Continuing Saga of a Struggling Writer...

Receiving rejection notices from magazines is supposed to be one of those great rites of passage that all writers destined for success have to go through. It still isn't fun though, and it's made less so by the knowledge that writers destined for failure go through it too.

Damn the torpedoes, though. Right now, the rejection count stands at 2 from the New Yorker, 1 from failbetter.com, and 1 from the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Discussion - The Greatest American Band? (part 4/4)

I keep hemming and hawing over this, and all day, I've kept coming back to Pearl Jam. I don't know exactly why, but I want to give it to them over Nirvana. Nirvana also has that enviable edge of having a lead singer who committed suicide.

But here's my compromise. Let's return to the "20 year" minimum rule again. You want the best American rock band? A band that summed up an entire epoch of American history? One that dabbled in every excess known to man, a sound so original that nobody has ever even come close to duplicating it? This band must have lived, breathed, ate, and drank rock and roll, and then oozed it from their pores onstage.

Well, if that's what we're looking for, I'm going to have to go with The Doors. Sex, drugs, rock, a Hammond organ, one of the most distinctive voices ever... and Jim Morrison overdosed and is dead, to boot. I'm pretty sure that automatically raises them a letter grade, at least.

I don't think there's any way to really top that, in terms of the whole rock 'n roll package.

"I am the Lizard King, and I can do anything!"

Discussion - The Greatest American Band? (Sidebar)

In support of my last pick, I'd like to submit the following USA Today article from July 2005 into evidence, marked as Exhibit A:

And the greatest American rock band ever is...

This doesn't count as my final post. It's just a little aside.

Discussion - The Greatest American Band? (part 3/4)

I wrestled with the idea of including solo artists here, and even though the discussion is about the greatest American band, I don't think that we can discount solo artists completely, if they're meritorious enough.

As far as Elvis Presley goes, your point about him "bringing African soul and swagger to the moon-faced masses" is exactly the reason I wouldn't call him the greatest. Sure, he's no Pat Boone recording horrendously 'safe' versions of songs by black artists for an American public hungry for rock and roll but scared to death of anything that sounded like a "race record." Still, he was a white guy doing black music; arguably, if it wasn't for widespread racism and a pretty face, Elvis might have ended up running a gas station in Tupelo.

Bob Dylan has got to be on the list if we're doing solo artists. He's a music legend, and one of my favorites of all fucking time. My only question would be, is Dylan a true rock star, or is he too much a part of the folk scene to truly be a rock icon? To be sure he is considered one, but so are many artists who are more tangential to rock and roll. Chuck Berry is considered a rock legend too, but I feel like he's earned that status as more of a progenitor of the genre than as someone who really inhabited it. In my mind, Dylan is a music legend, but he might not be 'rock' enough to satisfy.

I feel you a little bit on Pearl Jam and I agree that they've always been more of an old school protest band than a true grunge band. A huge part of the grunge ethos is apathy, and Pearl Jam (or at least Eddie Vedder) just doesn't have it. They give too much of a fuck.

Again though, Pearl Jam is such a relatively recent band that I wonder if they can qualify yet, or if they need a little longer to see if they stand the test of time. Still, they are definitely not a band I can immediately strike from the list.

However, if we are going with more recent bands, I have to go with Nirvana - even over The Ramones. Rightly or wrongly, Kurt Cobain's suicide pushed Nirvana into legend territory a little earlier than most bands. It's unfortunate, but sometimes people become greater in death than in life, and sometimes are remembered as greater than they actually were just because they die in tragic ways. Let's be honest - most of John Lennon's solo stuff is fucking garbage.

Let's look at Nirvana as compared to Pearl Jam though. You mention that Pearl Jam was thrown in with the other Seattle grunge bands, but turned out to be more unique. Nirvana was definitely part of the grunge scene, but in this case I don't think it can be weighed against them. They were grunge. They were far superior to Alice in Chains, or Soundgarden, and better than their predecessors, The Melvins and Mudhoney.

Nirvana released one of the most legendary albums of the 90s. The Unplugged in New York album is one of the best live albums recorded, especially as so much of the album was such a departure in sound and style. Cobain's version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" has got to be regarded as the definitive version of that song as well as one of the most painfully beautiful songs ever.

