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Mike Pinder, the last surviving original member of psychedelic rock of 1960s/70s prog rock band the Moody Blues has died at 82. The pioneering keyboardist/singer credited with helping to introduce the mellotron into the rock arena passed away on Wednesday (April 24) at his home in Northern California of undisclosed causes.
Moody bassist John Lodge shared a statement from Pinder’s family on Facebook, in which they wrote, “Michael Thomas Pinder died on Wednesday, April 24th, 2024 at his home in Northern California, surrounded by his devoted family. Michael’s family would like to share with his trusted friends and caring fans that he passed peacefully. His final days were filled with music, encircled by the love of his family. Michael lived his life with a childlike wonder, walking a deeply introspective path which fused the mind and the heart.”
It continued, “He created his music and the message he shared with the world from this spiritually grounded place; as he always said, ‘Keep your head above the clouds, but keep your feet on the ground.’ His authentic essence lifted up everyone who came into contact with him. His lyrics, philosophy, and vision of humanity and our place in the cosmos will touch generations to come.”
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Born in Erdington, Birmingham England on Dec. 27, 1941, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Pinder co-founded the group in May 1964 with multi-instrumentalist/singer Ray Thomas, singer/guitarist Denny Laine, drummer Graeme Edge and bassist/singer Clint Warwick; Laine and Warwick left the band in 1966 after the release of 1965’s debut album, The Magnificent Moodies, and were replaced by guitarist Justin Hayward and bassist Lodge. Pinder and Laine co-wrote all the original songs on Moodies, which included the band’s wistful, R&B influenced breakthrough single, “Go Now.”
The new lineup released one of the landmark early prog rock albums, Days of Future Passed, in 1967, on which Pinder made his recorded debut playing the mellotron, a keyboard that used prerecorded three-track tapes to reproduced a variety of orchestral instrumental sounds and special effects. “The Mellotron enabled me to create my own variations of string movements. I could play any instrument that I wanted to hear in the music. If I heard strings, I could play them with the Mellotron. If I heard cello, brass, trumpets or piano, I could play them,” Pinder told Rolling Stone in an oral history of the album’s enduring hit single, “Nights in White Satin.”
Pinder took lead vocals on the majestic, symphonic opening instrumental, “The Day Begins,” and is credited with writing “Dawn: Dawn Is a Feeling” and the “Sunset” portion of the trippy “Evening” suite. The album also featured what would become the group’s signature mind-trip single, “Nights in White Satin,” which ran up to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it was re-released in 1972.
Pinder’s experimentation with the then-new keyboard helped it become a staple of prog and psychedelic recordings by groups including Yes, Genesis and King Crimson. His explorations continued on the Moody’s 1968 album In Search of the Lost Chord, another concept LP which explored the concepts of inner exploration and discovery. He contributed vocals to the propulsive single “Ride My See-Saw” and is the credited songwriter on the mind-tripping psychedelic journey through the universe “The Best Way to Travel,” featuring the acid-tinged lyrics, “Speeding through the universe/ Thinking is the best way to travel/ And you can fly, high as a kite if you want to.” He also wrote the Indian-influenced album ender “Om,” which incorporates Pinder’s mellotron, as well as sitar, tambura, tabla and cello.
The rock group that fully embraced the flower power Woodstock vibe of the late 1960s further explored the deepest recesses of their consciousness on 1969’s On the Threshold of a Dream, which again featured Pinder’s vocal contributions and songwriting on four tracks, the incense-spiced blues raga “So Deep Within You,” as well as floaty “Have You Heard (Part 1)” (and “Part 2”) and the roiling instrumental “The Voyage.”
The keyboardist would continue to be a key creative force in the band on 1969’s moon landing-inspired To Our Children’s Children’s Children album, 1970’s more straight-ahead rocking A Question of Balance — which featured the quickstep Billboard Hot 100 No. 21 hit “Question” — and 1971’s similarly concept-free Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.
The group’s 1972 LP, Seventh Sojourn, found Pinder blazing a trail with another new instrument, the Chamberlin, another electro-mechanical keyboard that also used a tape-like device that would later be featured on recordings by Stevie Wonder, James Taylor and Edgar Winter.
After a long break, the Moodys returned in 1978 with their ninth album, Octave, on which Pinder traded his mellotron and Chamberlin for synthesizers on what would be his final studio recording with the band. It featured just one track credited to Pinder, the meditative ballad “One Step Into the Light,” on which he also provides lead vocals.
Before his passing, Pinder the was the last living member of the original lineup following the death of bassist Warwick in 2004, singer/flautist Thomas in 2018, drummer Edge in 2021 and guitarist Laine in 2023. “Mike your music will last forever. Rest in peace on your travels to heaven,” Lodge wrote on Twitter. The band, including Pinder, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Pinder released his debut solo album, The Promise, on the band’s label, Threshold, in 1976, followed by a second one, Among the Stars, in 1994 and 1995’s A Planet With One Mind.
See the statement from Pinder’s family and listen to some of his contributions to the band below.
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Twenty One Pilots drummer Josh Dun makes his directorial debut in the just-released clip for the Columbus duo’s latest preview of their Clancy album, “Backslide.” The visual for the mid-tempo tune debuted on Thursday morning (April 25) and it finds singer Tyler Joseph tooling around town on his red and black BMX bike in what […]
It wasn’t the technicolor morphing cars, or the giant robot shooting lights from its eyes into the crowd. It wasn’t the lava-lamp-like oozes, or the stories-tall geometric patterns, or the hyper-detailed videography of misty mountain ranges and sun-drenched clouds.
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No, the trippiest part of Phish‘s Sphere visuals was the “You Enjoy Myself” car wash – and what immediately followed.
One of Phish’s oldest and most commonly played songs – and a frequent launchpad for improvisation throughout the revered Vermont jam band’s four-decade career – “You Enjoy Myself” is strange enough in its audio-only form. An intricately composed instrumental passage builds to an all-out scream (which audiences usually join in on) before the tension gives way to famously inscrutable lyrics (a consensus best guess for the song’s repeated line: “Wash Uffizi drive me to Firenze”) and a jam section. During an instrumental breakdown, roadies produce trampolines for singer-guitarist Trey Anastasio and bassist Mike Gordon to jump on in tandem; the song often concludes with each member of the quartet participating in an a cappella “vocal jam” – described by fan site Phish.net as “featuring spontaneous vocal improvisation, from the merely strange to the auricularly traumatic.”
Phish perform “You Enjoy Myself” at Sphere on April 19, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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During its four-night residency at the cutting-edge Las Vegas venue, however, Phish paired most of “You Enjoy Myself” with an animated visual on the venue’s 160,000-square-foot LED screen that simulated going through a massive car wash – in a vehicle alongside the band and nearly 20,000 friends. The top of a steering wheel occupied the screen’s lower left corner; suds and water streaked the screen as Phish methodically progressed through the song’s stages. And as the car exited the wash and Anastasio, Gordon, keyboardist Page McConnell and drummer Jon Fishman finally arrived at the vocal jam – one of the strangest parts of its repertoire – footage of an enormous black dog appeared on the screen.
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With the audience positioned as if it was inside the camera itself, the canine started licking the lens. For several minutes, the crowd laughed hysterically as the moment’s absurdity deepened. It was a perspective-shifting piece of immersive art that was funny, weird, and totally unique.
Phish perform “You Enjoy Myself” at Sphere on April 19, 2024 in Las Vegas.
