When asked what my favorite TV show is, I always say Saturday Night Live, even though I know this answer is likely to start an argument with the sort of person who cares what your favorite TV show is. Since 1980, when Lorne Michaels and the original cast left and the show was taken over by infamously ill-equipped replacements, including executive producer Jean Doumanian and “stars” Charles Rocket and Denny Dillon, it has been fashionable for intelligent, television-savvy individuals to dismiss SNL as terrible. (This is another example of a Default Smart Opinion.) To be fair, there have been many times in the past thirty-five or so years when those intelligent, television-savvy individuals were absolutely right. Nevertheless, the conversation about whether SNL happens to suck at this very moment is boring. I’m not interested in attempting to prove that Kate McKinnon is as valid as Gilda Radner, because it has nothing to do with why I’ve remained loyal.
What I love about Saturday Night Live—more than any cast member or recurring character—is the format, which never changes and is helpfully stated right in the title. Saturday Night Live airs on Saturday night, and it is live. That is all the information you need to know going in. There are other aspects of the SNL formula that go beyond the brand name: the cold open that ends with “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!”; the monologue; the first musical performance, which takes place before “Weekend Update”; the second musical performance, which takes place before the weird “10-to-1” sketch. Ultimately, I appreciate both the consistency with which SNL is delivered—always on the same day of the week, and never via prerecorded video (commercial parodies and Digital Shorts aside)—and the consistency with which it is crafted: the product is always the same, no matter who happens to be making it. I like this because it re-creates a familiar experience that has resonated with me in the past, and I want to continue experiencing it.
I love SNL for the same reason I love the NFL. It doesn’t matter if my team, the Green Bay Packers, has a great season or a bad season. I won’t stop watching because I happen to think the current crop of Packers isn’t as talented as the Packers from ten, twenty, or forty years ago. I would never argue that the NFL should pack it in for the good of its legacy because the most recent Super Bowl was unsatisfying.
When I watch professional football I am first and foremost enjoying the ritual of watching football. This is an uncomfortable truth that sportswriters who write columns criticizing the public for not caring more about concussions in football (or steroids in baseball) will never understand. They’re focused too much on the sanctity of the game (or the good of society) and not on what actually draws people to sports. Sports fans want stuff to do. We want to watch football games on TV in the fall because it’s an excuse to eat junk food and engage in excessive daytime drinking in our living rooms. We want to have tailgate parties outside baseball stadiums in the summer because it’s an excuse to eat junk food and engage in excessive daytime drinking in an environment that’s not our living rooms. These activities always take precedence over whatever happens to be horribly wrong about sports at the moment. I’m not saying this is right or even defensible, only that it’s true. Taking a moral stand against the latest scandal du jour instantly becomes untenable for most sports fans if it means giving up our snacks.
The most egregious example of this is probably the 1987 NFL players’ strike, which resulted in one week of canceled games and three subsequent weeks in which “replacement” players filled out the rosters of professional teams. Instead of Joe Montana and Lawrence Taylor, fans were treated to Doug Hoppock and Jim Crocicchia. It was the worst.
But it was also acceptable. The ’87 strike is largely forgotten now; its most lasting legacy is that it inspired the lesser of two movies in which Keanu Reeves, improbably, plays a quarterback. (I refer to The Replacements, a supremely crappy film I have seen ten times, which is inferior to Point Break, a supremely excellent film I have seen one hundred times.) Unless you were alive at the time (I turned ten right before the strike began), you probably aren’t aware that the striking players were trying to secure free-agent rights and a better portion of the league’s revenue, both worthy causes.
What’s notable to me in retrospect is that the majority of NFL fans watched the replacement games knowing full well that they were getting a fraudulent product (as well as undermining those aforementioned worthy causes). Ratings after the first week dropped about 20 percent compared with regular NFL games, and the numbers for Monday Night Football at the time were the game’s second lowest since 1970. But the TV networks had expected ratings to be far worse; MNF still attracted more than twelve million viewers, and the Sunday afternoon games on CBS had between nine and ten million viewers. That’s far less than the average NFL game draws now, but still, given the NFL’s relative popularity in the late ’80s, the replacement games were much closer to “business as usual” than they had any right to be. A New York Times story published after the first weekend of replacement games confirmed that the networks would carry the subsequent contests “because they have no alternative programming that would draw a bigger audience.”
