This is going to piss off my readers who are eighties fans, but I want to be honest and put this out there right from the start: I'm more a child of the seventies than I am of the eighties. The eight artists I wrote about in the first eight chapters of this series (Jethro Tull, The Who, Pink Floyd, Yes, The Good Rats, Procol Harum, Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell) all had a tremendous part in forming my musical tastes, because most of them first got to me while I was still an open slate, a sort of musical larvae. By the time the eighties came along, those tastes were largely already formed by the artists of the sixties and seventies.
This doesn't mean that this next group of artists I'll be writing about aren't important to me. Just the opposite, in fact, as this whole series is about my "Favorite Artists". But it does mean that this next group of six bands are kind of the next tier down for me in my own personal pantheon of musical gods. They're "lesser gods," if you will. But lesser gods are still gods.
The bands in question are The Cars, The Police, Blondie, Eurythmics, The Smiths and The Go-Go's. The first three actually released their first couple of albums at the end of the seventies, but in spirit, I think most people associate them more with the eighties. I certainly do. Unlike my original pantheon of eight, who I remember primarily as WNEW-FM bands, these guys are all firmly classified in my head as WLIR bands, part of the so-called "New Wave" (although to be fair, I guess I actually first heard The Police and Blondie, and maybe even The Cars, I'm not sure about them -- on WNEW-FM.)
In comparison to the original eight, most of the bands in the second six had relatively shorter careers. Here are the numbers, in terms of studio albums (using Sputnik Music as the source, since there are some albums that can are classified by different sources as either studio albums or comp albums):
First eight: Jethro Tull - 22; The Who - 12 (including two double albums); Pink Floyd - 15 (including two double albums); Yes - 19 (including one double album); The Good Rats - 12; Procol Harum - 13; Bruce Springsteen - 19 (including one double album).
Second Six: The Cars - 7; The Police - 5; Blondie - 11; Eurythmics - 9; The Smiths - 4; The Go-Go's - 4.
So by and large, in addition to the original eight artists catching me more in my formative years, they also mostly put out a lot more LPs over the years to capture my attention (and my heart).
We're going to be talking about artists after these second six who actually started earlier than they did (examples: Fleetwood Mac and Rush). But although these artists were around longer, they didn't really make the list of bands I considered my bands until sometime after these six valiant new wavers did.
So anyway, within the next week or so (I hope), I'll be adding Part 9 to my favorite artists' series, as I take a look at The Cars. (I actually thought I was going to start writing about them here today. But as I began my intro, I realized that I really needed an interlude here before starting, so as not to take up half of The Cars' writeup with all of this intro stuff.) Anyway, see you in a few days.
