- another repost from the files of Whatculture. To keep it from fading into obscurity into their backlog of list-based posts or just disappearing if the site closes down (like what happened w/ some of my articles on spooftimes) I've copied my contributions and will release them sporadically while we wait for either the 2nd round of the Stanley Cup playoffs or someone says 'why haven't you published anything on your blog lately?'.
There is something to be said for anonymity. It provides a sense of safety for those that perhaps feel a bit too thin-skinned to take on the responsibility of being more well-known than what they are famous for. In music, a band’s name help create a feeling of teamwork and that everybody is relevant to the whole and helps to keep the lead singer’s egos in check. For instance, Mick Jagger at one time tried to rebrand the Rolling Stones as “Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones” well after their rise to fame which nearly ended the band for good in the eighties.
The market for new celebrity meat is quick and ever-changing. Last year’s Justin Bieber is this year’s Eminem. Bubble gum bands long ago conquered the true spirit of large radio stations to such a degree that although I have heard of One Direction, I have no idea of any songs that they sing. Plus, I have to acknowledge that for some reason a music director who at one time probably had great taste in music being played over a campus radio frequency has now joined the conspiracy to poop out bubble gum pop crap. I won’t pretend I understand why One Direction has already sold more records than a hundred bands better than them like Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem, a musically gifted bunch of guys that has been around for decades and sold very little records. But back to my main topic around fictional bands…
Sometimes, the line blurs so much between fantasy and reality it is often considered normal and expected. In a medium such as film, people are encouraged to become actively involved in the role-playing. That’s why they are ‘actors’ more than ‘performers’. We don’t necessarily expect the same with music; we expect the person singing to be the person singing, not ‘acting’ the role of a lead singer.
For instance, Meat Loaf is primarily a singer and has taken on that persona. Nobody considers him to be Marvin Lee Aday playing a singer named Meat Loaf. This is a list of some bands that have entered musical folklore, not only for having some great music but also providing some great record sales in the decades before the millennium despite being comprised of people or bands that didn’t actually exist in real life.
There’s such a fine line between stupid and clever. - David St. Hubbins.
6. The Blues Brothers
The Blues Brothers movie is a famous Saturday Night Live movie spin-off that managed to do something that few SNL movies have done; pull a profit. This could be because Lorne Michaels was not attached as a producer and is actually more of a spin-off of a musical act in the show, not a character or skit.
Jake and Elwood Blues (aka Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi) first appeared on the Saturday Night stage in 1976 and appeared two more times before deciding to take their act to the big screen after releasing their album Briefcase Full of Blues in 1978 which went to #1 on the Blues chart in the US.
Directed by John Landis, the Blues Brothers movie followed the exploits of Jake and Elwood as they decide to get the band back together to do one last show to save their orphanage from the mean tax collectors. The movie was a musical road trip, with guest appearances by R&B legends Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker to name a few. The Blues found themselves chased around the country by John Candy, Carrie Fisher and the worst drivers in police car history under the guise of the Illinois State police. I found this great UK specific clip of the record 103 cars destroyed in the epic final car chase, a total only surpassed by it’s sequel, the much less successful Blues Brothers 2000 who made it a point to wreck 104.
The legend of the Blues Brothers continues, as the movie/characters have spawned a ‘tribute’ band that continues to tour the House of Blues concert venues, a 2004 musical, a video game and 14 albums, most without John Belushi. However, the soundtrack to the movie went to #13 on the US charts in 1980.
Not bad for two fake orphans raised in a fake Chicago orphanage.
5. Spinal Tap
The first most anyone heard of Spinal Tap was when they watched Rob Reiner’s 1984 documentary ‘This is Spinal Tap’. Most of that day’s audience left theaters confused as to what they had just witnessed, like the Canadian women’s soccer team after the Summer Olympics. Reiner, for those non-film geeks, is often credited with creating the first ‘mockumentary’. It filmed the attempted resurgence of the naive and ignorant UK heavy metal trio of David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls as the three rockers strive to reclaim their past glory by embarking on a tour of America to accompany their latest album “Smell The Glove” and instead find themselves having to accept they are on the downward side of their career.
The blurring between reality and fiction really expanded after the movie’s release, when curious new fans of the band would go into record shops (ask your parents what they are) and try to find Spinal Tap’s back albums or previously-released singles such as Hell Hole, Big Bottom, and Silent But Deadly. Many probably also attempted to find a bootleg copy of Nigel Tufnel’s Trilogy in D-minor, including the song with the greatest working title in history “Lick My Love Pump”.
The album from the movie, This is Spinal Tap went to #121 in the US. Their follow-up albums, Break Like the Wind in 1992 went to #61 in the US, #51 in the UK and to make things stranger, their third album (again, from a fictional band) released 25 year later named Back From the Dead reached #52 in the US.
There are just too many jokes from this movie that have made it into our pop culture over the decades to get into, from Spinal Tap’s problematic drummer deaths to turning it up to 11, if you haven’t seen This is Spinal Tap, it’s a must.
For the record, Spinal Tap’s true identities are Baron Haden-Guest, aka Christopher Guest on IMDB, Harry Shearer, aka as all the other Simpson’s voices and Michael McKean, who rose to prominence as Lenny on Laverne and Shirley and done lots of other stuff since then with Guest in the ‘mockumentary’ fashion.
4. Eddie and the Cruisers
Eddie and The Cruisers was a 1983 film directed by Martin Donaldson about a 1960′s rock and roll heartthrob who goes Missing In Action and is presumed dead, but for the dogged determination of a young reporter played by Ellen Barkin who is determined to find Elv- I mean, Eddie (played by a young Michael Pare), and ask him why he left the music biz. The film follows her search for Eddie’s old bandmates and through flashbacks we learn of how a guy from New Jersey turned out to be one of the most forward musical geniuses of his time.