The same month that the ’87 NFL strike commenced, Pink Floyd released its thirteenth studio album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Like the NFL, Pink Floyd was an insanely successful and prodigiously well-off institution experiencing serious dissension in its labor force. Two years earlier, bassist and principal songwriter Roger Waters quit via a letter sent to Pink Floyd’s US and UK record labels. Because Waters was the chief creative force behind the group’s most popular albums—The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and, most crucially, the twenty-two-times-platinum double LP, The Wall—he assumed that his departure meant the end of Pink Floyd. However, because Waters had voluntarily relinquished rights to the Pink Floyd name during a power struggle over the firing of the band’s manager, Steve O’Rourke, his former bandmates David Gilmour and Nick Mason believed that it was their right to continue without him. Waters sued, unsuccessfully, arguing that Pink Floyd was “spent” creatively. “If one of us is going to be called Pink Floyd,” he declared, “it’s me.”
Waters made his case with characteristic eloquence in a Rolling Stone cover story parsing the details of his feud with the rest of Pink Floyd. “There is the legal issue, which is the only thing that can be resolved in court. And that is, who owns the piece of property that is the name Pink Floyd?” he said. “The other issue is completely separate, the whole issue of what is and isn’t a rock group. What is the Beatles? Are Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr the Beatles? My view now is they’re not, any more than the Firm should have been called Led Zeppelin, even if John Paul Jones had been there.”
“What is and isn’t a rock group?” is a fascinating and profound question that, like other fascinating and profound questions posed by Roger Waters in the context of Pink Floyd, Gilmour and Mason were no longer interested in pondering. By all accounts, Waters had been a domineering and arrogant bandleader who for years publicly undermined the contributions of the other band members. “Back in the early ’70s, we used to pretend that we were a group,” Waters told Rolling Stone in 1982, right as the film version of The Wall was released. “I could work with another drummer and keyboard player very easily, and it’s likely at some point that I will.”
Waters not only disrespected the other people in Pink Floyd, he also took the power of the Pink Floyd brand for granted. Surely he could work with different musicians, but would anybody care? Waters seemed to think so, though five years later that theory was being put to the test.
As for “what is and isn’t Pink Floyd,” the majority of people not named Roger Waters seemed to believe that Pink Floyd was whatever entity happened to be calling itself Pink Floyd, no matter who was involved. In spite of Waters’s legal efforts—Gilmour claimed that he met with his attorneys nearly every day while making A Momentary Lapse of Reason because Waters’s attorneys were constantly threatening to shut him and Mason down—the album was completed, it was released by the Floyd’s longtime label, Columbia, and it went on to sell three million copies. Gilmour and Mason (with ousted keyboardist Rick Wright rejoining as a hired gun) then proceeded to make tens of millions of dollars touring stadiums around the world for nearly three years.
Waters responded by expanding his media offensive. “I think the songs are very poor in general,” Waters said of Reason. “The lyrics I can’t believe.” The dig on the lyrics (mostly written by Gilmour) is telling, as Waters had been the acknowledged intellectual in Pink Floyd. It was Waters who devised the big concepts that Floyd albums were known for in the ’70s, while Gilmour was recognized for accenting Waters’s ideas with grand musical flourishes. (“I didn’t play the guitar solos; he didn’t write the lyrics” was how Waters put it.)
Lack of tact aside, Waters has a point: Reason’s best-known song, “Learning to Fly,” features the truly stupid lyric “Can’t keep my eyes from the circling sky / Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I.” (Think Gilmour’s cowriter on this was Yoda, you?) Waters’s singular lyrical obsession in Pink Floyd was reconciling his admiration for the band’s original front man, the infamous acid-case recluse Syd Barrett, with his fear that rock stardom would render him similarly crazy. (Waters did end up like Barrett in one respect—they both watched Pink Floyd flourish after they left the band.) This colors all of Pink Floyd’s best and most resonant work, from Dark Side’s climactic cut, “Eclipse,” to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” to the entirety of The Wall. “Learning to Fly,” meanwhile, is about David Gilmour’s joy in flying his own fucking plane. It was, to put it mildly, inferior Pink Floyd product.
After he was out of Pink Floyd, Waters had bigger problems than Gilmour’s inane lyrics. A few months before the release of Reason, Waters put out his second solo record, Radio K.A.O.S., the most concept-intensive concept record of his career. What is the concept of Radio K.A.O.S.? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill myself. Allow me instead to quote from the liner notes:
Benny is a Welsh coal miner. He is a radio ham. He is 23 years old, married to Molly. They have a son, young Ben aged 4, and a new baby. They look after Benny’s twin brother Billy, who is apparently a vegetable. The mine is closed by market forces. The Male Voice Choir stops singing. One night Benny takes Billy on a pub crawl. Drunk in a brightly-lit shopping mall, Benny vents his anger on a shop window full of the multiple TV images of Margaret Thatcher’s mocking condescension.
