I think I might have talked about this before, albeit from a different angle (emphasis mine -- ed.)...
ZZ Top and Aerosmith come to town tonight as two bands with more than a few things in common. Both played up a certain regional pride: ZZT is that little ol' band from Texas, Aerosmith the bad boys from Boston. Both have had bunches of hits. Both were served well by MTV. Both made songs for soundtracks that were more profitable than respectable.
...but it did bring something to mind. I remember talking to an Aerosmith fan a few years ago, and we were talking about all the people who would come to the live show who were fans of the band because of songs like "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing," which wasn't really representative of the Aerosmith sound. I really do wonder sometimes how many people, for example, only liked the following bands for the following songs:
• Metallica, "Nothing Else Matters"
• Guns'n'Roses, "November Rain"
• Queensryche, "Silent Lucidity"
Of course, the folks who bought those songs' respective full-length albums were treated to some of the bands' more representative records, and I'm sure many of them liked those records too -- probably more people than, say, who were brought to the country format by the more poppy acts and ended up liking the more traditional artists -- but still I hate to think of all the people who never really got past those songs, because they missed out on some awesome music...
....sort of like the tune playing on the Boneyard, Sirius Ch. 19, as I was writing this...."Make his fight on the hill in the early day, constant chill deep inside...." Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls" was my second favorite cut from Ride the Lightning after "Creeping Death." I could listen to that church bell-punctuated intro on a continuous loop for hours on end.
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