Rene Huemer
Before Phish’s Sphere shows, which took place April 18-21, Abigail Rosen Holmes, a longtime collaborator of the band and co-creative director of the run, told Billboard of one of the creative team’s guiding principles: “If you would do this for one of the other artists you work with, it’s probably not unique enough to be for Phish.” And while not every visual treatment across the band’s four shows felt quite that unique, many did. Phish, alongside Holmes, multimedia studio Moment Factory and the rest of its team, approached its Sphere gigs with comprehensive, detail-oriented creativity. The result: a superb four-show run that continued Phish’s career-long live inventiveness – and set the bar high for each artist preparing to play the Las Vegas venue going forward.
Across four nights and eight sets of music – featuring 68 different songs, with nary a repeat – Phish cycled through a staggering range of immersive visuals that spanned trippy abstractions to real-life footage to playful illustrations. In a SiriusXM interview during the run, Anastasio called Phish’s Sphere shows “a slight step forward in the psychedelic live jam music experience,” and naturally, many of the band’s visuals were vibrantly colored splotches, squiggles, and lines that supported its music.
Phish perform at Sphere on April 18, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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But the weekend’s most memorable visuals took the medium’s possibilities a step further. On the first night, Phish speckled Sphere’s screen with a multitude of dots to score “Sand,” and iterated that visual motif to great effect during other shows, for songs like “What’s The Use?” and “Chalk Dust Torture.” For the first night’s encore, vivid video of a barn by night in a forest, aurora borealis overhead, soundtracked the rustic “Farmhouse”; on the run’s final night, the crisply composed “Divided Sky” was paired with footage of billowing clouds, cast in the orangish-purple glow of the late afternoon sun – and, to accompany a mid-song change in tone, the image switched to grayscale.
Some of the visuals were just plain fun. For “Bathtub Gin,” hundreds of miniature swimmers rotated back and forth on floaties on an ocean’s surface. “Twist” began with a wall of dark-red loops that were quickly interspersed with an alphabet soup of letters; when the song’s “Woo!” interjection arrived, characters spelling the word shot up from the bottom of the screen. During the final night’s “Ghost,” a robot-like figure peered up above the band from the screen’s bottom – and spotlights shot from its eyes into the audience.
Phish perform at Sphere on April 18, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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And while Anastasio remarked to the Washington Post prior to the Sphere shows that we was skeptical about his own image being “800 feet high on the wall,” like Bono and The Edge during U2’s concerts at the venue, several Phish visuals were framed around the band – they just eschewed straight-ahead imagery in favor of designs that obscured, warped or refracted the musicians. During “Maze,” a tower of live video of the band split into tiny geometric shapes that repeatedly dispersed and reformed. “My Friend, My Friend” began with Sphere’s screen entirely off and a slowly rotating spotlight casting the band in silhouette against it; as the song intensified, the silhouette multiplied across the screen as the venue was drenched in eerie red lighting.
In the same way the “My Friend, My Friend” visual proved that Sphere visuals can be striking even in simplicity – especially when contrasted with other, more elaborate animations and designs – a new rig conceived by the band’s esteemed designer Chris Kuroda in tandem with Moment Factory subtly added to the sensory effect. Kuroda has worked with the band since 1989, and has used his increasingly complex lighting rigs to “jam” with the band.
At Sphere, his lighting setup was scaled back – relatively speaking – to six vertical beams and four horizontal strips running behind the band onstage. The lights assumed more of a supporting role than at normal Phish shows, but still accentuated the sensory experience – and were integral parts of it on songs like “A Wave of Hope” and “2001.”
Phish perform “Taste” at Sphere on April 20, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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Still, as Holmes explained, the Sphere run was designed to “use all of the opportunities of the building – the audio, the visuals – and do it while supporting Phish truly playing music the way Phish plays music.” Phish’s run was revelatory in terms of production, but those bells and whistles only enhanced the music itself – which, as is often the case on Phish runs, deepened in scope and ambition with each show.
Musically, the band was at its exploratory best during the second sets of the final two shows. Phish appropriately made “Fuego,” off the 2014 album of the same name, a centerpiece of its 4/20 show, quickly abandoning the song’s Zeppelin-y riff for soaring art-rock, contemplative ambience and, eventually, heavy funk across jam’s 29-minute runtime. Later in the set, on reliable classic “Chalk Dust Torture,” Phish demonstrated the mature efficiency it has developed over the years, compellingly cycling through more musical ideas than its 16-minute duration might suggest.
The final night was even better. Sequenced in the same second-set two slot as “Fuego” the previous night, “Down With Disease,” a beloved Phish jam vehicle that has cracked 20 minutes more than 40 times since its 1995 debut, received a record-long rendition, clocking in at 34 minutes. Colorful ridges shapeshifted behind Phish as Anastasio and McConnell’s instruments panned across Sphere’s speakers. (Sphere Immersive Sound allows for the targeted movement of audio; used throughout Phish’s shows, some panning instances were additive, others disorienting.) As the jam unfolded, the quartet increasingly locked in, masterfully riding through peaks and grooves; after arriving in a krautrock-esque pocket, the band perfectly timed its return to the melodic reprise that ends the song. Inspired playing on “2001,” “Light” and “Piper” followed.
Periodic issues with panning and mix – which were more common at the start of the run, as Phish’s team learned Sphere’s acoustic intricacies – notwithstanding, Sphere’s audio significantly elevated even the slightest of songs. The high-end audio helped Gordon’s propulsive bass lines shine throughout the run, especially on songs like “Sand” and “Tube”; each member of the band was distinguishable at nearly every point during the shows – far from a given at many of the arenas and amphitheaters Phish regularly frequents.
Phish perform “Pillow Jets” at Sphere on April 20, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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And for all the focus on visual surprises – and how Phish would navigate a show where, inherently, their jamming inclinations and setlist were more tethered to a plan than usual – the band still offered up plenty of unexpected selections. After forgoing the interstitial “I Am Hydrogen” (and replacing it with “Lifeboy”) that typically sits between “Mike’s Song” and “Weekapaug Groove” on Thursday, the band played it Saturday – the first time that’s happened without its usual bookends since 1987 and, freed from its normal structure, a worthy lead-in to that show’s late highlight, “Chalk Dust Torture.”
Meanwhile, Phish played four unreleased songs that debuted in 2023 – which will ostensibly appear on their upcoming album Evolve, due this July – along with “Evolve” and four other songs from Anastasio’s pandemic-era solo albums which, like “Evolve,” may be reworked for Phish’s new set. The band’s treatment of this material was striking: “Pillow Jets” was visually paired with a trip through a forest where multicolored bursts shot up trees like fireworks; chatter for the rest of the run was that it was the single best animation the band played in front of. “Mercy” served a critical tonal link on Friday between “Axilla (Part II)” and “Bathtub Gin,” and “Hey Stranger” and “Oblivion” both received sterling readings on Sunday that lived up to the opportunity cost of other classics that went unplayed. (Conspicuously, at Sphere, Phish steered clear entirely of all the tracks comprising Gamehendge, the fantasy song cycle it revisited in full this past New Year’s Eve.)
The new music wasn’t limited to Phish’s Sphere performances proper. In the venue’s lobby – adorned with suspended red donuts in keeping with the band’s iconography – gentle guitar music played, composed of loops and layers that Anastasio recorded specially for the occasion. In a sentiment shared by many Phish fans, one X user posted, “Can’t wait for Trey to release ‘Music For Lobbies.’”
Phish perform “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing” at Sphere on April 19, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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That thoughtful ethos – carefully considering every aspect of the run to deliver a quality experience for dedicated fans – extended to the overarching creative vision of the shows. In the wee hours of the morning of April 18, Sphere posted a video with Phish tagged and the message “It’s only a matter of time…” Ahead of the Sphere run, Holmes had hinted the shows would have loose themes, and as the concerts took place, a matter-based nightly theme – progressing from solid to liquid to gas to plasma – became evident.