I’m going to stop here—there are approximately thirty-eight more characters and 1.2 million additional words to get to—because I’m already tired and I’m guessing that you want to put this book down to listen to a song about a rich guy flying his own fucking plane.
Suffice it to say that Radio K.A.O.S. did not sell as well as A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
Gilmour’s advantage (and Waters’s insurmountable problem from a commercial perspective) was that Gilmour’s vocals and guitar playing were Pink Floyd’s first and second most recognizable musical attributes. A Momentary Lapse of Reason, unlike Radio K.A.O.S., sounds almost exactly like a Pink Floyd record if you aren’t listening to the songs all that closely. Fortunately for Gilmour and Mason, this was precisely the way Pink Floyd’s audience chose to listen to Pink Floyd in 1987. Pink Floyd exclusively played the sort of venues where the people standing onstage appeared to be small and distant abstractions surrounded by dry ice and retina-shearing lights. Close listening was out of the question, which meant it didn’t really matter what the songs were about or who was playing them. What mattered was the ritual of seeing Pink Floyd, which Waters had actively worked to dismantle for years.
When the supporting shows for Reason were announced, there had not been an extensive Pink Floyd tour in a decade. In late 1980 and early 1981, Waters devised the stage show for The Wall, which was too elaborate and expensive to tour outside of a handful of cities. A traditional round of concerts was discussed for 1983’s The Final Cut, but Waters opted out of those as well. Pink Floyd became even more popular in the interim, and the band’s scarcity heightened its mythic status.
Pink Floyd (rivaled only by Led Zeppelin and possibly Bob Marley) became the signature act of a certain kind of teenage suburban drug-culture lifestyle. If you were into smoking pot and traversing metaphysical realms of the mind while physically situated inside the confines of unsupervised basement rec rooms, Pink Floyd’s ’70s work was required listening, regardless of how removed each new generation was from those old records.
The unrequited demand for a Pink Floyd live experience is conveyed by an episode of Freaks and Geeks in which the freaks (played by Linda Cardellini, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, James Franco, and Busy Philipps) talk about hitting up the local planetarium on Friday night to check out the Pink Floyd laser show, which Segel’s character, Nick Andopolis, describes as a “transcendental experience.” Freaks and Geeks takes place in 1981, roughly at the midpoint between major Pink Floyd tours, but it really could’ve been any year, then or now. (There are still Pink Floyd tribute shows performed by hundreds of bands around the world.)
What Gilmour and Mason were offering with Reason and the accompanying tour was the ultimate Pink Floyd laser show, an ideal venue for aging fans to relive their glory days and for kids who missed the “real” Floyd to take drugs in the midst of a credible approximation. What must’ve been extra galling for Waters was that he predicted this on The Wall. In The Wall ’s initial, preposterously expensive stage production—which was presented in only four cities—a band of four musicians dressed up like Pink Floyd performed the album’s bombastic opening number, “In the Flesh?” The point was to underline the dehumanizing impersonality of arena shows, but what it ultimately illustrated was how Pink Floyd’s propensity for emphasizing iconography and visuals over the band members’ names and faces would neutralize the damage of Waters’s eventual departure.
No musician has ever argued in an interview, “I am as important as my songs—in fact, I’m more important.” It is required to at least pretend that “the music comes first.” No band is more associated with this idea than Pink Floyd. The band members have rarely appeared on their own album covers. (The exceptions are Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and the tedious double LP Ummagumma.) Even as The Dark Side of the Moon became one of the most popular LPs ever, the men who wrote and recorded it barely qualified as rock stars. This was by design.
“Oh, I wanted anonymity,” Waters said in 1987. “I treasured it. And somehow we made it big and stayed private and anonymous. It was the best of both worlds.” Now Waters wanted to retroactively assert his identity in Pink Floyd as a crucial aspect of the band’s aesthetic. But he was too late. (Perhaps not coincidentally, there are three photos of Gilmour and Mason in the liner notes of A Momentary Lapse of Reason—one duo shot and two solo pictures.)
“It is frustrating to find out how many people don’t know who I am or what I actually did in Pink Floyd,” Waters complained to Rolling Stone. “We get on a plane, and people ask what band we’re in. I tell ’em I’m Roger Waters, and it doesn’t mean a thing to them. Then I mention Pink Floyd, and they go, ‘Yeah, “Money.” I love The Wall.’”
