5 Subtle Clues Your Favorite Band Secretly Sucks

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#3. They Sell out Huge Venues but Don't Sell Records

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If you were basing your judgment on nothing but concert attendance, it wouldn't be crazy to assume that Phish is one of the best bands in the world. Of course, anyone with four hours or more of space between them and their last magic mushroom trip knows that's not the case. Phish is a terrible band.

Imagine I'm speaking as this guy for the first part of the next sentence.

"Well, it's not that they're a bad band, per se, it's just that what they do onstage doesn't really translate to the studio," some dirty hippie probably said just now. They're wrong, though, because if Phish (or the Grateful Dead before them) was a good band, they would find a way to make their shite work everywhere.

It's not impossible. Plenty of bands make great albums and also put on consistently great shows. Bruce Springsteen has been doing that for decades. If the only way you can pull a strong performance out of a band is to put them in front of thousands of adoring fans, it's not because they're awesome, it's because they're shitty songwriters who have to play minor variations of the same idea for minutes on end before it becomes even remotely listenable. Their only role in the music universe is to give the last few thousand people in the world who still do acid a relatively safe place to go when the planetarium is closed.

Whether fans want to admit it or not, bands like Phish didn't build their vast live following by making good music. They did it by consistently throwing great drug parties.

There are some exceptions in this particular realm right now. Pearl Jam has built the same kind of live following, but they did it on the strength of years and years worth of memorable songs and albums. Even the Dave Matthews Band manages to pair incessant noodling onstage with relatively tight studio work on occasion.

So let me ask you this: Is it fair to give someone like the Grateful Dead a pass as a "great" band even though all of their good albums are live albums and their studio stuff is mostly forgettable? Trick question, there are no good Grateful Dead albums. The live ones are the best, though, because, again, it's "hard to recreate what they do onstage within the confines of a studio, man."

Listen, I'm not saying people who make that claim about a band like Phish or Grateful Dead are incorrect. I'm just saying it means those bands are less talented than a lot of other bands.

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