The most cohesive and effective was liquid, on the run’s second night. The band played several liquid-related songs across its two sets as visuals took fans from the water’s surface (on “Mercy” and “Bathtub Gin”) to the deep sea (on “Theme From The Bottom,” where unnerving schools of humans – not fish – darted across the screen).
The sequence was not only effective for the visuals, but for the playing… which despite setlist constraints, still breathed. When Phish’s crew hoisted two large jellyfish mobiles during “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing,” it felt monumental: Phish had married visuals on the screen, physical adornments, and outstanding jamming, and harnessed Sphere’s potential in the process.
The band had to sacrifice a degree of spontaneity to hit its marks, which surely frustrated some fans – but the magical payoff was worth it. Besides, the other night’s themes were less pronounced; while Phish seemed a little boxed-in by its setlist choices – and opening night jitters – during the run’s first show, it rarely felt musically constrained as its Sphere run progressed.
Phish perform “Wading In The Velvet Sea” at Sphere on April 19, 2024 in Las Vegas.
Rene Huemer
At times, the shows felt like Phish’s own miniature Eras Tour – an ambitious, career-spanning concert experience that recontextualized, and pushed forward, old material while capably integrating newer songs. Phish didn’t dwell on the past, but tastefully nodded to it with the visuals for two songs that date back to the mid-’90s.
For its Friday encore of the tear-jerker “Wading In The Velvet Sea” (this was liquid night, after all), Phish programmed a slew of photos from throughout its history, which by the song’s climax coalesced into a sprawling collage. On Saturday, longtime Phish artist Jim Pollock’s etched illustrations for the first 20 volumes of the LivePhish series (released from 2001 to 2003) were brought to life as concentric rotating bronze bands that stretched to Sphere’s apex – amid so much artistic innovation, a savvy way of nodding to the creative whose visual style is most strongly associated with the band.
And the run’s bookends tied it all together. As tentative fans settled into the seats at the new-to-most venue on Thursday, Phish launched into “Everything’s Right” as geometric beams sprouted from the floor and ceiling behind them. For the closing song of its Sunday encore, the beams – now slightly rounded and colorized – reappeared for “Slave To The Traffic Light.” Gordon’s loping bass line assumed a victory-lap quality: Phish had mastered Sphere in its own distinct way.
You couldn’t throw a juggling stick in Las Vegas last week without hitting a Phish phan who was totally phreaking out about the band’s mind-melting run of shows at the Sphere. Definitely count comedian and The Price Is Right host Drew Carey among those whose minds were pried open by the visual and musical spectacle the veteran Vermont jam band brought to the one-of-a-kind venue.
How do we know Carey really, really enjoyed his first Phish-sperience? Well, he described it in vivid, strangely sexual detail in a bonkers rant on fellow comedian Taylor Tomlinson’s late night show After Midnight on Tuesday night. During the talky portion of the show where contestants typically answer the host’s jokey questions, Tomlinson asked Carey “if you weren’t being filmed right now, what would you say?”
That was all the runway Carey needed to launch into a psychedelic monologue that had the typically unflappable host looking amusingly shocked.
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“Gimme a minute. So, I saw Phish at the Sphere this weekend. Never saw Phish, didn’t know a Phish tune, and they f–king blew my mind off so hard,” Carey said as he hustled to center stage and began walking around animatedly and gesticulating like a religious convert as Tomlinson said “oh” and fellow guest “Weird” Al Yankovic looked delightedly confused. “I had a bunch of girls with me, and I thought to myself is this what it’s like to…” Carey said, as censors stepped in to bleep what appeared to be a graphic sexual description.
Carey definitely didn’t stop there. “It was like being edged for four days straight. And then right before the face-melting climax at the end of the fourth day, an angel comes down from heaven, Gabriel, and he shoots f–king heroin in your arm, and he says, ‘Good luck now motherf–er!’ And he leaves, and you have an orgasm for 15 minutes while your eyeballs fall out of your head!”
Cut to a shot of Tomlinson looking, well, amusingly phreaked out while the next five minutes of her show were totally, and hilariously, derailed by the Carey crack-up as Thomas Lennon (Reno 911!) could not stop making jokes about the rant. “Next time they play the Sphere, you better not miss it,” Carey counseled. “That was so great and we can definitely use all of it, absolutely, absolutely we can.” Tomlinson joked.
“HR wants to talk to all of you,” Lennon said.
What she couldn’t have used was an earlier from Carey on Monday, in which he got even more graphic. “I swear I just talked to God I would give you all my money, stick my d–k in a blender and swear off p—y for the rest of my life in exchange for this,” Carey wrote along with video of the show he saw. “Bro I met God tonight for real. I feel like I just got saved by Jesus no lie.”
Watch Carey’s Phish tale below.
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#Phish at the #SphereI swear I just talked to GodI would give you all my money, stick my dick in a blender and swear off pussy for the rest of my life in exchange for this. Bro I met God tonight for real. I feel like I just got saved by Jesus no lie pic.twitter.com/Wci1OdUp3F— ʎǝɹɐƆ ʍǝɹᗡ (@DrewFromTV) April 22, 2024
Papercuts, the first greatest-hits compilation from Linkin Park, debuts at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Hard Rock Albums chart dated April 27.
The set bows with 44,000 equivalent album units earned in the United States in its first week (April 12-18), according to Luminate. The majority (23,000) is from streaming equivalent units, with 21,000 in album sales.
Linkin Park now boasts a record-rewriting eight No. 1s on Top Hard Rock Albums, which began in 2007. The band pulls into sole possession of the most rulers in the tally’s history, passing Five Finger Death Punch, Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam; perhaps not to be outdone for long, Pearl Jam’s latest LP, Dark Matter, was released April 19 and will challenge for the top spot on the May 4 ranking.
Most No. 1s, Hard Rock Albums:8, Linkin Park7, Five Finger Death Punch7, Foo Fighters7, Pearl Jam6, Disturbed6, Korn
Linkin Park last led Top Hard Rock Albums with Meteora, following its 20th-anniversary reissue last April.
Papercuts also starts at No. 2 on Top Rock & Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums. As previously reported, it debuts at No. 6 on the all-genre Billboard 200, where it’s the band’s 11th top 10 and first since One More Light debuted at No. 1 in 2017.
The 20-song Papercuts includes singles from the majority of the band’s studio albums, as well as the previously unreleased “Friendly Fire” and outtake “QWERTY,” from the group’s 2006 EP LP Underground 6, a fan club-only collection. The new release’s “Lost” was released in 2023 on the 20th anniversary reissue of Meteora.
“QWERTY” concurrently debuts at No. 5 on the Hot Hard Rock Songs chart with 1.1 million official U.S. streams and 1,000 sold April 12-18. “Friendly Fire,” released Feb. 23, rises 42-37 on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs (after it debuted at its No. 13 high on the March 9 ranking) with 6.5 million radio audience impressions, 806,000 streams and 1,000 sold. It spent two weeks atop Rock & Alternative Airplay and one week at No. 1 on Mainstream Rock Airplay.
Linkin Park’s music rose 15% to 42.9 million official on-demand U.S. streams April 12-18, boosted by interest in not only the newly released “QWERTY” but also the band’s multi-album string of hits cataloged on Papercuts. The most-streamed Linkin Park song of the week was “Numb,” which accrued 4.7 million streams, up 9%. It’s just a tick ahead of “In the End,” also at 4.7 million streams rounded off, a boost of 10%. “One Step Closer” was third with 3 million streams, a 15% jump.
In all, the 20 songs on Papercuts encompass 10 of Linkin Park’s 12 career No. 1s on Alternative Airplay. The tracklist omits only three-week ruler “Lying From You” (2004) and four-frame leader “The Catalyst” (2010). As for Mainstream Rock Airplay, Papercuts features all but two of the band’s 10 No. 1s, both from 2014’s The Hunting Party: “Guilty All the Same” (featuring Rakim) and “Until It’s Gone.”
