On Oasis & Band Reunions
By the time this publishes tomorrow Noel and Liam Gallagher will have likely announced that Oasis is reuniting.
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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.
When I was a pre-teen, everyone was still hoping the Beatles were going to get back together. That was the big reunion everyone wanted to see happen. Even as a 10 year old I looked at everything the individual Beatles were doing and thought, “Not gonna happen.” Like, it was never a question of money. I remember when Lorne Michaels did that bit on SNL about offering the Beatles $3000 that time that George was a guest along with Paul Simon. That would have been hilarious but also in 1976 would not have broken the world the way something similar would happen today. Today they would just have tweeted “on our way!” and the entire internet would have fallen over. (And the actual story is that they thought about just showing up at Studio 8H the following week, it didn’t happen the same night.)
With the Bros. Gallagher people I know who do not even care about Oasis were texting me about it because of First!!!11111 disease. It does not even matter if you know or you deciphered the so-called clues. It’s not like the Stones in 1978 (not 75!) where they announced they were playing the Palladium in NYC by putting their name and a date on the marquee and selling tickets at the box office. Like there you had an actual advantage in figuring things out before anyone else. Here, you’re going to be in the same Ticketmaster waiting room with 6,315 people ahead of you (that was the number ahead of me for Jack White tickets at St. Andrews here in Detroit) to buy a ticket to see Oasis in a giant football stadium on either side of the pond.
You have to realize that I fucking loved Oasis when they first came out. I went to the Deck the Hall Ball in Seattle in 1995 and saw them play two songs and was delighted. They came back through in 1996 and I got a full show. I loved it but I also felt like I got it as much as I was going to get it. I completely understand if people want to see Oasis so they can say that they saw Oasis. I am personally trying to figure out how I can see Robert Plant because I’d like to say I saw him. (I saw Page at the ARMS Concert at MSG in 1983.) And don’t start saying I’m blaspheming because there is a generation of music fans for whom Oasis mean as much as Led Zeppelin did to earlier generations. I don’t even like Zeppelin, I just feel like I need to see Plant sing live and in person.
But this is not about that! It is about reunions.
Music is something that cannot be controlled and yet it seems to be the first thing people want to do with it. We want people who hate each other to keep generating art together onstage (although there are probably plenty of people who hate each other who do a very good job of hiding it while they perform), but part of that is the whole fairytale notion of bands being groups of friends and it’s less about whether or not they are friends but that listeners need them to be friends, a thing that you should probably grow out of by the time you’re an adult. They’re a gang, they’re your pals, their lives together are all about inside jokes and wanting to make each other look good onstage for a couple of hours a night. Except that it stops being that long before they become household names. It is not like the Beatles in Help! We just want it to be.
The reunion model morphed into a scenario where bands got one more chance to get back together with their original lineup to cash in on money they didn’t get the first time around -- the Pixies are the first group where everyone felt like, Well, okay, sure, they are entitled, but no one else! I get why the Pixies got an out, it had a lot to do with their influence on Kurt Cobain, but then other bands of similar stature realized they still had fans and that their fans were grown up and had more money than they did when they were popular. Why did we make these people justify their existences or their reasons for wanting to make art together again? Why was it ever anything except, “Okay, cool.”
I am not sure, but it probably because of the Beatles, which was the first enormous public breakup of a band that everyone was focused on, and where it felt like for decades people were waiting for them to get back together and spent decades examining why they broke up and why they wouldn’t get back together, and then other bands felt that they had to make announcements and provide justification instead of just, you know, making music or not making music. I am not talking about contractual obligations – although I have to say, if someone had actually said, “We have to tour because we have a contract with our record company we need to fulfill” is as legitimate a reason as any and we would all be better off seeing the machinations of the industry. Like, the proof of the situation is on the stage. Is the music good? Are people having a good time? Are people willing to buy tickets? It seems pretty clear-cut!
This is how cover bands do a very brisk business! No one is lobbying for cover bands to not be allowed to exist. And by “cover bands” I do not mean the outfit at your local bar who performs a repertoire of popular classic rock songs every Friday night, I mean the ones like the B Street Band or Red Not Chili Peppers or Vitalogy or the Dancing Bears, the ones that specialize in sounding and sometimes looking like and having the same onstage presence as the people whose music they are performing. I personally do not understand this and am not going to go participate in it and if you’re a friend of mine who is, I might lightly make fun of you, but mostly it seems like a situation where you have a product people are willing to pay money for, so go for it. (I do sometimes wonder what it feels like focusing that much time on someone else’s art instead of your own but, again, capitalism.)
We gave bands a hard time about breaking up. Then we gave them a hard time about getting back together. Then we gave them a hard time if they got back together BUT didn’t put out a record of new music, because then they were a nostalgia act. I confess I am one of those people but most of the time that was because I was super interested in what these artists had to say and wanted to hear new ideas for as long as they were still breathing. (Critiquing things doesn’t mean you don’t like them, it is actually probably because you do like it quite a bit and would like it to be even better.) Then we got to the point no one cared. Just give us the tour dates up front and give them to me with enough notice so I can get the time off work.
Like are Noel and Liam going to put out a new record? One would have to imagine it would have to be finished already. And like when the Replacements got back together and everyone flew in to the first show in Toronto because no one could be certain they’d make it to subsequent shows, I would be doing something similar if I cared about Oasis even though I know that the financial structure of this thing is going to mean that they will stick it out no matter what because no one is going to give them the amount of money this thing will command if there isn’t a guarantee of some sort.
I do wonder what it is like to not give a fuck as much as Oasis can afford to not give a fuck. (I know that is some of the attraction.)
There is a point at which a reunited band has been back together longer than they were apart and they are no longer reunited, they are just a band. That is of course the case with the E Street Band. When that happened I was obviously super glad but it also wasn’t anything I had been sitting and waiting for. There was a lot of other music to have kept me busy.
But right now there are dudes on Twitter already mad that some fictional 21 year old named Chloe who loves “Wonderwall” is going to be competing against Dude, a REAL Oasis fan, for tickets to the yet-to-be-announced reunion tour. The Gallagher brothers will command daily headlines, and writers will be dispatched to every show to watch for signs of fraternal conflict. It’s kind of great that the planet is still this interested in Oasis. I’m interested in any new music they want to write together; I quite liked the Noel Gallagher solo outings, was less wowed by Liam’s stuff, and think their superpower is in working together. They obviously think that they can make that work, or their bank accounts and/or egos (or both!) have convinced themselves that they can. They've built such a mythology around themselves that it doesn't even matter if they fail in spectacular fashion. No matter what happens next, that's quite the legacy.
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