But even fans who did know what Waters contributed to Pink Floyd didn’t stop going to Pink Floyd concerts. Perhaps the music was worse without him, but the rituals associated with the music were essentially the same. More important, Waters’s exit made the revival of those rituals possible. Pink Floyd would’ve been finished if Waters had his way. Siding with him as a fan would mean giving up the “transcendental experience” of hearing Pink Floyd music played by a majority of Pink Floyd’s members with fifty thousand people consuming fifty thousand tabs of acid. Even if Waters was right about the validity of calling this enterprise Pink Floyd, he was not correct as far as judging the market is concerned. As Waters himself put it, “I’m competing with myself and losing.”
What if A Momentary Lapse of Reason were structured around an obscure story involving radio waves and anti–Margaret Thatcher broadsides? What if Radio K.A.O.S. swapped out Jim Ladd’s interstitial DJ patter for some majestic David Gilmour guitar solos? What if Waters never left Pink Floyd? That would’ve been better for all involved, no?
Before we address all that, let’s ponder a parallel topic: What if Conan O’Brien never left The Tonight Show?
The late-night wars ended when Jay Leno folded up his wacky small-town newspaper headlines and retired to his fifty-story garage in 2014. But I will never not be interested in talking about the behind-the-scenes wrangling that took place over The Tonight Show in the ’90s, ’00s, and early ’10s. My interest in this topic far exceeds my interest in the actual Tonight Show. I honestly could not care less about The Tonight Show. I was sad when Leno retired, because I knew I could no longer hate him. Leno was an outstanding villain in a drama I couldn’t get enough of—the quality of the talk show he hosted inside that drama mattered as much to me as TGS did in the context of 30 Rock. To me, The Tonight Show is like one of those making-of-the-video music videos (e.g., Genesis’s “Invisible Touch” and Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl”)—you never see the actual video. Forget the corpse; I just wanted the dirt.
When people talk about the 2010 Tonight Show conflict between O’Brien and NBC/Jay Leno, they often overlook a vital detail: Leno did not “steal” The Tonight Show from O’Brien any more than Gilmour and Mason stole Pink Floyd from Waters. O’Brien decided to leave after rejecting a proposal forwarded by the network that would’ve placed Leno’s denim-clad carcass in the 11:30 p.m. slot for a monologue-centered prologue to O’Brien’s Tonight Show at 12:05 a.m. O’Brien subsequently released a statement maintaining that he would “not participate in the destruction of The Tonight Show” and demanded to be released from his contract.
I would normally characterize equating a half-hour time-slot bump with “the destruction of The Tonight Show” as hyperbole, but given my semantics-based argument for SNL earlier, I must let it slide for the sake of ideological consistency. O’Brien wanted The Tonight Show to air at night and not (technically) in the morning. I won’t dispute any of that. Instead I’ll just quote Jerry Seinfeld at the end of Bill Carter’s definitive account of the Jay-Conan debacle, 2010’s The War for Late Night: “It’s all fake! There’s no institution to offend! All of this ‘I won’t sit by and watch the institution damaged.’ What institution? Ripping off the public? That’s the only institution. We tell jokes and they give us millions!”
(How awesome is post-Seinfeld Jerry Seinfeld? Actually, it’s more like post–Bee Movie / The Marriage Ref Jerry Seinfeld, but still: he’s such an unrepentantly cranky bastard now. At some point Seinfeld decided to follow the Kobe Bryant model: he dropped the smiling, likable celebrity act and revealed the angry, misanthropic, and candid asshole underneath. Everything he says now is deeply cynical and coldly persuasive.)
O’Brien partisans will insist that even if Conan did voluntarily jump from NBC, the network escorted him to the ledge and then covered that ledge in rabies-infested rats. He was practically pushed from The Tonight Show, in other words. There is some validity to this argument: reinserting Leno into the late-night mix couldn’t help but undermine O’Brien and his show. It was a humiliating vote of no confidence from NBC. But if you set aside O’Brien’s bruised ego and look at this strictly in terms what was best for O’Brien’s career, staying on NBC still seems better in retrospect then winding up on TBS (or Fox or ABC, if O’Brien had been luckier). Again, I’ll quote Seinfeld, the Sage of Real Talk: “Hang around! Just stay there, just be there! The old cliché: 95 percent is just showing up. OK, I’m on at 12; I’m still showing up. You never leave!”
