It’s always interesting to me to observe how performers,
particularly veteran ones, deal with an unresponsive audience. While I’m sure that there’s no one “right”
way to handle such a situation, there is certainly a very wrong one: ladies and
gentlemen, let’s have a rousing lack of applause for Queensrÿche frontman Geoff
Tate, appearing at this year’s Rocklahoma festival…
Watching that video is bound to raise a few questions for
any viewer. In a post like this, it’s my
job as blogger to anticipate at least some of those questions and answer them
for you, at least to the best of my ability and/or snark capability. Without further ado, then:
1) Queensrÿche are still together? Indeed they are, although you are almost
certainly better off if you lost track of them somewhere in the early-to-mid
‘90s. Founding guitarist and prolific
songwriter Chris DeGarmo left the band in 1997, and they have struggled
creatively ever since, bouncing from bad imitation grunge to ham-fisted “return
to form” concept records to covers albums to tours featuring cabaret
dancers. Their best album (relatively
speaking) since their heyday is the self-explanatorily titled Operation: Mindcrime II, a sequel every
bit as disappointing and unnecessary as it sounds. Their latest, Dedicated to Chaos, was released last year to a nearly unanimous
reaction of vitriol and mockery, and it is every bit as bad as the criticism on
the intertubes would have you believe.
2) That all sounds pretty awful. Were
these guys ever any good? Indeed
they were: for a five album-plus-one EP run between 1983 and 1994, they were
responsible for some of the most intelligent and challenging music of their era
and scene. For a teenager of the time
like me, stuck with metal as pop and sick of the more vapid hairball bands,
they were a godsend. In particular,
1986’s Rage for Order (my personal
favorite) and 1988’s Operation: Mindcrime
(my pick for their artistic peak) were as good as non-thrash ‘80s metal got,
and remain well worth investigating.
3) So what happened? With DeGarmo out of the picture, Tate took
creative control of the band. Judging by
some of his remarks in interviews, he’s no longer much of a fan of heavy metal
as a genre, a shift in musical preference that his recent work under the Queensrÿche
banner certainly bears out. There’s
nothing wrong with that per se – all of our tastes grow and evolve as we do –
but it does get thorny when your audience wants something you no longer have
any interest in giving them.
4) So why doesn’t he just go solo? He tried that, releasing a self-titled solo
disc a few years back that was as mellow (and decidedly non-metal) as it was
uninvolving. Its failure likely left
Tate between a rock and a hard place: his audience was only interested in Queensrÿche's earlier sound,
and creative restlessness/ambition doesn’t necessarily keep the bills
paid. So it seems that Tate more or less
began selling his solo ideas as Queensrÿche, sandwiching them between the old
hits that actually attracted a crowd during live performances. Unfortunately, it didn’t take the crowd too
long to catch on, and the audience for all of this has been steadily dwindling
along with, rumor has it, the enthusiasm of his bandmates.
5) Did the crowd really suck at Rocklahoma? Wasn’t there, couldn’t tell ya, although most
eyewitness reports I’ve stumbled across seem to describe the band’s performance
up to the point of Tate’s rant as “lackluster”, or some synonym thereof. On the one hand, all bands have off
nights. On the other, an audience is
frequently only as “good” as the entertainment they are witnessing. Surely, a thirty-year veteran like Tate has
had to convince an indifferent crowd at some other point in his career, and
surely he has done so by proving his mettle to an audience, rather than
demanding their unbridled enthusiasm simply by showing up on stage. Insulting the audience as Tate did is a
mistake made by newbies with chips on their shoulders; for a man with his
experience to do so is downright bizarre at best.
6) And, lastly, how do I feel about it as a
onetime fan? Not much different than
I did before I read about all of this, actually. Their early music meant a lot to me as a kid,
and I still enjoy that era of their work now.
If anything, all it’s done is force me to face facts: in my opinion,
they’ve been mostly useless post-DeGarmo, and I need to stop forcing myself to
try to like uninspired dreck just because a certain band name is printed on the
cover. So I opened up my music folder,
deleted Dedicated to Chaos and a few
other lame, latter-day albums that I’ll never actually listen to again anyway –
and queued up Rage for Order, which
still sounds great to my ears. Friends,
there is too much great music and too little free time available in my
life. If I waste any more than I need to
of that time on mediocrity, particularly out of some intertwined sense of
nostalgia and obligation, then the joke is well and truly on me.
There has been a bit of an interesting post-script to all of
this. Since word and video of the “you
suck” incident went viral, it has been announced that Geoff Tate will spent the
rest of the summer pursuing his “solo acoustic performances”. Meanwhile, the rest of the band have drafted
a new singer and will tour under the name Rising West (derived from a lyric on The Warning, Queensrÿche’s first full
length album), performing material solely from the early, good years; they will
also be recording new material, presumably in the same artistic vein. I sincerely wish all of them the best of
luck: Tate with getting to make the music he really wants to make, and his
(former?) bandmates with getting back to where they once belonged. Few things must really suck more than feeling obligated to perform music that your
heart isn’t really in.
Addendum: this guy’s YouTube Video sums up the band’s career
arc accurately, hilariously, and in a grand total of two minutes and twenty
seconds.
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