking here of Notorious, as I recall) represented far better music on their part. Hunh. So the failing with Duran Duran, then, we might chalk up to a complete loss of self-awareness. I hear they’re reuniting, so we’ll see what comes of that.

18. Phil Collins
From Abacab to No Jacket Required to crooning loves songs for Disney. Sigh....

A Special Case

John Lennon and Paul McCartney
They were so unbelievably good that I might ought to just leave it alone, but I can’t. McCartney is trying, I think, and Lennon was certainly trying, but the primary achievement of their solo careers was/has been to prove how desperately they needed each other. Lennon by himself was a self-indulgent pseudo-intellectual whose more, umm, introspective moments would bore the tits off a brass hog. Yes, he had some fantastic high spots – “Imagine” springs to mind – but they were the exceptions, not the rule.

Macca, on the other hand, was substantively about an inch deep. All he really wanted was to hear the screams of little girls wetting their panties, and if he had to afflict us with “Coming Up” to do it, so be it. Like John, he had his moments – some of the Wings-era stuff, for instance, was just fantastic (I’ve always loved Band on the Run from start to finish), but after a while he just quit pretending.

Together, they mitigated each other’s weaknesses. Paul injected some fun into Lennon’s navel-contemplation, and John kept Paul’s dingy butt from flapping mindlessly off into the ether. It was a classic case – the classic case – of one plus one equals a million, music’s ultimate collaboration.

But compare either of their solo careers to their Beatles output, and even the most rabid fan has to admit that there was something of a drop-off....