Why does history treat some bands better than others?

Growing up in the late 60s , early 70s we liked a wide variety of music and had some great radio stations that played it all. I was thinking tonight about how some bands are now held
in such high regard and others not so much. In my circle in the mid 70s in high school Savoy Brown, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Mountain, Rory Gallagher, Wishbone Ash, and many others were held in very high regard and have virtually little recognition among the new generation but Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, etc are widely known. We didn't think much about it back then and were just as excited about a Uriah Heep show as we would have been to see a Zeppelin show. Interesting how history treats different bands. My first show was Uriah Heep headlining a 10,000 seat show at the Denver Coliseum and people were going nuts! Same with Savoy Brown, they sold out huge arenas but history has left them behind while elevating others. Do you remember those days when all these bands had similar following but now only a few are remembered? Will some of these forgotten bands be the Robert Johnson's on future generations?

 

Think the music of some just ages better than others.

 

To start with

Jann Wenner and Co at Rolling Stone Magazine

 

As the saying goes, some guys have all the luck.

 

I swear that in 1974 Deep Purple was as big as Led Zeppelin, absolutely on the same level among everyone that I knew. Today, I don't see any kids wearing Deep Purple shirts but Zeppelin are the kings. There could be a whole book written about how history rewrites the fortunes of some bands.

 

Just relating to Uriah Heep. I listened to Magician's Birthday and Uriah Heep Live more than almost any Zeppelin album when I was in my teens. I wish I had an answer to your question.

 

I regard all those bands in the OP's posts pretty highly, whether history does or not. While artists like Uriah Heep and Savoy Brown are relatively obscure bands today, people who really want to discover them or have any interest in the history of music can easily find them.

 

Was anybody wearing a Bing Crosby or Benny Goodman shirt in 1975?

In reality, it boggles the mind that anyone or any band can sustain a career or maintain popularity for decades upon decades. Pop music is not really designed that way. In other words, the remarkable thing is that kids wear Led Zeppelin shirts at all - not that they aren't wearing Deep Purple or Uriah Heep shirts.

 

That's a fair point. I know many-including myself-can get a little rankled that artists like Deep Purple, The Moody Blues and Chicago aren't in the Hall of Fame yet and aren't really well known by most youngsters (IME) but the fact that all these bands can still play to thousands of people night after night more than 40 years after their respective heyday is pretty flippin' cool.

 

Also, remember that "He who wins the war writes the history".

Maybe The Velvet Undergroud, The MC5, The Stooges, The Modern Lovers, Can, etc. - all of which were considered "marginal" at the time - are currently remembered more than the typical "heavy" bands of the '70s because the younger generations prefer them as influences?

 

Actually most will become more forgotten than Robert Johnson, who by virtue of being a pioneer will probably be mentioned in holographic blues documentaries in the 23rd century. On the other hand, it is unlikely that a similar holographic rock documentary of the 23rd century will have time to mention Wishbone Ash or Savoy Brown. There's only so much you can include in a set number of hours.

I came to a realization one day when I was trying to estimate the total number of rock songs that have been commercially released worldwide throughout history. (It is impossible to pin a number on it, but my semi-educated guesstimate puts it around 16 million to 24 million songs, with more added daily) The realization I had was that the space in between peoples' ears is finite, as is their time on the planet. As time marches onward, the present is always (and very naturally) crowding out the past. The 60's to 70's is a very narrow period of time for most people; it is important only to specialists of that era. In another 40 years, there will be no 60's survivors left, and the world of 2054 will have a century of history between them and Elvis Presley, and will have to squeeze all that history into whatever amount of time they devote to cultural explorations of the previous century (to be honest, I don't spend much time contemplating the musical climate of 1914, although let me get shouts out to Fred Van Eps and Vess Ossman, both huge stars, who deserve listens today) In other words, there is too much old music for any one person to explore already without ever getting to a huge (and always growing) number of 'deserving' artists.

The 60's-70's names who survive in 2054 as having any cultural relevance or meaning whatsoever will be limited to about the same number as fingers on one hand. There will always be explorers and specialists, so the names will never disappear from the internet (assuming the internet survives the next forty years) But the number of people listening to Wishbone Ash in 2054? You could probably count them on one hand too. That's not a dis against any of the bands you mentioned, but just a function of how our brains relate to the present and to history.

 

Because some bands are better than others.

 

Can you remember who finished second to Nadia Comaneci in the Montreal Olympics? Which squad did the United States Olympic hockey team defeat for their surprise gold medal in 1980? (It wasn't the Soviet Union, which was the semi-final game.)

I think that history has a way of condensing what was a complex, fluid picture down to one or two snapshots. Led Zeppelin and maybe Black Sabbath become the memory of an entire swath of heavy British bands. The Beatles and Rolling Stones are the British invasion. The Sex Pistols, Ramones and Clash are punk. Bob Marley is reggae. Alternative is the Stooges and Velvet Underground. And so forth. It's not quite winner-take-all, but the basic principle applies.

 

Not sure he can be blamed for the fact that most of the bands mentioned are from over here and RS didn't then- and still doesn't - mean that much to us...and they don't get mentioned much over here either.

