In his marvelous book about the rise and fall of SST Records – Corporate Rock Sucks – author Jim Ruland paints a depressing picture of the transformation of popular music in the 1980s into one more cog in a massive corporate entertainment industry. This wasn’t exactly a shocking development. Music, or any other popular art form, has always existed in a state of struggle between an artist’s impulses and the demands of the marketplace.
The catch-22 is eternal. As an art form grows more and more popular, the likelihood of it becoming subsumed by a bigger entity grows even faster. The conglomeration of music simply mirrored the same trends in film and television and magazines and newspapers.
Specific to music, it was a decade in which once-hallowed phrases like alternative rock and college radio stopped being those things and became something different. Something that could be plotted on a graph and faxed to shareholders. Formats became tighter and more restrictive, in order to better market spots to advertisers. I don’t mean to lay this all at the feet of the 1980s. The trend had been going on before the decade dawned and it would continue unchecked until...well, I’ll let you know when we get to the end. But the ‘80s did seem to pour lighter fluid on the transformation.
Five bands from the 1980s that ended too soon
Musicians responded. They always do. They overcame the obstacles. Perhaps they even needed those obstacles to push back against. Whatever the explanation, they created some enduring music. But not all of them could survive in the new environment.
Last week, we looked at five great bands from the 1990s that, for a variety of reasons, ended too soon. All the bands were fronted by women. Today, we turn to the ‘80s, and we give the boys a turn. Here are five excellent bands who put out some great tunes in the 1980s but didn’t make it (very far) into the next decade.
(SPOILER ALERT: If you’re only here to read about the Smiths, move on. I’ll leave that to others who appreciate them more than I do. But I promise, if you stick around, you’ll find at least one band you will love – or will grow to love in time.)
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, 1979-1982 (4 albums)
They began as The Boy Next Door in 1979 but soon changed their name to The Birthday Party when they moved from Melbourne to London around 1980. Though often just thought of as the precursor to Nick Cave’s long-standing Bad Seeds, it’s not hard to argue that The Birthday Party was a better band. You’ll find all the obsession with death, religion, suicide, and other painful subject matter for which Cave would become known. But the music is not quite as heavy and ponderous.
Don’t get me wrong – The Birthday Party is heavy enough for any black metal fan to grind out to. But there’s an attention to quirky melody and humor that becomes harder to find in Cave’s more austere work. It may be hard to identify that melody immediately in hypnotic tunes like “Nick the Stripper” (“hideous to the eye”) or “Dead Joe” (“junk sculpture turning back to junk.”) But it’s there.
What Cave, along with guitar players Mick Harvey and Rowland Howard were doing for early metal was similar to what Ian Curtis was doing for early punk. When everyone else was going faster and faster, they were the contrarians who dared to slow the music down, offering a number of new avenues for punk and metal to explore. By 1983, Cave and Howard found they could no longer work together and so The Birthday Party disbanded.
Harvey and bass player Tracy Pew went with Cave to form the Bad Seeds. Howard, who has to be one of Australia’s most underrated guitarists/songwriters, went on to form These Immortal Souls with his brother and worked extensively with the likes of Lydia Lunch and Thurston Moore. Personally, I prefer both Cave and Howard when they were banging off each other in The Birthday Party to most of their later work.
THE BRAINS, 1980-1982 (2.5 albums)
Tom Gray’s The Brains came from Atlanta, and fans like to point out that they once headlined a show that featured a brand-new band from up the road in Athens. It was the legit first gig REM played. There are plenty of fans still in Georgia who lament that Tom Gray never achieved REM-level success.
Gray wrote shimmering pop songs that had a strong rock backbone. Gray’s keyboards would take on a bigger role after the debut album, which may have made them feel a little bit like a new wave fad than a serious rock & roll outfit. But the songs remained first-rate, whether with words, like “Tanya,” or in progressive rock instrumentals like “Ambush.”
They were dropped by their label as their final EP Dancing Under Streetlights was being released and the band broke up. Gray tells a funny story about how he went back home and began mowing lawns to try and pay all the bills he had run up traveling with his band. He had to do that until Cyndi Lauper released a version of The Brains “Money Changes Everything.” The song was a hit and the title was prophetic, allowing Gray to pay off those bills and return to making music. Gray died a few years back, still a legend in Atlanta.
LET’S ACTIVE, 1983-1988 (4.5 albums)
Just as REM played their first gig opening for The Brains, North Carolina’s Let’s Active played their first show opening for REM. Both shows took place in Atlanta. REM’s producer at the time, Mitch Easter, had started the band, and the boys from Athens gave him a shot on stage. Let’s Active put out a series of bright, jangle-pop albums before their break-up at the end of the decade. That break-up may have had more to do with the break-up of Easter and his wife – Let’s Active’s singer/guitar player Angie Carlson – than anything attributable to music or success.
Things began changing for the band when original rhythm section Faye Hunter (bass) and Sara Romweber (drums) left in the mid-‘80s. The sound grew a little harder and it began to look as if what Easter really needed were some session players as opposed to an actual band. Regardless of how it ended, their early single “Every Word Means No” remains a stone-cold classic of early college radio jangle pop – one of the best songs of the ‘80s.
THE HOUSEMARTINS, 1986-1987 (2 albums)
First things first. If you’re feeling depressed, stop reading a find The Housemartin’s single “Happy Hour.” Better than Paxil and Lexapro put together. You can’t listen to Paul Heaton’s voice and that jangly melody and not feel better (whether you pay attention to the lyrics or not.) That’s not to say the rest of their debut album, London 0 Hull 4 isn’t filled with other great tunes.
Their second and final album, The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death, had plenty of effervescent pop as well, though their roots as a Christian-leaning band become a little more obvious. Whether you buy into the spiritual message in a song like “Caravan of Love,” it’s impossible to resist the gorgeous a cappella harmonizing.
The Housemartins broke up, apparently amicably, after that second album, and all the members went on to fine careers, with Heaton and drummer Dave Hemingway forming The Beautiful South, guitar player Stan Cullimore becoming a successful author and journalist, and bass player Norman Cook becoming Fatboy Slim. (Disclaimer: no statements about the effectiveness of antidepressant medication or songs that might replace them should be taken seriously.)
fIREHOSE, 1986-1993 (5 albums)
fIREHOSE (stylized with the lowercase “f”) was a personal reclamation project for Mike Watt, after his best friend and co-founder of seminal post-punk band Minutemen, D Boon, died in a car crash at the age of 27. Watt, who played bass and co-wrote Minutemen songs with Boon, recruited a new guitarist, Ed Crawford, to join Minutemen drummer George Hurley in the new project. Actually, Crawford, a big Minuteman fan, largely recruited himself.
Their first album, 1986’s Ragin’, Full On hit the ground running. Crawford’s songwriting may not have been as subtle or clever as Boon’s, but he can blast his way through solid rockers like “Brave Captain.” And that old D. Boon spirit was very much alive on the tracks Watt wrote with his wife, one-time Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler. Those are spiky, confrontational blasts with titles like “Under the Influence of Meat Puppets.”
fIREHOUSE would improve their sound and their songs on the three albums they released for SST during the rest of the ‘80s. Then they left the indie for Columbia and released two more albums in the ‘90s. Those albums are largely forgettable, so I suppose you could say that they don’t exactly fit with the others on this list. By the time they called it quits in 1993, it was time. But maybe they simply never should have left SST. So I’m choosing to ignore those final two releases and say that it’s a shame fIREHOUSE stopped being fIREHOUSE after 1989’s Fromohio.