A Rock Resurrection?
Notes on women in rock, rock-stardom, burnout and comebacks
One of my favorite bands just made my day. They have announced they are doing a reunion tour after a nine year hiatus. The details are still being worked out, so nothing is guaranteed. But if they do come back, seeing them live is a bucket list item for me.
It is a normal impulse, when a band we love calls it quits, to hope that they change their minds and make a come-back. I was a kid when the Beatles broke up, and it was sad news. For the people who were just a little older than I was, for whom the Beatles were their musical lodestar, it was devastating. Many of them didn’t accept that the band was truly done until John Lennon was murdered.
There are so many ways a band can come to an end:
Death: Led Zeppelin and Motorhead ended when core members (Bonzo and Lemmy, respectively) died. Few bands in history have rocked as hard as they did. The Doors didn’t end with Jim Morrison’s death, but the band was a shadow of its former self. The same is true for Queen, post Freddie Mercury.
Dissension: Cream fought among themselves throughout their brief existence as a band. Somehow they put out two years of incandescent music, and changed the direction of rock, before imploding. King Crimson can be said to have broken up and come back together many times. Certain members of Pink Floyd notoriously hated each other, yet they somehow managed to keep putting out great music together until finally coming apart for good.
Drift: Jefferson Airplane were probably the most talented and iconic band of the late 1960s. They embodied the Summer of Love. But they wanted to do different things musically, and would eventually splinter into multiple groups that went their separate ways. The progressive rock group Genesis is another example — many of their individual members went on to success doing other things.
Obsolescence: Probably the most common. Audiences change and most artists have a hard time switching gears, so they fade into obscurity. Some go on to make a good living playing rock festivals for their aging fans who remember the glory years (looking at you, Guns ‘n Roses, Kiss, Foo Fighters and so many more.) Others hang it up and go on to other things.
Add burnout to the list.
In 2016, I discovered one of the greatest hard-rock bands I had never heard of. I was watching a YouTuber who streams new music from unknown artists and found Crucified Barbara. I quickly became addicted, only to find out months later that the band were breaking up.
The period in which they were doing their thing corresponded to the years I was most obsessively focused on work and stuff like that. I wrote a recent piece about realizing that my priorities might not have been the right ones for some of those years.
Missing this band was one of the penalties:
Here is how Crucified Barbara sounded three years before they broke up:
The thing is, they were not actually unknown. In their heyday, they were a big deal, at least in Europe. Their secret weapon was their live performances: Everywhere they played, they simply burned the house down.
Why did they call it quits? Burnout. They had been touring and recording relentlessly for 18 years. They were trying to balance that with their personal lives, all the while dealing with a continual barrage of sexist nonsense:
I’m excited about their upcoming reunion tour, and thinking about how to make it possible to see them. Here is a sample of what they were like, live. It’s a clip from one of their concerts in France in 2012. I highly recommend taking the 20 or so minutes to watch them in action:
Postscript: A Note on work-life balance, burnout and being a rock star
There is a mountain of popular literature about how professional women should approach work/life balance, but I’ve never seen any books in that genre addressed specifically to musicians, let alone rock stars. Crucified Barbara founder and bandleader Mia Karlsson could probably write one.
She gave a terrific interview recently in which she talks about the band, the reunion, and the ups and downs of the rock star life, including burnout:
They toured with us in the States. Clara the guitarist was the nicest one. Some less so.
Really interesting summary of how bands end, and thanks for introducing me to Crucified Barbara. I watched the Mia Carlsson interview, really interesting on the rock grind and burnout.