Imagine if Lennon or Hendrix were still alive today

By the way, Zeppelin rules, and When the Levee Breaks >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Stairway, IMO.

 

I heard a radio interview Tuesday with David Bromberg, who recently resumed performing after a 17-year retirement. He was a mainstay on non-commercial radio stations in the 1970s but hardly a household name and seemingly an unlikely candidate for "burnout," as he calls it -- "At a certain point I realized I was no longer a musician."

Burnout or just walking away at some point would be entirely imaginable. It's a rare artist who can maintain that kind of productivity over decades. Take Bob Dylan -- still a productive musician, but how many classics has he written over the past 20 years? When he dies and the radio stations play all Bob Dylan that day in tribute, 98 percent of it will be from the first 10 years of his career.

 

D'oh!!! I know that, just had a brain cramp on it.

 

Townshend is undoubtedly the creative force behind the Who but Moon's drumming (up to Who Are You anyway) always drove the band. Stuff they've done since his death has always lacked that energy that Moon's playing brought.

As for Hendrix, his music was never headed in just one direction. As F-B noted, he was into jazz (there is supposedly tape of a Hendrix/Miles Davis collaboration out there) and he was always deep into the blues. Would he have done a Sly Stone-type R&B thing in the 70s when that was big? Worked with Prince or some of the top rappers?

In the interviews he gave before his murder Lennon gave little idea of what he would be doing in the future but a Beatles reunion seemed out of the question.

Holly is another great what if. One of rock's first great songwriters and he put together the prototypical rock band in the Crickets. He was an extremely prolific and creative record maker for that era too.

 

Agreed.

 

I remember hearing that Bob Gruen, the photographer who took the iconic shot of Lennon wearing the New York City T-shirt, was trying to turn him on to punk right before he was shot. I think the story was that Lennon was blase about it at first (kind of a "been there, done that" thing), but became a little intrigued...that would have been an interesting sort of direction for him.
I dunno, you look at people like Dylan, the Stones, Paul McCartney, Clapton -- people every bit as iconic as Hendrix and Lennon -- and how they moved through the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s. I imagine the same thing would have happened with Hendrix and Lennon -- good albums, shitty albums, big tours, interesting hook ups with current artists. I doubt if either of them would have cranked out another classic like "Electric Ladyland" or "Imagine", but we probably got cheated out of their version of "Time Out of Mind"

 

Not with rappers?!
What would we tell the children?

 

I wonder how long Zeppelin would have stayed together if Bonzo had lived. Would they have moved more toward the 80s metal scene?

How much different would rock have been if Buddy Holly survived just another five or 10 years? I tend to believe there would have been a quicker move toward "hard rock" and less pop bubble gum stuff through the 50s and 60s.

 

This is exactly the kind of speculation I was hoping for.

And while not as iconic as some of the other names, what would have happened to Metallica had Cliff Burton not died? How different would Metallica sound now, or would they?

 

careful, AA--that comment could lead down the slippery slope where we're discussing the impact of the Monkees sans Peter Tork.

 

Most of the Zeppelin catalog > Stairway

 

In the interviews Lennon gave in the last couple of days before his death, he seemed a little more equivocal on the idea of a reunion; he talked about McCartney's impromptu visits to the Dakota, and their near-decision to take Lorne Michaels up on his offer of $3200 to reunite on SNL -- Lennon said they were about to do it, but were "just too tired."

Lennon -- all of them, really -- was very adamant on the idea that the Beatles would never reunite for a simple money grab, or for a wildly overhyped tour which would return them to all the chaos and pressures of mid-60s Beatlemania which had just about driven then insane at the time.

My guess is they would have reunited sometime in the mid-80s, probably following McCartney's original strategy with Wings of appearing completely unannounced under assumed names at out-of-the-way bars and clubs, going all the way back to the beginning, just playing music as a bar band again without immediately having to walk on stage and be "The Beatles."

As far as Lennon's own musical direction, the best indication comes from "Walking On Thin Ice," the Yoko song he was working on the night he was killed, which was a driving, guitar-based song with a style fairly similar to "Where The Streets Have No Name" (done a decade later by U2). Lennon's own guitar playing on the song is amazing -- very Hendrix-influenced, and by far the greatest guitar piece he ever did.