Cheap Trick w/ very special guests, Soul Asylum

[darkstar]

Kind of surprised to hear concert ad the radio. I guess I realized that SA's star had diminished, but couldn't they fill a hall just as well as CT at the same ticket price? Apparently not. But hell, I'm pushing 50 and I think I could pick the SA singer out of a line-up easier than I could Robin Zander...


:shrug:

[last_texas_dem]

1. Soul Asylum are one of my all-time favorite bands

I think they hurt their popularity by waiting too long between albums. Their '98 album Candy from a Stranger (a very underrated album, IMHO) didn't do as well as its two platinum-plus-selling predecessors, but many bands have survived a one-album commercial slump. Plus 1998 was just a bad year for many of the bands who had their breakthroughs in the early- to mid-nineties; that was the year the boy bands and teen pop singers were starting to dominate the airwaves again. But for whatever reason, Soul Asylum didn't release a new album until just last year (and that one was even post-poned a bit more due to the death of their bassist); eight years is quite a while to wait between albums and no doubt had some effect on the size of their fan base. Plus, Soul Asylum have long had to deal with a rift in their fan base, between the older fans of their more punk-influenced stuff and the fans of their work from Grave Dancers' Union and beyond. A lot of their old school fans think they sold out by signing to Columbia and releasing more "commercial" (at least, in the mid-nineties) material. Really, I think their music from both eras is cool; their later stuff may not rock quite as hard, but it's also generally more melodic and developed musically. (And I'm not really biased to one era or another based on when I got into them; I started listening to them a lot around 2001 or 2002 when they seemed to have fallen off the map and no one was talking about them!) But yeah, I guess Cheap Trick is considered the bigger band due to their longer period of commercial success, but I figure both groups have a decent amount of fans. Maybe Soul Asylum will benefit from a wave of nineties nostalgia that ought to roll through in five to ten years! Anyway, apologies for this long, rambling paragraph...