One More Light remains Linkin Park’s last studio album. Frontman Chester Bennington died two months after its May 19, 2017, release.
This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2004 Week continues here with the story behind Bowling for Soup’s “1985,” a ruefully nostalgic top 40 hit that has taken on a different meaning for its creators now that it’s been longer since its release than it was since the mid-’80s at the time.
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Like many songs, “1985” started with nothing but a wordless hook. It first came to former SR-71 frontman Mitch Allan while he was driving, after which he temporarily added in some filler to start with: “She’s a, she’s a, she’s a roller coaster.”
His decision to later swap it out for “19, 19, 1985” was just as random. The reason it stuck? “Honestly, it sang fantastic,” he recalls to Billboard over 20 years later.
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Later, the world would agree. Bowling for Soup had a No. 23 hit with the nostalgic earworm on the Billboard Hot 100 and a No. 10 peak on the Pop Airplay chart, propelling the band’s record A Hangover You Don’t Deserve to a career high of No. 37 on the Billboard 200. In the two decades since, the track has amassed over 372.7 million on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate, and folks who weren’t even alive in the title year continue to gleefully sing along when it comes on the radio or plays at a party, as it still frequently does.
But before it was an era-defining legacy hit for BFS, Allan had buried his original version on SR-71’s final album Here We Go Again, which was only released in Japan (until 2010, when it was finally made available in the U.S.). He’d pieced together the rest of the track on a trip to Machu Picchu, asking fellow tourists in his hiking group to shout out their favorite ‘80s references — “Springsteen!” “Madonna!” — and weaving them into an admittedly cynical takedown of a Prozac-dependent suburban housewife named Debbie with some help from his drummer, John Allen.
If not for producer Butch Walker, “1985” would’ve never been widely heard in the U.S., much less become an enduring smash for generations. But Walker had worked with Allan and SR-71 in the past, and at the suggestion of his manager, Jonathan Daniel, he decided that the track deserved a second life – something the guys of Bowling for Soup, fresh off their first Grammy nomination for pop-punk radio hit “Girl All the Bad Guys Want” in 2003, could give it.
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“The song was good, but it wasn’t great yet,” Walker recalls. “It’s all about who’s presenting it. I think we realized that maybe the presentation of it originally was wrong.”
First things came first. Led by frontman Jaret Reddick and bandmates Chris Burney, Gary Wiseman, and Rob Felicetti, the tongue-wagging Bowling for Soup had made a name off not taking itself too seriously, specializing in the creation of meme songs before memes were even a thing. That meant that some of the more sardonic lines about condoms breaking and George Michael’s sexuality needed to go.
“That’s the difference between the humor in SR-71 and us,” says Reddick. “Their songs had that grit in their comedy – it’s more snarky. Our stuff is just blatantly funny.”
He and Walker sat in a room together dissecting “1985” line by line, subbing in lyrics about Duran Duran and Ozzy Osbourne to coincide more with the personal tastes of Reddick, who was a teenager during the titular time period. The frontman gave the tune a peppier delivery, and Walker made it so that the song’s sunny “woo-hoo-hoo” hook was the very first thing listeners heard when pressing “play.”
“It was a collaborative effort,” Reddick says. “Had I heard the song by SR-71, I’m certain I would’ve liked it, ’cause I’m a fan of that band. But I don’t think it gives me the same visual at all.”
Allan, now an L.A.-based writer-producer who’s worked with Bebe Rexha and Demi Lovato, agrees. “[Reddick] took this sad woman who we were making fun of and turned her into the hero of the story,” he marvels. “She’s suddenly celebrating that she got to live in 1985 and that we, the listener, didn’t. Life was so much better then, and she got to experience it.
“[The original] version in my brain has been replaced by Bowling for Soup’s,” he concludes.
Released as the lead single off Hangover, “1985” made BFS a staple of the early 2000s pop-punk movement. The band cosplayed as Robert Palmer, Run-DMC and Limp Bizkit in the track’s music video (which Reddick says he’s especially proud of), complete with a Tawny Kitaen lookalike and a cameo from Allan.
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They embarked on a tour, and then another one and another one, discovering that their fans across the world never tired of mocking Debbie night after night – because, let’s face it: “The song’s kind of mean,” Reddick admits. “We made it nicer, for sure. But there’s still a bit of hopelessness to it.”
The guys didn’t get sick of playing it, either. “The fact that it’s something our band does that makes people happy – that’s the thing that never gets old,” Reddick continues. “Right from the first two chords, they know what it is. Every phone comes up during that song. People still laugh at ‘When did Mötley Crüe become classic rock?’”
But something peculiar happened right around the time Bowling for Soup’s version of the song came out – Reddick became a parent. So did Allan. Their first-born kids are now 21 and 20, respectively, almost the exact number of years between 1985 and 2004 as 2004 and 2024. As time went by, a song about nostalgia became nostalgic in and of itself, and its creators realized that they were beginning to identify more with Debbie than her proverbial two kids in high school. In 2021, Bowling for Soup put out a track titled “Getting Old Sucks (But Everybody’s Doing It).”
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“I started to see it really quickly,” remembers Reddick, now a father of three. “It wasn’t lost on me that that was actually happening in my life. When they’re really little, they still think all your jokes are funny. Then they go through this time where they don’t think you’re funny, then they think you’re funny again but roll their eyes. My kids’ teachers tell them, ‘I heard your dad on the radio today,’ and they’re just like, ‘Okay, great. He also mowed the lawn today, and there’s a heap of dishes to get done.’”
Allan relates: “I’m Dad – I’m not cool.”
Luckily for them both, as well as all the former cool kids-turned-Debbies, things have a way of coming back into fashion. Debbie herself — who, as Reddick points out, is probably a grandma now — would be overjoyed that her precious Springsteen and Madonna are both on arena tours in 2024, while U2 is on the heels of a successful Las Vegas residency. And modern pop stars have been in the midst of a pop-punk renaissance for most of the decade now, replicating the sounds popularized by Bowling for Soup and their peers.
“Everybody’s trying to make records sound like [“1985”] now,” Walker says with a chuckle. “It’s ironic that that’s where we’re at. I guess I’ve been alive that f–king long … I can’t believe we’re already back at recycling the emo era and the pop punk era, sound-wise.”
“All my kids went through a pop-punk phase,” adds Allan. “It takes them a minute. They discover bands, and then they discover my band. I get texts from my oldest who’s at UCSB, and she’ll be at a party and there’s a band playing, and they’ll be playing ‘1985.’ She’s like, ‘Oh my god, my dad wrote that!’”
Meanwhile, “1985” has demonstrated an impressive longevity. It was certified double platinum in 2019, and Reddick and Allan still enjoy sending each other young musicians’ updated covers of the song with references to the early ’00s and 2010s – which, ironically, sometimes go over the now-52-year-old Reddick’s head.
“I’m Debbie!” he proclaims, mystified. “People come up to us like, ‘I am Debbie.’ She’s probably now looking back at her kids, and they’re the Debbies of the world. And she’s like, ‘You see?’”
But just as Debbie gets the last laugh in her story, so does he: Reddick remembers a time when his daughter called him from science class in disbelief, asking if he knew just how many Spotify listeners his band had. “I was like, ‘I don’t know, 2 million monthly?’ She goes, ‘Dad, that’s a lot!’ I go ‘Yeah, I’ve been trying to tell you that.’” (For the record, BFS has nearly 4 million monthly listeners on the platform at press time.)
Reddick, Allan and Walker are all living in real time the reason they believe “1985” has had such a lasting resonance across generations. Aging and nostalgia are some of the only truly universal human experiences, which means that the song, unlike some of the dated ‘80s tropes it pokes fun at, will probably never go out of style.