I have a theory about why O’Brien’s Tonight Show pulled in mediocre ratings, and it goes back to viewing rituals. As a person born in the late ’70s, I naturally believe that Conan O’Brien is funnier than Jay Leno. But I hardly ever watched his version of The Tonight Show, just as I never watched Leno’s Tonight Show. Watching The Tonight Show was simply never part of my formative experience as a TV viewer. I appreciate Johnny Carson as a historical figure, but I was too young to see him in his prime, back when he could seduce sexy-as-hell Angie Dickinson, even while one of Jack Hanna’s monkeys urinated on his shoulder.
I think I’m pretty typical in this regard—for people under the age of fifty, The Tonight Show is just another late-night talk show, not necessarily the greatest franchise in the history of TV. So if you supported the idea of O’Brien rather than Leno hosting The Tonight Show, there’s a decent chance that this support didn’t translate to actual viewership. Whereas the people who did watch The Tonight Show liked Leno, or else they wouldn’t have sat through all those O.J. jokes for twenty years.
The conventional wisdom on O’Brien is that he was “too weird” to operate on The Tonight Show, which is true if by “too weird” you mean “utterly disconnected from Jay Leno’s version of The Tonight Show.” When Jimmy Fallon—who won the Jay-Conan war without firing a single shot—took over in 2014, he began by introducing himself to The Tonight Show’s core audience with an ingratiating display of boyish humility. He talked about his wife and child, his proud parents, and the honor of inheriting what Leno had shepherded since the early ’90s. He courted the uncool Leno fans whom O’Brien seemed ambivalent about. If Fallon had been wearing a cap, he would have respectfully removed it and gripped it to his chest; if it were possible to mow 4.1 million lawns in a single night, Fallon would’ve chartered a jet and loaded it with his trusty mower immediately after stepping off the stage. Fallon’s message was clear and reassuring. This was the gist: “I’m the new guy, but not really new. What you’re about to see might seem different at first, but you’ll discover that it’s the same thing to which you’ve grown accustomed.”
If O’Brien had stayed on The Tonight Show, his show probably wouldn’t have been like that. It probably would’ve been more like The Wall—a late-night talk show about the ugly and dehumanizing environment in which late-night talk shows are created. I only became a regular viewer of O’Brien’s Tonight Show during its final two weeks, when O’Brien steered his failing enterprise spectacularly off a cliff. As a person not emotionally invested in The Tonight Show, watching O’Brien self-destruct was way more entertaining than watching a conventional late-night talk show.
Could he have done that every week, with Leno as his lead-in? We’ll never know, but Leno was clearly a valuable foil for O’Brien. The “Team Coco” protests that erupted in response to O’Brien’s “firing” were rooted at least partly in generational resentment. Leno was a potent symbol of boomer cultural hegemony, and if you were conditioned as a Gen Xer or Millennial to hate Woodstock retrospectives and Eagles reunion tours, O’Brien was easy to root for. Putting Leno on directly before The Tonight Show under contentious circumstances would’ve given O’Brien license to be a dick to his network and Leno while remaining a sympathetic figure in the eyes of the media and viewers who might not otherwise care about The Tonight Show. Perhaps NBC would’ve eventually replaced O’Brien with Leno on its own volition, but I doubt it, especially if the drama happened to gin up interest in O’Brien’s otherwise indifferently received show.
This is all speculation, of course. What’s known for certain is what happened to O’Brien after he left The Tonight Show: he was marginalized on a cable network best known for airing reruns of The Big Bang Theory 467 times per day (give or take a hundred airings), and he was defined by the row over The Tonight Show in a mostly negative way. Again, Conan O’Brien in my view as a non-Cocoite seems sad and sort of small on basic cable. It’s similar to the way Waters receded in the public’s estimation in the aftermath of blowing up his relationship with Pink Floyd. In the 2011 film Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, a concert documentary about O’Brien’s post–Tonight Show Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television comedy tour, O’Brien is depicted as a man adrift. He is self-pitying, angry, and needy. He also seems to have temporarily lost his ability to discern irony: at one point O’Brien insists that he’s “the least entitled person” he knows in spite of starring in a feature film based on the premise that he was persecuted by NBC because of a personnel decision that added tens of millions of dollars to his bank account.
