The Iconic Band Over 40% Of People Would Want To Be A Part Of
Like baseball, barbecue, and bowling, debating the merits — or not — of classic rock and pop acts is one of the great American pastimes. Who had the greatest run of albums? Who sold the most in the shortest time? Who was the most impressive live act? And who was just the downright best in all spheres combined?
The joy of discussing the music greats is that, apart from the cold hard facts of record and ticket sales, there is no final answer. The old maxim is right: there’s no accounting for taste, and so we can keep joyfully arguing over music indefinitely, forever!
Having said that, one of the useful benefits of this newfangled thing called the internet is that we’re only ever a few clicks away from unlocking the power of the hive mind to back up — or else, completely obliterate — those music-related opinions we hold so dear.
Here at Grunge we’ve decided to harness the awesome answer-giving potential of YOU, the users of the Information Superhighway, to get a handle on what the nation’s musical biases really look like. So we asked a group of over 500 Americans: “Which iconic band would you want to be a part of?” Those surveyed could pick from a list of some of rock music’s heaviest hitters: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Eagles, Joan Jett’s The Runaways, Buddy Holly’s Crickets, and Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, but they could also give us a band of their own choosing.
So who came out on top?
A poor showing for Seger and Jett
Just because you’ve sold a bucketload of records, it doesn’t mean you’re always going to come out on top. As this survey demonstrated, the band of classic rock superstar Bob Seger (whose record sales exceed 75 million copies, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) failed to attract many clicks from those surveyed, receiving just over 3 percent of the vote.
Then again, cult adoration is no guarantee that you’ll gain traction with music lovers in the 21st century, either. Joan Jett’s Runaways (pictured), who were a runaway commercial and critical success back in the late 1970s and remain “one of the most famous all-female punk acts of the era,” according to Tone Deaf, have fared little better among Grunge readers, with just 4.44 percent of the vote.
We received no comments arguing that we should have chosen Jett’s later band, The Blackhearts, with whom she had her international signature hit “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” in 1982, suggesting that Joan Jett fans prefer her underappreciated earlier work.
The Stones beat the Crickets to take third place
There is a huge jump in voter numbers between fourth and third place on our list, and it is Buddy Holly’s famous backing band The Crickets who join The Silver Bullet Band and The Runaways in failing to take their portion of the vote into double figures. Our survey reveals that The Crickets — who, in fact, only backed Holly for a total of two years before his tragic death on The Day The Music Died in 1959, but continued to perform together without their star frontman all the way until 2015, according to All Music — are only the dream band to join for just over 5 percent of our survey respondents.
In comparison, The Rolling Stones came away with 14.67 percent of the vote, beating The Crickets by almost three votes to one. And, really, is it any surprise? Though few rock ‘n’ roll fans could argue against the fact that The Crickets were a highly influential band with a lasting legacy — The Crickets’ website claims that they “still help set the standard of excellence by which it should be judged” — The Rolling Stones have remained megastars with a huge audience ever since their heyday in the 1960s, and constantly sell out stadiums around the world with their mind-blowing stage shows. They are also a band full of characters: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood — who wouldn’t want to go on tour with those guys?
A respectable turn out for The Eagles, but the Fab Four smash it
Ever since the 1960s, the biggest battle of the bands has always been between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Even today, music fans feel the need to pick a side, despite the fact that the two British bands were close friends who didn’t feel the rivalry their fans and media were attempting to stoke, according to Cosmic Magazine.
But in our survey, the stranglehold of these two British bands on the top two spots in the league of musical greats has been well and truly smashed thanks to the performance of one of America’s own classic rock acts: The Eagles, with 17.5 percent of the American public dreaming of joining the legendary Glenn Frey and Don Henley on tour.
But there really is only one winner here: The Beatles, the band that defined the ’60s. The “Four Lads Who Shook The World” are the dream band to join for nearly 41 percent of Grunge readers. And can anyone really be surprised? John, Paul, George, and Ringo — see? You don’t even need their surnames, you know them already — are some of the biggest characters in popular culture, and the story of their rise and fall has become something of a fable, passed down to the next generation of Beatles fans.
However, 13.5 percent dreamt of joining another band altogether, with U2, Fleetwood Mac, and Led Zeppelin showing strongly.
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