 

Exactly, the eighties were Madonna and Michael Jackson ( or R.E.M. and The Smiths for alternative)
The nineties was Oasis, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam, etc.
and on and on and on and on....

 

Time has a way of separating out the wheat from the chaff - ie, what connects with people outside of the trends and fashions of its day - and some bands just connect better with listeners and other musicians than others. Judging from the bands who have lasted, it's those groups who were very good at what they did, were innovative, and weren't afraid to take some chances who are standing the test of time. The other bands mentioned - while some are very good (Mountain) and some may be unjustly falling to the side (Deep Purple), I think for the most part they're falling into the obscurity one would expect of acts who filled a niche in their time but weren't good enough to transcend it. Grand Funk Railroad being perhaps the ultimate example, setting sales and touring revenue records yet having the relevance of a Bucks Fizz b-side today.

 

Maybe they were as popular in your circle of friends but just looking at album sales of the day they weren't nearly as popular. 5 gold albums, one double platinum, 2 top ten albums through 75. Not shabby at all but Zep dwarfed that

 

Well, Zeppelin dwarfed pretty much everybody in that regard.

But when you consider that Emerson Lake & Palmer and Deep Purple co-headlined a festival that attracted an audience of nearly half a million in 1974, it does show you how some acts haven't been able to translate well to newer generations I guess...

 

Slade, along with T.Rex, were one of the UK's all time great singles bands in the early 70's. Yet sadly they are mostly remembered for that Xmas song and Dave Hill's daft haircut.

 

I think the responses above have collectively nailed it on the head. Only a small number of acts can really persist forward (and we are talking about forty years now), and for the most part those will be the most popular acts. When I look at the chart data on Wikipedia, it looks like Deep Purple might have been about as popular as Black Sabbath, but not nearly as popular as Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, which had multiple albums hit #1 in the '70s. The acts other than Deep Purple mentioned in the OP were considerably less popular--collectively, they didn't have a single album reach the top 10 in the United States.

There are acts like the Velvet Underground or Big Star that were not popular in their time and have persisted to some degree, but they are the exceptions, and their following is still relatively small.

 

It simply happens. If there was a recipe or a trick to become timeless every band would use it.
Very often it's just the Zeitgeist, that makes an old band relevant again. It can't be explained.
Best example is ABBA. When they stopped in the early 80s no one had ever expected such a huge comeback of their music in the 90s.

 

That would be a good thread -- What are the historically biggest , commercially small bands?

Lots already checked in the thread: Velvet Underground, Stooges, Big Star, Can, Ramones, X . . . I think the Sex Pistols and Kraftwerk don't quite qualify as "small."

 

It's a complicated process, and the same, more or less in all the arts, popular or otherwise. And it's not just a matter of initial popularity, either, although that's usually a key element because it means wide exposure (if people never hear you, see you, read you, you can't get "canonized"). As mschrist notes the exceptions to the "initial popularity" rule are bands/artists who get discovered by a wider audience and lionized later, after they no longer exist or produce new work. Again the key is getting heard/seen/read--and that's usually the result of new relevance that gets discovered (a style of music that later becomes popular in mainstream or some important subculture is, for example, indebted to this or that "almost forgotten" band).

But then other things take over for both the initially popular and the later discovered or "rediscovered:" the music has to continue to fit with later tastes, interests, needs, values. There are, of course, ups and downs in that process over the long haul, and the really long lived artists, in addition, develop their own self-perpetuating value simply as a result of having already been valued by audiences, critics/historians, and other artists for some time. Those artists also start to have something that makes hearing/seeing/reading them a fuller, richer experience for a lot of people: information that puts their work in relevant contexts (biographies, interpretations, discographies/filmographies/bibliographies, arguments about their relationship and relevance to the work of other artists or the cultures that make use of their works). And they come with their own ready-made myths of importance that keeps them getting heard in ways that are already made sense of for new listeners.

All of that has been going on in the usual ways for the small number of rock artists that everyone agrees are in the canon--at either major or minor levels. And most of the biggest names with the widest reputations and the richest pile contextual information will stay at the top. But who knows what the second and third tiers will look like in 100 years? Especially after the original audiences of the past 60 years have died-off. Get ready for the Savoy Brown rediscovery of the late 2070's......first collection of mid 20th century rock to be released in 10a 14p cortex implant format. Spurred by Everett R. Spitz's synaesthetic documentary, The Brown Decade, which caused a complete rethink of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

L.

 

Sometimes all it takes for a band to be resurrected is a spot on a film soundtrack, or a TV commercial. I'm thinking of Iggy (Lust For Life), Nick Drake, etc.

 

I think there is a combination of reasons that have to do with it.

Here are a couple of my best guesses

1-Band's image / looks - there are a lot of great musicians and great bands from back in the day, but they may not have had enough going for them in terms of looks / image and showy performance. I don't think you can discount the impact of a good looking and/or charismatic lead singer in terms of getting a band in print and on the screen and having a very recognizable face to associate the band with.

2-Who controls the catalog / recordings - if a big and stable record company that owns and controls the catalog, they are better able to keep the music in print over the years and also market it to television and movies.