That discomfiting impression is exacerbated by how unfunny the movie is, both when O’Brien is on the stage and when he’s off it. No matter how hard his put-upon assistants laugh at his desperate mugging, O’Brien’s bitterness is palpable. (If Dont Look Back had been filmed during Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait period, it might’ve resembled Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.) It speaks to how deluded O’Brien and his camp were by the Team Coco bubble: they believed Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop would make its titular star seem sympathetic. Instead the film unintentionally reveals O’Brien’s “destruction of The Tonight Show” talk for what it is—self-serving and ultimately self-defeating.
This will strike some as counterintuitive and trollish but nevertheless I believe it’s the truth: NBC was right. The public was comfortable with Leno doing a monologue at 11:30 p.m. and watching O’Brien after that. Leno was good at guitar solos, and O’Brien was good at lyrics. For his own good, O’Brien should’ve kept the band together.
So: What if Roger Waters never left Pink Floyd? This question was sort of answered in 2005, when Waters reunited with Gilmour, Mason, and Wright at Live 8 in London. Pink Floyd played four songs: “Breathe,” “Money,” “Wish You Were Here,” and “Comfortably Numb,” and nearly everyone who saw the performance agreed that it went as well as could possibly be expected. Pink Floyd sounded fantastic: considering the circumstances, it’s probably the greatest reunion gig ever. Most striking was Waters, who bounded around the stage enthusiastically and stopped the show before “Wish You Were Here” to remark on how emotional he felt to be back with the Floyd again.
Big-money offers predictably poured in after the gig, rumored to top out at $200 million. Gilmour publicly rejected the idea of a tour; he likened playing with Waters to sleeping with an ex. “The Live 8 thing was great but it was closure,” he said. “There’s no future for Pink Floyd.”
The apparent retirement of the Pink Floyd name prompted a stunning role reversal—now it was Waters’s turn to satisfy the ritualistic needs of Pink Floyd’s fan base. For three years after the Live 8 show, from 2006 through 2008, he toured the world playing The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. In 2010 he launched another three-year tour centered on The Wall that wrapped the month he turned seventy. While he didn’t technically tour under the Pink Floyd banner, Waters was trading on Pink Floyd’s music, and he benefited from Gilmour, Mason, and Wright essentially surrendering the brand name. Waters’s ex-partners and longtime adversaries even offered public approval of his efforts: Gilmour and Mason joined him for a Wall show at London’s O2 arena. Waters no longer had to compete with himself.
Perhaps Waters could be accused of hypocrisy, but “what is or isn’t a rock group” is a question that time is in the midst of settling without the input of guitar-slinging mortals. I’m writing this two days after the death of Tommy Ramone, who had been the last original surviving member of the Ramones. It seems incredible that Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and now Tommy are gone forever, but it’s really not incredible at all. What’s incredible is that more top-line classic-rock bands haven’t been wiped completely off the face of the earth. There are two surviving original Beatles, two surviving members of the Who, three surviving members of Led Zeppelin, and four original surviving Stones. All four guys in Black Sabbath are still alive in spite of eating LSD for breakfast throughout the ’70s. U2 and R.E.M. are still intact, too. Axl hates most of the original Guns N’ Roses, but a full reunion is still possible should cooler heads finally prevail. Every significant band you can think of—even a hard-luck outfit with a high body count, such as Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers Band—still has somebody who’s around to answer the call if a concert promoter phones. When the final episode of Breaking Bad briefly reignited interest in the ’70s power-pop group Badfinger by using the heartrending “Baby Blue” over the closing scene, that band was able to tour, even though the two main singers had committed suicide decades earlier. Against all odds, classic-rock bands have endured like termites.
Eventually, every single person in these bands and every other band you’ve ever loved or merely heard of will be dead. What then? Well, if there’s still an audience of living music fans interested in seeing the music performed live, those bands will carry on in the form of holograms, jukebox musicals, and Cirque du Soleil extravaganzas. Consider that, in 2010, Elvis Presley had his best earnings year ever, thirty-three years after his death, raking in $60 million thanks to sales spurred by his seventy-fifth birthday and the launch of the Viva Elvis Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. That same year, Cirque du Soleil announced that it would be mounting a Michael Jackson–themed show for a worldwide tour and a permanent installation in Vegas. Jackson, who died in 2009, became a bestselling artist again in the aftermath of his death, moving 8.2 million units in the United States and thirty-five million units worldwide. Sony paid a quarter of a billion dollars for access to his archive of unreleased music, the biggest contract for a single artist in history.
Over the next ten to twenty years, these stories will become increasingly common. Some people are too popular to ever leave show business, even after they stop breathing. But don’t worry—there’s no institution to offend. Ripping off the public is the only institution.