But “1985” also speaks to the power of leaving egos at the door in service of collaboration. The project wouldn’t have been a success story without Allan being open to having his creation improved upon, or Bowling for Soup’s willingness to stand behind a song that they hadn’t written originally.
“I’m super glad this song has had such a good run,” Reddick says. “I’m not sure that we wouldn’t be where we are today [without it], but I certainly am thankful we are.”
“You hope a song goes on the charts, let alone enters the top 10, let alone is around a year later,” Allan remarks. “It takes a village. But I’m so happy to live in that village, you know?”
Radiohead has officially entered YouTube‘s Billion Views Club, as the video for their 1992 classic, “Creep,” surpassed a billion views on the platform. The milestone marks the UK rockers’ first video to accomplish the feat. The clip is simple but effective, featuring the band — comprised of Thom Yorke; brothers Jonny Greenwood and Colin Greenwood; Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway […]
This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2004 Week continues here as we hear from an artist behind arguably the year’s biggest rock album: Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, whose punk-rock opera American Idiot sold millions and spawned four huge hit singles, led by its pointedly enduring titular protest anthem.
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One of music’s biggest stories in 2004 was Green Day’s resurrection. After a ’90s run that included era-defining alt-rock and MTV hits like “Longview,” “Basket Case,” “When I Come Around” and “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” the band had taken a folkier turn on its 2000 album Warning – and experienced its softest sales and least enthusiastic reviews in years. With a new generation of pop-punk and emo bands emerging, Green Day could’ve easily seemed like a relic by 2004.
But with that year’s album American Idiot, Green Day reasserted itself as a mainstream force – eclipsing even its monumental ’90s – with a dramatic reinvention. On the album, the band infused its tested brand of pop-punk with classic-rock grandiosity, grafting an anti-war storyline of disillusionment onto the 57-minute set; in interviews ahead of its release, Green Day’s members likened American Idiot to a “punk-rock opera,” drawing a direct line from idols like The Who to their own new project.
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“The melodies are based on the tradition of Lennon and McCartney,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong tells Billboard today. “That’s where we were trying to push our stuff and take our melodies and the whole idea of Green Day – pushing it to a level that we thought could be our Tommy moment, or our Sgt. Pepper’s.”
The high-concept, high-octane album blew up like the heart-shaped hand grenade on its iconic cover. Recorded during the early days of the Iraq War and released three months before President George W. Bush’s eventual re-election, the title track and lead single took aim at news illiteracy, widespread propaganda and “a redneck agenda”; in its stark, Grammy-nominated video, the stripes wash off a giant American flag suspended behind the band. “American Idiot” topped the Alternative Airplay chart, snagged a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year and ignited a run of subsequent Idiot Hot 100 smashes — which included the caustic protest anthem “Holiday” (No. 19), as well as the power ballads “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” (Nos. 2 and 6, respectively).
All told, American Idiot snagged six Grammy nominations (winning Best Rock Album), was certified six-times platinum by the RIAA, and launched a 17-month world tour that spawned the live album Bullet in a Bible. In a couple short years, Green Day went from possibly-over-the-hump ’90s greats to being in the mix for the world’s biggest rock band.
Recently, Armstrong says, a fan approached him at London’s BRIT Awards. “They go, ‘American Idiot changed my life.’ And I said, ‘It changed my life too!’” he recalls with a laugh. “It changed everything for me. … It really made me feel like I can spread my wings. It proved to me that, if you have the guts to do it, then you can make it happen. When you have a hunch that it’s time to make a big statement, musically, and it gets acknowledged, it’s the best feeling ever.”
In the years since its release, American Idiot’s stature has only grown. Green Day has frequently harnessed the album’s urgent political energy since, including for this year’s Saviors, and American Idiot became the basis of the Tony-winning 2009 musical of the same name. Its songs remain staples of the band’s concerts, and Green Day has made headlines in recent years by revising the title track’s lyrics to address former President Donald Trump. This year, the band will perform American Idiot — as well as another of its seminal albums celebrating a milestone anniversary, 1994’s Dookie — in full on The Saviors Tour of North American stadiums.
On the eve of that tour, which kicks off overseas in late May, Armstrong admits, “I haven’t really acknowledged how proud I am of that record in a long time.” Below he talks more about American Idiot, being inspired by the New York bands of the early ’00s (and not so much by the period’s pop-punk), and why he still considers rock music to be “the underdog.”
Take me back to 2003, and Green Day’s headspace when you went into the studio to record American Idiot. After the ’90s and Warning, did you see American Idiot as the start of Green Day 2.0?
When we did Warning, we were definitely trying to do something different from [our] sound than we’d ever done before. It was a little bit more folky, a lot more acoustic guitar. That was foreshadowing for what would end up becoming American Idiot. We had a studio that we were going into every day in Oakland called [Studio] 880, and we just started to experiment in there. We were like the inmates running the asylum for months. Then we came upon doing a concept record that was right in the middle of the George Bush administration and the war in Iraq.
To what extent when you went in were you planning on this being a more political record? Or did that emerge organically during your sessions and your experimentation?
When I wrote the song “American Idiot” is when. It was just such a bold statement – bolder than I had ever said before politically. When we started [recording], we just talked about the song and we were all on the same page. It felt dangerous and risky and fun at the same time, if that’s even possible. We all agreed that this was the right way to go. And then with that came songs like “Holiday.”
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It’s hard to imagine a single that’s more in your face than “American Idiot,” in both sound and subject matter. Was there any resistance from your team or your label about that being the lead single?
No, I didn’t feel like there was any resistance. We felt empowered when we did the demo and when we recorded it. I don’t think we really worried about anything – it gave us a bit more swagger, to be honest, because we knew that we were sitting on a song that we really believed in. The label, they were great. There was no blowback from them at all.
“American Idiot” has taken on this second life – you’ve called out President Trump a number of times when performing that song in recent years. Did you ever think when you were making it that it would end up being a living document, and that the ills it documented would persist long after the Bush era?
I don’t really know what I thought, like what kind of legs that that song was gonna have. I remember when Trump got into office, that song was getting played a lot. The first trip that he took to England, [a British social media campaign was] trying to get “American Idiot” to go No. 1. I think it got to number two. [Laughs.] When the song first came out, I think we were like, “This could blow up in our faces, but who cares? We’ve said something that we really felt strongly about.” Then, as the record kept getting bigger and bigger, I just said, “Man, we really made something that is special that’s gonna stand the test of time.”
A political record and tackling some of these themes would have been challenging enough, but then you had the rock opera concept and story on top of it. Why was that narrative structure the right way to present this subject matter?
It made the record personal. It was coming from the heart. And then, it was also not just finger pointing, but questioning my own ignorance, at the same time, and posing the questions to myself. The one thing about a lot of punk-rock bands that are political, it seems that they come across as politicians. For me, it was just — the one thing we all have in common is that we’re living the human experience. So I wanted the songs to come from the heart as much as they came from the head.
Green Day has always had a young fan base, and American Idiot was a huge touchstone for so many kids who were going through adolescence and waking up to the news and current events. This might have been the first political record they ever got. How did you feel about Green Day’s role in the political awakening of Millennials?
9/11 defined a generation in the same way that the Vietnam War defined a generation. It was just that sort of era of fear that every generation has to endure. When the Twin Towers fell down, it created a generation of paranoia. Looking back, three years after 9/11, a lot of people when they heard the music [on American Idiot], [there was] this push back [happening] and [we] created like a soundtrack for that push back.
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“American Idiot” and “Holiday” were very political – and very successful – singles. But American Idiot spawned two even bigger, less politically oriented singles: “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” How do these pop crossover moments fit into the album as a whole?
