The great themed bands

I like bands that tend to have strong themes. When I look back on all the groups that have survived for me, from my childhood until today , it seems that having a "theme" is the thread that runs thru each band that has successfully 'made it' and stayed with me, even now in my adult life.

Like so many others, I listened to just about every band imaginable when i was a kid, but so many of them seem to have fallen, quite sadly, to the wayside, once I grew older. Many became insufferably awful sounding, and on the occasion i do return, I find myself in total confusion, as to how I ever liked them. Many others, alas, have suffered that even more damning fate, of just being bands who never seem to provoke my interest beyond the one or two songs I remember fondly of them, from my childhood days. Bands that fit this bill include, but are not limited to, Something Corporate, Jimmy Eat World, Bright Eyes,etc. For some reason these bands only pop up for me time to time, in the chamber that is my mind... i don't think of them mch...

But now look at bands like, for instance, the Doors and the Misfits. In their own way, both of these bands seem - at least ot me -- to have very strong themes. They also seem to have unique style music that was simply never heard from again. No matter the time of year, both these bands here always take me to precisely the same place. Indeed, their music doesn't merely evoke emotion in me, but it actualy seems to supply an entire soundtrack for a very specific "place"  and an "atmosphere". And what i find so strange is how the atmosphere these two bands evoke never really changes all that much, no matter what song you're listening to by them. This especially seems to be the case with the Misfits. Literally every song by that band brings you straight to "Horror Boulevard".

In some sense, the way i see it, listening to both the groups never ceases to be fun, because they bring you to a sort of amusement park, that literally only they can bring you to. Granted, the amusement park in both cases here, is a bit of a dark one, it's still its own park and it thus still begs the question: How come these two bands were able to so strongly cement this very particular theme -- but so many others do not seem to have been able to? For example, take an artist like Neil Young. When first i found him, Neil Young seemed like a promising artist who would have a wide back catalaogue, and who would be able to take me to a fun, familiar park, that i imagined would be a bit Indian themed, and very country, whilst always having rock vibes, etc. In the end, however, Mister Young mostly failed me. Why? Because his music was all over the place -- but not in a good way. Every album I found from the guy seemed tobe in a totally different balpark. After awhile, he became a bit confusing as an artist. The place he brought me to stopped being at all recognizable.

I'm not saying I'm a listener who searches for familiarity, but whatever Neil Young did, especially beginning with the 80s, just stopped working for me, completely. 

Of course, the difference between Neil Young and the two bands I list, is right there in the names: Neil Young is a solo artist, and the Doors and the Misfits are both bands. Bands, it could be argued, perhaps need a theme, in order to unite the members, who might otherwise go a'wandering. Yet, even then, when we look at the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, we see that they were two major bands of rock history -- -and yet they don't really tend to have any marked theme, in the same sense that the Doors do. Both the Beatles and the Stones pretty much lived their musical lives, in a similar fashion to Neil YOung: You never knew where you were going to find them on any given day. The mood changed constantly. The Stones go from giving us 'seedy' rock ballads like "Gimme Shelter", a song full of war imagery, and rape, too, to then giving us "Beasts of Burden".

The band has no theme, no single subject matter. Jagger will literally sing anything he feels at the moment. Same as Lennon and certainly same as McCartney. In fact, Paul McCartney, who i listened to extensively years ago, is perhaps one of the worst lyric writers in all of pop music history, who has nevertheless earned himselff $1 billion dollars. I have never felt more inspired to write pop music lyrics, tahn i have after listening to McCartney, because he simply never says much of anything, at all. His instrumentation is wonderful, and always experimental, but his lyricsa re just ... well, i personally always felt you could tell he was struggling to find something to sing about. Like I say, he sorta did the same thing when he was with the Beatles: As good as many of the Fab Four songs are, they are often about unusually simple topics. This is a radical difference from the Doors, or even Led Zeppelin, who had pretty complex hits like "Stairway to Heaven". Imagining McCartney writing "Stairway to Heaven" is next to impossible.

The question thus becomes - at least for me -- "where did the bands with good themes find their themes?" Well, personally, after many years of examining it, and trying to find the origin, two different ideas have popped out to me. Here are the ideas: In the case of the Doors, I believe the entire dark and eerie theme of the band was discovered, initially, almost solely through Ray Manzarek's very haunting organ (an instrument, i always note, that was never really again seen so prominently in rock music), and when it comes to the Misfits, the theme seems to have been rather "artificially uploaded", from Glen Danzigs never ending obsession with ridiculous 1950s and 60s horror movies. Musicaly speaking, for example, the band the Misfits was almost downright terrible -- but the music almost doesn't matter,because of what Danzig did with those movie plots: He literally just did little more than "upload" those plots to music and...though this might not seem too remarkable, it was actually something that had never really been done before. In fact, its hardly still even being done today- -which is why the Misfits has remained a fairly relevant band, even years later. Same as the Doors....

In any case, I suppose i find both bands so interesting to obsess over, because they both did something that , both in their time and our own, still doesn't seem to be too understood or accepted in rock and roll. They not only both worked with specific themes, but they also seem to have largely sacrificed the idea that the songs should be written for "your point of view". This, in fact, is perhaps the biggest detail of all when it comes to both groups: It's almost as though they were forever performing with no real listener in mind. Putting a few specific songs aside, for example, I almost don't really "hear" or "feel" the 1960s audience of the Doors, when I listen to most of their most memorable songs. The band, especially with hits like "The End" and "Riders on the Storm", stands completely outside the era, in the best of ways. This is the same when it comes to the Misfits: There is no sense of the 1980s , nearly at all, in the catalogue. There is, instead, only a sense of this rather otherworldly atmosphere, that is essentially timeless, so far as I see it.

Basically, you see, by having such strong themes to their work, both of these groups have escaped the main bullet that sinks most bands (in terms of holding listeners interests) after even just 5 years time: They don't really bring on any strong sense of nostalgia. This is very important and its a very unique trick that very few artists ever seem to get away with. I'd say 95% of artists do not manage.  As a result, most artists face the march of time down with only one real card in their pocket, that begs you to listen to them : "I'm a representative of the era... don't you want to find out what people listened to then?" This card isn't all bad, but mostly it just gets you a loop or two around the bands catalogue and then it is not good for much anymore.

As I'm saying with the "Themed bands" here, their loop never ends. My enjoyment and, more importantly, the very unique inspiration I'm able to pull from them, literally seems never ending at this point. The Doors especially seem to forever inspire a very specific movie that begins to play in my head, not only when I listen to them, but even when I Just give them a few spare thoughts, throughout my day. Again, as I said before, its almost like they are inspiring an actual "amusement park" to come to life inside the corridors of my mind. I see weird dark highways, hitchhikers, crumbling Churches and temples, odd snakes and lizards, the desert, Navajo indians...the list goes on and on. There are so many "mini films" within the music of this band, its almost maddening.Of course, more important than anything, almost all of the subjects the Doors inspire tend to stay somewhat near to each other. For example,though the Doors do occasionally inspire light hearted themes, with songs like "Love Street", they are still somehow always not far from the descent into the dark. Love Street for instance, basically just seems like one random off road, in a village of madness and darkness.

Now, however, after all this writing of theme, the question -- to me-- becomes this: How did these bands manage to find a theme, agree on one, and then actually maintain it, throughout years of performing, and is this even still really possible, in our own time?

---notes on muzak (unfinished)