On Oasis & Band Reunions
By the time this publishes tomorrow Noel and Liam Gallagher will have likely announced that Oasis is reuniting.
jukeboxgraduate dot com is an at-least weekly newsletter about rock and roll, written by Caryn Rose. the newsletter is free, but paid subscriptions help me prioritize this work. if you can't afford to subscribe or put money in the tip jar, tell a friend about the newsletter & why you like reading it!
By the time this publishes tomorrow Noel and Liam Gallagher will have likely announced that Oasis is reuniting. For many people who loved Oasis and never got to see them live, or who were old enough to have been a fan in real time, this may be enormous and welcome news. At this point, it doesn’t even matter why a band decides to get back together – publicists used to sweat blood and tears trying to craft the exact right statement for their clients to espouse after announcing that the outfit that they claimed were finished/done/worn out/tired were now reversing all of that 2/4/6/10 years later and getting on the road again.
Reunion announcements are almost always about a tour. It’s almost never “we want to write new songs together again.” Tours are money, albums cost money. Am I cynical? I am cynical. But also? It doesn’t matter. An artist wants to once again do the activity that allows them to earn money. Go for it! There are bands that never broke up who had to cancel tours this year because not enough people wanted to pay money to come see them. If you had promoters backing up literal Brinks trucks to your house with the kind of cash the Gallagher Brothers are going to command? Oh hell yes.
Reunions used to be weird. They used to need to be justified, there almost always was a time constraint involved: one more tour! You better come see them now, while you can. And then that tour got extended, and extended again, and then just became a normal course of business. It’s because everyone calmed down and people now expect reunions more than they question them. And no one is punishing any band by not coming to see their reunion because there are plenty of other people willing to buy tickets in their stead.
I never thought I'd see a band calling themselves the New York Dolls. But by the time I saw them there were only two actual Dolls; the night David Jo and Sylvain showed up to a Johnny Thunders gig at Irving Plaza in the 1980s was actually more of an actual reunion than the one in 2004. I knew people who went to as many of those Dolls reunion shows as they could, while I was done by the time I saw three: Underground Garage, a night at Irving Plaza, and then at CBGBs just for the novelty of it. I had seen every single member of the New York Dolls in some solo configuration, and while this was a very, very good rock and roll band, it wasn't the Dolls.
What I wanted was to be wearing ridiculous outfits and too much makeup and standing in the Oscar Wilde Room at the Mercer Arts Center, but that was never going to happen. I enjoyed watching Tom Verlaine and/or Richard Lloyd play guitar in Patti Smith's band over the years more than I ever enjoyed the reunited 2002 Television, or any Television-branded outfit over the years, although I would still go from time to time. There's a degree of being able to hear the voice that sang those songs sing those songs in the same room you're in, or watching that guitar player live and in person. After that there has to be something else besides THEY'RE BACK!!!! or it's not interesting to me. But some artists don't need more than THEY'RE BACK!!! Oasis is definitely one of those.
There's an argument to be made about an artist and their legacy, and what that means if they end up spending a healthy portion of their life working playing the songs from the first 3 albums that made them famous. I always respected the heck out of the 2013-era Replacements for saying, "Yeah, this isn't happening" and packing up their stuff instead of continuing to tour the alternative oldies circuit. I saw four of those; by the time we got to the last two – which happened to be the last two shows they did in the States, with only four overseas gigs after that – I remember standing in Philly watching the band and thinking, "Unless they're gonna write some new songs, I think I'm good." I adored that band beyond all measure but without some forward progress it would start to feel like empty calories.