“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” became a part of the narrative of the record, because [it’s what the] Jesus of Suburbia character was going through. That song, it comes across as someone growing up that feels very self-righteous, until they come across into the real world and find [themselves] in a very lonely place. I wrote that song when I was spending time in New York. I was by myself, and not knowing really anything about New York, I just sort of dropped myself right into the Lower East Side. I honestly didn’t know where I was at. I have a horrible sense of direction. That that song is exactly that: It’s about my horrible sense of direction.
Green Day was a defining alt-rock band of the ’90s. Then, as you’re in the studio recording American Idiot, there’s a new wave of alt-rock popping up, whether it’s what’s happening on New York’s Lower East Side with The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or the next generation of pop-punk bands who were dominating Warped Tour. Was what was going on in alt-rock percolating through to you when you were in the studio or were you sealed off?
For us, power-pop or whatever, we just wanted to bring it to a new level. A lot of that music at that time, as far as the pop-punk stuff was, it just became, like, commercial on purpose. [Laughs.] The pop-punk stuff, it just seemed trivial. It seemed really generic, and I didn’t really like it at all. The subject matter was just really shallow. It felt paint by numbers. The New York stuff that was going on, where it was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes and Interpol, felt very real to me — because it felt like a scene, and it felt like people were very serious about making music. I found that to be really inspiring.
You’re playing American Idiot and Dookie all the way through this summer to celebrate their respective 20th and 30th anniversaries. As you’ve revisited American Idiot ahead of that tour, what has stood out to you?
American Idiot was sort of this unicorn that [during its album cycle] we were like, “OK, let’s get past this and move on.” We played it in its entirety at the Fillmore [in San Francisco] the other night. Revisiting it was cathartic, for lack of a better cliché. Playing songs like “Extraordinary Girl” and “Whatsername,” there were times on stage where I was getting choked up because it was bringing me back the feeling that I had at that time, that I was revisiting for the first time in 20 years. I had a great sense of pride and I was sort of humbled by the experience.
More and more artists are doing tours where they play classic albums in full. Why is that an effective way to connect with fans?
Playing it the other night at the Fillmore, just looking at people’s faces, there were people that were crying. I saw this one person that was in the crowd that was transgender, and I could see the tears coming out. I realized how far we’ve come. Green Day has been a space for people to feel a connection with people that are kindred spirits. It was really heavy to see people just sort of – we’re playing “Homecoming” and “Whatsername” and “Are We The Waiting” and people [are] just crying. I was kind of taken aback by it. I think it’s great that bands are revisiting their albums, because these are works of art. [Weezer’s] Blue Album is a work of art, just as much as Tommy is a work of art. This sounds really pretentious, but it’s like when an orchestra is playing Mozart. I think rock music is just as important.
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One of the most adventurous parts of American Idiot is “Jesus of Suburbia,” the five-part, nine-minute epic. It’s still a fan favorite. Did you have any doubts when putting that song together – and has its longevity surprised you?
“Jesus of Suburbia,” that’s one of my proudest moments for Green Day. I remember the first time that we ever played it [in July 2004]. We were rehearsing at the Olympic Auditorium down in Los Angeles. We were really tight. We were playing every day and we thought, “Hey, let’s do a cheap ticket, people can come see us play.” That was the first time that we played it in front of people. They kind of couldn’t believe what we had done. It was this nine-minute epic, where people were used to our two-and-a-half, three-minute songs. The reaction was so positive in a way where people just couldn’t believe what they were hearing. I’m really proud of that song and how it was inspired by The Who and we just got to have that moment.
We don’t see rock smashes quite like American Idiot these days. What are your thoughts about the arc of rock as a mainstream genre – and how it fits into the pop landscape – since American Idiot came out?
There’s a lot of great rock music that’s out right now. And I think, in a way, it’s more popular than ever. You see these festivals that are popping up all over America. Something like Aftershock [in Sacramento] – they’re huge! Like, 50,000 people are coming out. To me, that feels like rock is bigger than it’s ever been, especially in the last 10 years. It just doesn’t get covered.
But in a way, rock music has always been underground and the underdog, as far as what goes on in the pop world. It’s always been that way. It’s been that way, really, since 1948.
Few rock albums live as long and varied a life as The Who’s Tommy. Since its release in 1969, guitarist Pete Townshend’s conceptual masterpiece — centered around the story of the titular boy who witnesses a murder, becomes a “deaf, dumb and blind” pinball wizard, then something like a rock star-savior — has been translated into various mediums, including Ken Russell’s wild 1975 film starring the likes of Tina Turner, Elton John and Jack Nicholson.
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But none have persisted quite like The Who’s Tommy, the groundbreaking 1993 stage musical directed by Des McAnuff that brought Townshend’s electrifying music and haunting story to Broadway. It was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won five, including best original score for Townshend and best direction for McAnuff.
Three decades later, The Who’s Tommy is back in its first major Broadway revival — a searing production with a cast of standout vocal and acting talent led by 23-year old Ali Louis Bourzgui as Tommy. If the show still feels incredibly vital, that’s in large part because McAnuff, who returns to direct, and Townshend still are, too. And as they told Billboard in a wide-ranging conversation, this production (a likely contender for best revival of a musical when the 2024 Tony nominations are announced April 30) is anything but the end of their alchemical creative partnership.
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Back before the original Broadway production, what convinced you to turn Tommy into a musical, Pete, and why with Des?
Pete Townshend: You know, The Who were not a particularly financially successful band. We had big hits and Tommy was our biggest, but the money didn’t exactly roll in. I tended to work purely for the art. I had written a bunch of songs, all of which had done pretty well, and one was “I Can See For Miles” which I took a lot of trouble with recording and arranging harmonically. I think still to this day it’s a masterpiece, and I can’t really work out why it isn’t in the shrine of rock history as the best song ever written about anything at all.
So after it [underperformed in the U.K.], I thought, “F–k, what am I going to have to do to get the interest of the public and maintain it and also to harness this incredible machine” which the band was at that time as a performing band. It hit me that I should write a major piece, a collection of good rock songs strung together that will tell a story. At the time, I was absolutely not interested in anything to do with music, theater, movies, anything other than just providing something for my band — something that would last, that we could perform on the stage.
Whip pan forward to 1992: I haven’t performed with The Who for nearly 10 years, I had gone to work with publisher Faber & Faber as a commissioning editor for a pop culture imprint within the company, I was doing some solo work. And I had a cycling accident, fell and broke my wrist, and my surgeon told me I’d never play music again with my right hand, so I thought, well, I’ve got to make a living. As ever, every couple of years the phone would ring and my manager would say “Somebody wants to talk to you about doing a theatrical version of Tommy” — God forgive me, it was ice skating Tommy, it was ballet Tommy, brass band Tommy, there was a reggae Tommy. And I just was not interested in any of it to be honest.
But when Des flew over to New York in late summer or early fall of ’92, I daresay — I don’t want to embarrass Des — that we fell in love. We struck an immediate relationship and I knew we would be friends forever, whether or not we worked together. And that’s where it began. I think Des has been so fantastic to hang on to the integrity of the original story, all of the nuances and some of the bum notes, and I thank him for that. And you know, I’ve done what I can to help out along the way.
Ali Louis Bourzgui as Tommy in The Who’s Tommy
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
When the original Broadway run ended (and then subsequent tours and productions elsewhere, like the West End), did you feel like a chapter was closed? Or did you have a sense that there might be a reason to revisit it down the line together?
Des McAnuff: It was kind of open ended — there wasn’t a moment where we said, “Okay, well, this is over.” Ultimately what happened is, I was traveling in Costa Rica and saw that Pete had called, and he suggested that we start talking about a film project, whether it was a motion picture or a live capture, he felt that the time had come. And I was very excited by that. We did a screenplay, and as we were doing it, we kind of said, hey, you know, it’s really time to reimagine this [for Broadway].