On top of that, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has got to be the song of the 90s, one of the best rock songs of all time, and the anthem of Generation X and that little mini-generation that happened to be born in the mid-70s to early 90s. Just because Kurt thought it was a Pixie's ripoff doesn't make it any less amazing.

Entertain us.

Discussion - The Greatest American Band? (part 2/4)

Nice opener -- The Ramones are definitely hard to beat. What might kill it for them, though, is the fact that their "known" music is confined to a very few tracks out of their large catalog, and the fact that they went through some major and continuous lineup changes over the course of their rock 'n roll ride.

We could always go old school and nominate Elvis Presley or Bob Dylan... but this is a conversation about the best American band, and I'm thinking that solo acts (even with backup bands) are probably disqualified. That would be an interesting choice -- Presley of course can be credited with bringing African soul and swagger to the moon-faced masses, and it was Dylan who showed us how cool it could be to be esoteric.

The fact that we started this conversation off with a mention of punk progenitors makes me automatically start thinking of Iggy Pop and the Stooges, but even as influential as they were (sonically, I think modern punk owes more to them even than the Ramones), I don't think they were ever accessible enough to the mainstream to be considered the "greatest" -- not in that Mohammad Ali sense.

I think the sound I'm looking for is AC/DC, but there again you run into the inconvenient problem of them being a gang of filthy foreigners. The same goes for The Who and Led Zeppelin (both of whom have their own satellite radio channels, on Sirius and XM, respectively).

It's probably my own bias and love talking here, but at the two-minute warning here, I'm going to have to settle on Pearl Jam. They began their careers being lumped in with the Seattle grunge movement, but in reality have more in common with Neil Young and Pete Townsend than they do with Kurt Cobain or Jerry Cantrell. It was there that they gained their mass appeal, but as time went on, it became clear that Eddie Vedder was Pearl Jam's driving force.

Even if you're not crazy about their last few records, it's undeniable that Pearl Jam is one of the few remaining bands that puts on a genuine rock 'n roll stage show.

So take it from here, man. I've still got some jungle to work through on this issue.

Hail, hail.

Discussion - The Greatest American Band? (part 1/4)

To kick off the blog, Enough Of This Palaver's Ian and Adam discuss which American band can be defined as "the greatest."

Each writer gets two chances to make their case as best they can.
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The Greatest American Rock Band -

Hey Ian,

The question of which American band was first posed to me, as so many interesting questions are, in a bar during a whiskey-fueled bullshit session.

It's not an easy question, and it's one that probably has no good answer. To explain that, let me fill you in a little bit on what we agreed to define "greatest" as; it can't just be the biggest selling band, and it can't just be the band that was most influential. It's got to be some combination of success and artistic influence.

The Beatles are a great example but, as so many of the bands that immediately spring to mind are, they're British.

As much as the world views rock as an American art form, so many of the most influential artists in the genre come from the UK. Sure, they were all (for the most part) inspired by American artists and art forms (where the hell would Led Zeppelin be without the blues?), but American they were not.

A few of the other artists that spring to mind also become quickly disqualified. The Velvet Underground is an undeniably influential band, and Lou Reed is a living legend. VU never sold a whole hell of a lot of albums though, and they were playing art-rock, which was a little bit of a nonstarter as a wider musical movement. Even a much more successful artist like Neil Young, I think, gets knocked out contention. Young, first of all, is more of a disciple of earlier folk rock pioneers rather than an innovator. And let's be honest - most people don't own more than one Neil Young album. Much as I love him, Tom Waits has got to be disqualified too - and The Pixies.

Other bands have to be ignored simply because they're a little too recent to be considered. I'd love to put Nirvana in contention, but Kurt Cobain isn't even 20 years in the grave, and grunge - for all its greatness - hasn't yet proved to be more than a flash-in-the-pan, post-punk scream of rage against commercialized rock.

I thought about Guns N' Roses. Undeniably great, undeniably talented, and hugely successful. Still, Guns N' Roses was another sort of "response" band - they took all that was wrong with 80s rock, and threw it out, but they were still heirs to a scene rather than creators of one.

I'm willing to be argued out of it, but at first blush, I think I have to propose The Ramones. They were there at the beginning of the punk scene, and are at least some of punk's godfathers, if not fathers. Even people who aren't into punk have at least one of their songs that they know and like, and everyone has heard them. They're also still unassailably cool, a band that no one minds name-checking as an influence.

Gabba gabba hey.