The single most “boring” band in America, according to Tom Waits and John Lydon
Tom Waits once said, “I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in.” You get the sense that John Lydon would sooner choke on a stew like that rather than get out a sinful sieve.
The dog-eared edges, daring misplaced chords, and dirty croaks of unrefined performance are what make music feel deeply human. You undoubtedly get a sense from ‘Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis’ and ‘Anarchy in the UK’ of the strange cats behind the songs, and they’re all the better for it.
However, not everyone agrees with Waits and Lydon’s warts-and-all approach to music and seeks out a smoother polish to their pop. In fact, you can swap out ‘not everyone agrees’ for ‘nearly everyone disagrees’, particularly in America. Polished pop rules the airwaves over in the States, with the Eagles sitting pretty as the best-selling band in the nation’s history.
For Waits and Lydon, they’re also the most “boring”. The Captain Beefheart-loving pair figured that the country rock band’s sanitisation is an act of stripping the spice from carnitas until all you’re left with is overcooked nothingness.
As Waits put it himself, “I don’t like The Eagles,” he told NME. “They’re about as exciting as watching paint dry,” he said.
He then concluded his cutting lambast by stating: “Their albums are good for keeping the dust off your turntable, and that’s about all.” They had covered his song ‘Ol 55’ by this stage, but he was about as thankful for their “antiseptic” rendition, which ironically helped to launch his career, as the fake tan industry is of Donald Trump’s pumpkin-like endorsement.
While the band might be the only group with two separate records in the top ten best-selling albums of all time list, hailed for their cunning collision of country and rock by many, Waits and Lydon’s gripe with the Eagles is that all they did was pair the most middling parts of two commercial platitudes. The result, in their blunt view, was not only insipid, but insidious.
There’s not a hair out of place on ‘Hotel California’, and while most of the entire world adore it for that, it also means that it falls foul of Waits’ fundamental view of music. ”My theory is the best songs have never really been recorded,” the ‘Martha’ singer poetically opines.
Adding, ”We’re listening to things that made it through but there’s so many songs that have never made it because they were scared of the machine and wouldn’t allow themselves to be recorded. The trick is to get it in there, don’t hurt the song when you record it”.
Don Henley, though a fan of fellow maestros like Randy Newman, has often exhibited more of an inverse sentiment that a song ought to be wrestled with, plucked, and pruned until it’s perfect. Lydon doesn’t think so. He, like Waits, says that there should be “room for everything” in music, including “bum notes”.
In fact, he didn’t just find the Eagles guilty of dismissing music’s wider magic, but he found that their drive for sonic perfection was utterly murderous. “Don Henley, that’s the man,” Lydon said in an interview with Cream in 1992. “That’s the man responsible [for the dull seriousness of “doom-laden” music]. There’s a man with no humour. Same with Sting, he’s gone and taken himself far too seriously, hasn’t he? ‘I am an intellectual, honest, please believe me. Look how unshaved I can be.’”
And then, in 2007, he took aim at the Eagles in general: “They’re irrelevant. A band like that doesn’t write songs that mean anything. We’re the Charge of the Light Brigade, with decent generals, right?” While Waits might nod along in agreement, a few hundred million would beg to differ.