That was several years ago, and pre-COVID we started working on this in earnest. Nothing is easy, particularly in the theater — or for that matter in rock ‘n’ roll. But this has been remarkably smooth. The great thing about Tommy is while it has evolved, it’s deepened, there are new complexities in the story — themes that are sometimes even paradoxical — but it does remain faithful to what Pete composed.
Were there elements of the original production you wanted to be sure to preserve or pay homage to? Or likewise things you dreamed of doing the first time around that you now had the ability to do — particularly on the technology front?
McAnuff: I think we basically did what we imagined the first time around. I remember the conversations: “The bed’s going to spin here, Tommy’s gonna come flying in here.” Both at La Jolla Playhouse [where Tommy premiered in 1992] and this time around at the Goodman Theater [in Chicago], they were willing to just kind of follow us into hell, so we basically got to do what we wanted.
While the new production is very ambitious, interestingly enough nothing moves on that stage that is not moved by an actor. It really is about a company of actors, storytelling. The first one had a lot of gadgetry and technology and automation, and this certainly is very ambitious, technically, and somewhat of a spectacle. But I would say it has a kind of humanity that breaks through all of that.
Townshend: A number of people who saw the original show in ‘93 have told me they think the storytelling is more solid and clearer somehow this time around. And I don’t think it’s because there’s less distraction, because the stage is still a sleigh ride, a visual feast, an onslaught of image and light and color — and also of shadow, moments when you really feel drawn into the deep pathos of many of the characters. And that was only ever inferred in the original music that I wrote.
Ali Louis Bourzgui and the cast of The Who’s Tommy
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
I think this one exposes the actors in a much bigger way, and it feels to me to be more of a play than it ever was. There’s an incredible empathy for the creatures that we’ve created here, not just to make them real, but to make them solid enough that they spark a real identification with members of the audience. Tommy is about stuff that so many of us in my generation, and the generations that followed right up to today, are all still suffering from — from the trauma of 200 years of war. So everybody in the audience has this deep desire just to have a night out where they can forget their worries and have a good time, but also feel involved in something that is deep and reflects the very reason why they want to get out and get smashed. And of course that is what rock ‘n’ roll was about, and Tommy I believe is doing that now.
You’re in the Nederlander Theater, where Rent began on Broadway in 1996; I think few people realize that Tommy actually preceded Rent! In so many ways Tommy was the parent of the next generation of rock musicals — or, well, attempts at them — that have followed. Why do you think Tommy succeeds as a rock musical, where many others have not?
Townshend: We had a human story to tell. And the way that I realized that is we would get to the end of the show — after the songs about bullying, about drugs, about sexual abuse, about family trauma, about a kid who becomes a messiah in a sense — and it ends with what was perceived to be a prayer: “Listening to you, I get the music.” Why do we need that release at that point in the show? I think it’s because we’ve been taken on a journey where we look at the best and the worst of human nature. It’s not Dostoevsky, but it ain’t far off, the function of it. Actually, I do feel a bit like Dostoevsky.
McAnuff: Very much like Dostoevsky [Laughs.] I think what distinguishes Tommy from many other theatrical enterprises is that it has authenticity. Pete is really one of the reigning princes of rock ‘n’ roll to this day, he is rock ‘n’ roll, he personifies it. And he’s also a very good storyteller, and he’s made a wonderful partner because of that. It’s not just his imagination, but it’s his appreciation of good story points that’s made my job really a delight.
McAnuff (left) and Townshend with the cast of The Who’s Tommy.
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
When we did this 30 years ago, people were still very nervous about electric music. Electric music was something you made fun of in Bye Bye Birdie! It wasn’t legitimate somehow. And that’s totally changed. Now Broadway represents all of the richness of American music in all its different forms. In those days, all you could do was was, quote, “Broadway.” Well, that’s all gone.
In Tommy, there’s very little spoken dialogue — you both seem to have this inherent trust that the songs will communicate the story, that every point doesn’t need to make literal sense or feel totally linear, and that the audience will come along for the ride, which seems like something for more theater makers to internalize…
Townshend: I recently went to see the Sufjan Stevens piece at the [Park Avenue] Armory, Illinoise; I’m glad it’s moving [to Broadway]. I love his music, and I love the show, but the thing that really came across to me was, whether you got the story or not, whether you felt that the story was relevant or not, it was a poetic experience — I felt somehow moved and touched. And, wow, that’s all I want.
Behind Tommy is a performance piece, rooted in the engine of modern performance. If we look at the brilliance and massive success of somebody like Taylor Swift, it’s because she carries her audience with her, and they carry her with them. The essence of the period that Tommy came from, we were experimenting with the function and the importance and the value of the audience just showing up and listening but also contributing. How do you contribute if you’re sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a theater? You contribute in some way which is almost intangible. Yes, you can get up and you can clap along or you can smoke a joint and shout. But there’s something more going on.
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So many artists from the pop world now want to work in musical theater, and many find they prefer it to the commercial music industry. Having spent much of your life interacting with the theater world now, Pete, do you think anything is preferable about it?
Townshend: Working in music theater, you have everything that we have in rock ‘n’ roll, but you also have story. So for me, it’s been like being in a band but with extra cream. All art, all performance is play. It’s so important to play — and that’s how I feel about working in theater or going back and working with Roger Daltrey and what remains of The Who on a tour or producing other artists, as I’ve done largely for folk artists over the past few years. This is where creativity really comes alive. And remember, I’ve done this and the shows have not been successful, too. It’s just about whether or not you’ve actually spent the time in a useful way.
Tommy has had many different iterations since the album came out. Do you think of it as an eternally evolving work, or is each version of it merely a moment in time, without necessarily a “next”?
Townshend: As a songwriter and a storyteller, you create something and then you just let it go. You have to let it fly in each of its incarnations, some of which I’ve found difficult to live with and some of which I’ve enjoyed.
I have to be absolutely honest here: I think I do care about the lasting legacy of my work. I do very much. One of the reasons I’m with my current wife Rachel [Fuller], is that around 1996 The Who were struggling to get back together to help our bass player John Entwistle who was in dire straits financially, he was gonna go to prison for tax evasion. We had to tour to keep him out of jail, basically.
I decided that I wanted all of what I would call my story-based pieces to be put on paper— A Quick One While He’s Away, Rael, Tommy, Quadrophenia, Life House, my solo albums and so on — and I was looking for an orchestrator and found Rachel, and the first thing she orchestrated for me was Quadrophenia. I wanted it to be something that could be performed the way that I wanted it to be performed as a songwriter, without any bells and whistles, without the ideas of other creative people, just to be put up as a piece of music that I had personally rubber stamped.
So the legacy of Tommy is really important to me. At my age now, 79 in May, there are big decisions to make. I can’t jump out on a stage the way that I used to — some of the photographs of me jumping up in the air, it looks like I’m jumping seven feet in the air, I don’t know how it happened. I survived Keith Moon, and the fact is that Keith Moon didn’t survive Keith Moon.
On the other hand, you have to let this stuff go. You have to trust. In Chicago, I realized that time had moved under this piece, and it still worked. That’s all that matters; what you’ve done doesn’t have to be sacrosanct. For God’s sake, what AI might do to creative work might actually be good — who knows?
McAnuff: Somebody once said that musicals don’t get finished, they just get opened. And that’s true — we’re working on this even now. The theater exists, as Bob Dylan said, in the eternal present. I would have thought Tommy was more or less finished in the ‘90s for me, and then here it is. It has new life.