Think Bruce Springsteen meets Jim Morrison meets Sgt. Pepper.
The music is composed of predominantly two ‘albums’ that Eddie worked on, the first one that won him the fans and the second one that was deemed ‘too dark’ for release and subsequently buried by his fictional record company. The music-loving movie audience didn’t really flock to the theaters to see this but Eddie and the Cruisers was given a new lease on life by upstart HBO in 1984 and the soundtrack album started to climb the charts, going quadruple platinum. Nine months after the film was released, “On the Dark Side” made it to Number 1 on Billboard’s Rock charts and #7 on it’s Hot 100 chart. The second single from the film, the ballad “Tender Years” peaked at #31.
Unfortunately for reality, Eddie’s songs were actually composed and sung by the relatively unknown John Cafferty who fronted the awesomely named Beaver Brown Band. Often compared to the ‘other Bruce Springsteen band’ from New Jersey, they were never able to shed that comparison to Bruce. They did two more albums before going back under the Eddie and The Cruiser pseudonym for the Eddie and the Cruisers sequel. Nobody cared.
3. The Commitments
The Commitments was directed by Alan “Pink Floyd, The Wall” Parker in 1991 and followed the exploits of Jimmy Rabbitte, a young Irish man who aspired to find a group of working class Dubliners to form a soul band because deep down, he knew that not all Irish people wanted to listen to U2 all the time. Released in 1991, it won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, as well as BAFTA Awards for Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was also voted the best Irish film of all time in 2005.
The cast were mostly unknowns in the acting industry, picked more for their musical abilities than acting talent but truthfully, you wouldn’t notice it. The songs are all covers of great R&B tunes, with the amazing Andrew Strong (18 years old at the time) singing lead vocals with a voice beyond his years. There is a cameo by the guy who appeared on U2′s Boy and War album covers early on, a nod to the Irish rock giants perhaps. The soundtrack peaked at #4 in the UK and #8 in America and proved so popular the band was reunited to record The Commitments Volume 2 the following year, at which time it went to #13 in the UK and peaked only at #118 in the USA, proving that there was a limit of how much R&B sung by white singers America was willing to accept.
Interesting footnote is that real Irish band, the Corrs, all had small bits in the movie and eventually retained the film’s musical coordinator John Hughes (not The John Hughes, the other one) as their manager.
2. The Archies
The Archies were a band made famous first in the comic series Archie. Based on the all-American teenagers of Riverdale, USA The Archies somehow managed to put aside their petty squabbles, girl problems, social standings and Jughead to create a decent bubble-gum pop rock and roll group in the late 60′s.
Their most famous hit was “Sugar, Sugar”, which in this clip really shows how well cartoon microphones can change the pitch of a teenage lead singer’s voice. It went to #1 on the pop chart in 1969 and sold over six million copies. This was also the year In Billboard’s Hot 100, it was ranked as the number one song of that year and happens to be the only time a fictional band ever claimed Billboard’s annual Hot 100 top spot. For the record, the top albums of 1969 were Abbey Road, Led Zeppelin II and Let It Bleed, showing that even way back in 1969, radio station playlists were f^#$’d up.
Other Top 40 songs released by the comic band included “Who’s Your Baby?” (U.S. #40), “Bang-Shang-A-Lang” (U.S. #22), and “Jingle Jangle” (U.S. #10). The Archies released 7 albums in the real world, most recently a Christmas album in 2008.
Truthfully, it was a parade of studio musicians that were hired to make up the fictional Archies group. Most of the male lead vocals were provided Ron Dante, who also fronted a band called the Cuff Links that made zero impact on sales in Riverdale, no matter what hijinks his band got into.
1. The Monkees
Some might argue that The Monkees were a band, first and foremost who happened to have a television show when truthfully it was the other way around. To those people I say I can’t hear you, it’s the internet, not a phone. The Monkees were a fictional band name without players, an America television executive’s answer to the Beatles. Given the green light after the success of the Beatles’s Hard Day’s Night, the Monkees went into production in 1965 and ran from 1966-68, with singles from the TV series released onto radio. The pilot’s theme song wasn’t even sung by the true Monkees, who were not yet musically ready for such a task and so other singer’s voices were substituted in. There was extensive touring with the ‘fictional’ band until 1970, followed by numerous reunion concerts/tours to this day, 45 years later.
The formation of the band followed the tried and true method of a bunch of friends just getting together in an open space and jamming while drinking beer and discussing how great Tom Jones was. Wait..no, sorry, my bad. Davy Jones was already a signed contract player to the studio producing the show, Michael Nesmith answered the casting call that was looking for ‘musical types’ in the Hollywood Reporter, Peter Tork learned of the auditions through word of mouth of a fellow musician who had been already rejected and Micky Dolenz, who had previous TV and musical experience learned of the casting through his agent.
In a complete departure from how bands actually are formed, the actors musical abilities were based on what the cameras and executives saw, not where there talents lay. Davy Jones was considered the best drummer, but it was felt that he was ‘too short’ to play the drums on television so Dolenz was taught how to play the basics during pre-production. They were one of the world’s most pre-packaged managed bands in way that makes Lady Gaga, Britney Spears or One Direction pale in comparison.
Out of all the superficiality of their beginnings, the Monkees did manage to come together and bring out some great singles during their run, including Last Train to Clarksville, Daytime Believer and I’m a Believer.
They have often been quoted as having influenced musicians ranging from the Beach Boys to Tom Petty to Kurt Cobain and in a small footnote in musical history, gave the Jimi Hendrix Experience their first big break, letting him open for them in 1967.
And what better way to end an article on music than with a classic from a real legend of rock. who may or may not have existed if you believe in the conspiracy I just made up.
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