When I was a teenager, the notion of a rock band lasting 30 years was still a hypothetical. Literally no "rock" band had lasted that long! I mean, The Who and The Rolling Stones were both still going, but their albums delivered sharply diminishing returns through the '80s (with The Who faring slightly better due to having a single primary songwriter who was restless in his own solo work). And my senior year of high school saw both those bands rolling across the planet on massive world tours—The Who's guest-star-studded Tommy tour and the Stone's slowly rusting Steel Wheels tour—that mostly mined material from much earlier periods of both bands' careers for their setlists.
But hey, no band had ever lasted that long yet, so what could you expect, right?
So it's kinda fun to me that these days as newer bands from that time are coming up on their own 30th anniversaries, they're often releasing albums as good as—and sometimes even better—than the ones during their original glory years.* And most of those bands touring play with a fire and passion that keeps them fro falling into some modern-day nostalgia circuit.
Turns out you need neither burn out NOR fade away after all!
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