Townshend: In my first week at art college back in 1961, we were being told that computers were going to come within two or three years and they would change the nature of artistic and creative communication and would change the world for the better. And it took 40 years or so for those promised computers to arrive. Now we have Apple producing this great big thing like a television screen that you stick to your head and we’re supposed to be impressed by it? Give me a pill I can take that will help me to experience something more fabulous than looking at a f–king television screen!
I do think if there’s another iteration of Tommy, I probably won’t be here for it, but you could do it [using] these new media formats that are starting to rise up and maybe even be able to make something out of artificial intelligence as just a tool. Anything that makes my life as a creative easier and, incidentally, is fun to play with, I’m in.
The company of The Who’s Tommy.
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
You’ve both spent so much of your creative lives with Tommy but is there another piece from Pete’s catalog that you think deserves more theatrical attention?
Townshend: Well for me, it’s Life House. Songs like “Baba O’Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Pure and Easy,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” those songs all emanated from a sci-fi piece that I wrote called Life House, which had a strong spiritual backbone and a lot of ethical issues are brought up in it. This was meant to be the follow up to Tommy, and it began at the Young Vic theater in 1971, but was really a bit too ambitious, I think, to survive [Ed. note: It’s since been adapted into a graphic novel.] I would love to do something theatrical or some kind of modern production based on that — that would be my dream, I think, right now. It feels like it has potential. I’ve recently shared some of the collateral of that with Des.
McAnuff: I’m digging into the box set, Who’s Next/Life House, and I’m incredibly excited because I think that the music in Who’s Next, as with Tommy, is obviously masterful, brilliant songs that continue to bounce around in my brain all these years later. I also love Quadrophenia — an extraordinary score. But for me it’s Life House next.
Townshend: Give us another five years.
Mötley Crüe promises there’s more where its brand new song “Dogs of War” came from.
The track and video, both out Friday (April 26), are the first releases under a new deal with Nashville’s Big Machine Records. It’s also the Crüe’s first new song since the Machine Gun Kelly collab “The Dirt (Est. 1981)” from the soundtrack for the 2019 Netflix biopic of the same name and the band’s first recording with new member John5 (Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie), who replaced original guitarist Mick Mars last year.
“We want to keep putting out new music, too, so we don’t get stagnant,” frontman Vince Neil tells Billboard. “We recorded ‘(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)’ by the Beastie Boys and we recorded this song, too, and I thought it turned out pretty good.” And while no firm plans have been specified for future material (although an EP has been rumored for fall), both Neil and John5 say there’s more Motley music on the runway.
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“There’ll definitely be new music out next year, for sure,” Neil says, “’cause we recorded a couple of other songs, too. Maybe we’ll release one of those by the end of the year, but I can’t say. But we want to keep putting out new music — not, maybe, an album but a few songs here, a few songs there, and that’s good.”
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John5 confirms that “there’s gonna be more music to come out, that’s for sure. [Bassist] Nikki (Sixx) calls me all the time and says, ‘Hey dude, check this out’ and it sounds like it could be a demo from, like, the Too Fast For Love album or the Shout at the Devil album. He just has that inside him; he’s created this music and it sounds just like that era because that’s who the guy is.”
Neil describes the fiery-tempoed “Dogs of War” as “like old school meets new school. It’s got that old school vibe about it, but it’s new music. Nikki came up with it and he sent me the music and I thought it was really cool. So I started singing it and we got in the studio and it turned into the song I think the fans are really gonna like it.” The song was produced by frequent Crüe collaborator Bob Rock, which Neil says was a source of comfort for the band.
“He’s great,” the singer explains. “He’s a lot of fun. He’s smart. He’s creative. He knows what the wants. He knows what to get from each guy to make them be their best. That’s what a good producer does, takes what you have and makes it better – and that’s what (Rock ) does to Mötley Crüe. That’s what we love about him. We know he’s not gonna change and we didn’t want any change. We wanted to do it just the way we always recorded with him.”
The upcoming video, meanwhile, is an animated, all-CGI affair directed by Nick DenBoer that depicts the band in various levels of an apocalyptic, video game-like battle. It also includes a clever nod to the pig masks the group wore on the cover of 1997’s Generation Swine album.
In making the new label deal announcement, Big Machine Chairman and CEO Scott Borchetta — the driving force behind the 2014 Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Mötley Crüe compilation — says that, “Growing up in Southern California, I was in Hollywood when these new sheriffs showed up and took over the city. It was loud. It was powerful. It was game changing. (The band has) reignited the flame with ferocious newCrüe Music.”
Neil, who resides in Nashville, calls Borchetta “a good friend … and a good friend of the band’s. They’re just a smart company that knows how to market songs and how to get them on the radio and do all the stuff you gotta do. They’re perfect for us.”
BMG remains the band’s home for catalog releases, however. This year it’s already released a Dolby Atmos remaster of The Dirt Soundtrack to celebrate its fifth anniversary as well as a Record Store Day re-release of the rarities compilation Supersonic and Demonic Relics on vinyl for the first time. Since this year is the 25th anniversary of the band’s legendary Dr. Feelgood album, fans have been speculating about some sort of release to commemorate that later in the year.
Back in 2014, of course, Mötley Crüe famously signed a “binding” contract for its The Final Tour farewell trek stipulating that support act Alice Cooper could cut their heads off if they broke it. Then, however, came The Dirt, which despite overwhelmingly negative reviews was a rating success, while the soundtrack hit No. 10 on the Billboard 200 and Top 5 on the Top Rock Albums and Soundtrack Albums charts. “The Dirt (Est. 1981)” single was also a Top 10 Mainstream Rock hit.
“The Dirt got us so many new fans, a whole generation that hadn’t seen Mötley Crüe. That kinda brought us back to want to play again,” Neil says. The Crüe did regroup for The Stadium Tour with Def Leppard in 2022, while John5 came on board later in the year in place of Mars, who announced he was retiring from touring. (The band and Mars are currently embroiled in legal actions regarding the latter’s departure and status in the band, which Neil would not comment on.)
“John brings a lot,” Neil says. “He’s an amazing, creative guitar player. He hears stuff us normal people don’t hear. He brings a lot to the song and a lot to the band, and we’re just so happy to have him.” The feeling is mutual according to John5, who collaborated with Sixx on Sixx A.M. projects and co-wrote the three new songs on The Dirt Soundtrack.
“I love Motley and I’ve known Mick, Tommy (Lee) and Nikki for so long, it’s just like playing with your friends,” the guitarist says. “Their music is something I care about. I care about the history and I care about the future of this band, so I want to do things with the utmost respect and make sure everything is done right and execute it to the ability it deserves.”
Mötley Crüe will play selected shows this year starting May 3-4 at Hard Rock Live in Atlantic City, N.J. and including several festival dates.
Check out the full tour itinerary below:
May 3-4 — Atlantic City, NJ @ Hard Rock Live
May 9 — Daytona Beach, FL @ Welcome to Rockville
June 22 — Milwaukee, WI @ Summerfest
June 23 — Mt. Pleasant, MI @ Soaring Eagle Casino & Resort
July 11 — Calgary, Canada @ Calgary Stampede
July 13 — Ottawa, Canada @ Ottawa Bluesfest
July 14 — Quebec, Canada @ Festival d’Ete de Quebec
July 19 — Minot, ND @ North Dakota State Fair
August 10 — Springfield, IL @ Illinois State Fair
August 14 — Des Moines, IA @ Iowa State Fair
August 17 — Thackerville, OK @ Winstar Casino
August 29 — St. Paul, MN @ Minnesota State Fair
August 31 — Uncasville, CT @ Mohegan Sun
Sept. 26 — Hollywood, FL @ Hard Rock Live
Sept. 28 — Louisville, KY @ Louder Than Life Festival
Oct. 13 — Sacramento, CA @ Aftershock Fest
