Forgotten But Not Gone
Rock and roll legends living in the dusty corners of the Internet
I think I told you about the “Music League” a while back. It’s this game that we played a couple of years ago at work and it’s back again!
The way it goes is each week there’s a category and you pick a song that you feel best represents the category. Past challenges have included, “Made in Chicago”, “Worst Song”, and “Stupid Cupid”…y’know…Valentine’s or anti-Valentine’s songs. You get the idea, I assume.
But anyhow, once everyone has submitted their songs, a playlist is populated and ideally everyone listens to the list before voting, but it’s not a prerequisite and in fact the first time we played Music League, we had a particular coworker who shall not be named who was very open about not listening to the playlist and only voting on songs that they already knew. We also had one coworker choose not to play because this coworker claimed to “not like music”. I still cannot wrap my mind around either of these stances, particular the latter coworker, who seemed like a normal, okay dude, but was clearly living a horrible, horrible existence that I cannot even fathom.
Anyway, you then get 10 votes. You can parse out these votes however you please. You can give all 10 to one song or you can split them up accordingly. The first time we played, my strategy was to present songs that matched the category, of course, but that were also authentically “me”. That backfired pretty mightily, as apparently people aren’t as keen on The Legendary Stardust Cowboy and Wilco deep cuts as I hoped they would be.
This time around, I’m doing well. Currently I’m in 2nd and it’s largely due to the fact I’m not going too far off the rails. Stick to things people know. Stick to the jams. Kick out said jams. Get the votes. And maybe, just maybe I can win this game that has zero prizes, but fulfills some sort of weird competitive streak that manages to rear its head from time to time.
The inspiration for my post here is this week’s category, “Gone But Not Forgotten”. Quite simply, this means that we need to choose a song by a band or artist who has at least one dead member. This is, as you can imagine, a very broad category and includes several possibilities. I went with “Crazy Train” by Ozzy at the urging of Danielle because she asked, “Do you want to win or not?” I said, “Yes, yes I do.” So as my Music League manager, I’m following her advice and will see how it goes. I was going to go with Beastie Boys (RIP MCA), but she pointed out that Ozzy is known over several generations, either for music or reality tv stardom, and his death is a little more recent news, so I need to think strategically. I see what she’s saying and have decided to adopt a winners mindset. Again, this competition is meaningless.
But this post isn’t about Ozzy, nor is it really about the Music League. It’s about two ‘70s Rock bands that though fit into the “Gone But Not Forgotten” category, might better fall into the “Forgotten, But Not Gone” category: Thin Lizzy and Sweet.
So if you lived through the ‘70s, I’m guessing you might have a recollection of these guys. They had some hits. In some cases, pretty big hits. If, like me, you grew up after the ‘70s, but were fed a steady diet of classic rock radio, chances are you came to know Thin Lizzy at the very least, with “The Boys are Back in Town” and “Jailbreak”. And hypothetically, you may have gone to see the movie Wayne’s World in the theater and hypothetically developed a serious crush on Tia Carrere as she sang, “Ballroom Blitz”, only to find out later that the song was in fact written a generation earlier by a UK band called Sweet.
But Sweet and Thin Lizzy don’t have the profile of The Who, Aerosmith, KISS, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Queen, or Journey. Of course part of that definitely has to do with longevity. Part of that may have to do with high profile tragedy. Part of that has to do with one or two songs that have weaseled their way into pop culture consciousness and just won’t leave. Odds are that as you read this, somewhere in the world, someone is currently butchering “Don’t Stop Believin’” at a karaoke bar. I’d like to stop believin’, I really would, but the song won’t let me!
I’m guessing that if I did an impromptu, man-on-the-street poll of 50 random people who walk by a busy intersection and ask them if they can name three songs by Thin Lizzy and/or Sweet, the percentage who can name even one song by either is likely pretty low. Is that the standard baseline for a band being, “forgotten”? I don’t know. This is all very unscientific. But even among self-proclaimed “music fans” who appreciate bands from previous generations, I think they slip through the cracks. Realistic? I think so. Fair? No.
One of my favorite pastimes that Danielle is very patient with is when I go down the YouTube rabbit hole of old bands. Bands like these, despite maybe being largely forgotten by the population on the whole, are never really gone. And if you’re a restless seeker who likes stumbling across vintage performances of 1970s Rock and Roll bands, then what a time it is to be alive! Even if the performances are subpar, which they can sometimes be, they are still satisfying for their dated visual effects and for the special moments you can put a face to the voice on a song you’ve been hearing your whole life and say, “THAT’S how that dude looks?” Let me just say, lead singer of Nazareth? Didn’t know what he would look like, but it wasn’t that. Not meant to be a diss, just sometimes your mental picture ends up being wildly incorrect!
It’s exhilarating and more than a little humbling to find the depth of the video archives of even “lesser known bands”. But there’s also the inevitable fan generated content that tends to be titled something like, “The sad and tragic tale of (insert band here)”, which can bring the fun to a screeching halt.
And we might as well get that part of the story over with right here. Besides being from the same part of the world (Ireland for Thin Lizzy, and Great Britain for Sweet) at around the same era, Thin Lizzy and Sweet both had lead singers that struggled with addiction, who both died as a result of those addictions. Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy died of pneumonia related to years of heroin addiction. Brian Connolly of Sweet succumbed after multiple heart attacks and liver failure as a result of chronic alcohol abuse.
And both bands have their fair share of stories of members quitting on stage and fighting with each other. There were the inevitable disagreements about the direction of the sound of the band, and inevitable lineup changes and dissolutions and reunions, followed by re-dissolutions. But let’s not dwell on that too much. It’s time to rescue the legacy of these bands from the worst of their stories and re-elevate the great music that they made to the front and center where they belong.
If you’ve lived under a rock and have never heard, “The Boys Are Back in Town” or “Ballroom Blitz”, don’t start with these two. For Thin Lizzy, start with “Cowboy Song” and for Sweet start with “Fox on the Run”. Both were actually decently big hits in their day for each band, but they haven’t managed to make the “way overplayed” or even plain “overplayed” category of classic rock songs. They are bangers, for sure, but they still sound fresh and full of life because they haven’t been relegated to Two-fer Tuesday for the last 50 years.
Then what? How about, “Rosalie” by Thin Lizzy and “Love is Like Oxygen” by Sweet. THEN move on to TBABIT and BB. Still want more? Oh there’s more.
Jailbreak is THE album by Thin Lizzy, so you can’t go wrong. Bad Reputation is also really great, though. Hard blues-rock with Celtic influences? Yes, please.
As for Sweet, THE album is Desolation Boulevard. Glammy, T. Rex-esque rock meets sort of Black Sabbathy sounding melodic hard rock? I will also take that, thank you very much.
There is a current debate that has been raging off and on for the past couple of decades that considers the question, “Is guitar rock dead?” Or “Is guitar rock back?”
And I really don’t know the answer to this. If guitar rock is still alive, it sure isn’t like guitar rock was in the ‘70s, though. Nothing sounds like these two bands anymore. You have the dual lead guitars on Thin Lizzy that sound both aggressive and pretty at the same time somehow. And then you have a frantic urgency of Sweet which is propelled forward with all sorts of wild guitar lines that typified shredding bands, but there’s also occasionally a progginess to it that I don’t hate because they seemed to have known when to rein it in. Hard pop-prog?
There’s bar band energy. There’s a little ELO/Queen theatric touch, especially when it comes to Sweet. There’s a rawness that evokes early rock and roll and an edginess that predates the hard rock and metal of the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s all there. It’s all delightfully ‘70s in ways I can’t completely explain too.
I think a couple of things are at work when it comes to the idea of, “Forgotten, but not gone.”
As a culture of rapid consumption, we tend to fetishize that which is new, preserving just enough relics of the past for when one is ready to enter the nostalgia phase, while casting the rest aside to live in the vast wasteland of “not now, not important”
There’s a touch of, I don’t know if it’s arrogance…maybe more aptly, naivete…for mega super music fans when it comes to one’s overall knowledge. One knows they have a ridiculous amount of mostly useless knowledge about music, and many people are quick to tell said mega super music fans that, “Hey, you know a lot about this!” Ergo, mega super music fan thinks they have fewer holes in their music knowledge than they actually do. It’s the “if I don’t know it well, it can’t be that good” brand of music snobbery. That was me at a certain point in life, but I’d like to think I’m pretty reformed.
My point is, if you do consider yourself a songseeker, you have to allow yourself to admit that your view of the past is limited and probably skewed. I’m not saying ignore new music, which is a different sort of problem that many around my age and older particularly have, especially when they enter the dreaded nostalgia phase. Don’t assume anything. Let the music be your guide. It’ll tell you if it wants to be heard.
For better or worse, nothing is ever really gone. An openness to music discovery regardless of genre or time period is a true gift you can and should give yourself, as openness to the diversity of experience in this life is just good for you anyway. But not only that, when something unexpected truly hits you? Man! There’s nothing like it.
Who are some of your favorite “forgotten” bands that you still enjoy going back to every once in a while? Let me know in the comments! And as always, thanks for reading!