The "bad guy" in the band: who are the other Mike Loves in music?

And Birdman is an interesting one, because it's arguably not just about Big Tymers, but also related to the entire golden era of Cash Money records.

you have to come up w/ groups that do have inessential or at least clearly least essential members and then have that member be someone that manages to acquire a disproportionate level of power and influence over the band and uses that power generally for ill cuz they're an asshole. that's alot of conditions.

steve perry decidedly essential to journey so i'd disqualify him. eazy-e maybe, except he's also the bez of nwa so somehow simultaneously the least essential and most essential member of nwa. i mean eazy-duz-it was almost as big as straight outta compton at the time.

how is Steve Perry a Mike Love? I know he broke his hip and asked the band to wait until he recovered to go on tour--and then the band said we gotta get this cash and hired another singer

Do they have be inessential? Or do they just have to be oppositional to the resident genius/geniuses, and also influential in the group's direction?

I can't remember but wasn't one of the Jackson 5 kind of a Mike Love? Jermaine, maybe?

Yeah, scratch Steve Perry, totally doesn't qualify

there's a really good reality tv show somewhere in this thread.

jackson five didn't have a mike love. totally had a murry wilson though.

x-post America's Next Great Mike Love

Can we be shown weirdoes?

for someone to be truly Love-ish, it would seem that the family band aspect would be key. Like, Love's position therein was (I think) fortified in that as the wilson's cousin, he was not subject to Murry's abuse, and thus backed Murry a lot of the time? on the "help me rhonda" session tape where Brian stands up to Murry, Mike sides with Murry, if memory serves.

Jackson Five = Beach Boys/ Micheal = Brian; Carl = Jermaine; …I think I read somewhere that either Randy or Jackie took after Joe and thus are ruthless pricks. So maybe which ever one = Love.

I think yr recollection is correct but otoh Murry screwed Mike pretty hard with the royalties/publishing (which in turn fed Mike's financial obsession)

To be a true Mike Love, some people think you're a shitty musician. So Johnny Ramone.....

^did i miss the memo as to when Johnny Ramone was supposed to have turned into a great guitarist?

Johnny Ramone is a great guitarist

if you listen to Mike Doughty then the other guys in Soul Coughing were all Mike Loves

relative to the rest of the band

re: johnny

people could rightly argue that Johnny's style is super-simple and they would be right but I've never heard anyone argue that he is literally a shitty guitarist (which is certainly a charge levelled at other punk guitarists, ie Greg Ginn)

like it's really easy to imagine loving the beach boys but really having no use for love's vocals or lyrics while loving the ramones but having no use for johnny's guitar is insane.

now imagining Ramones as a dub act w just drums/bass/Joey

johnny IS the ramones, musically

also like he was in a band with a total fuck up deceitful junkie and a fragile child, i'd imagine from his perspective he was just getting shit done whether people liked it or not

again, I think actual musical ability isn't the question here. It's the perception of the Mike Love figure as being a weak link in the band musically - which no-one would accuse Johnny Ramone of being in The Ramones. If anyone was perceived as the weak link as a musician it was Dee Dee and then only on the first album mostly.

did Dee Dee play on the records or did Johnny ever pull a Steve Jones/Keith Richards and just play it himself?

Johnny Ramone is a great guitarist

― Οὖτις, Friday, May 23, 2014 1:35 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^jesus christ, on what planet. I think when you gotta bring in session guys to play your parts, you lose some cred.

I love the guitar on the Ramones records, esp the first one, but it's not "great" by any stretch.

xp not that I know of, it all sounds dee dee-ish to me though it wouldn't be the toughest thing to sound like dee dee

upper missisppi OTM about how he saw his role in the band - and that's where the most direct Mike Love comparisons work for Johnny, the vision of themselves as the straight hard-working money guy who just wants to tour for the fans and the bucks, but saddled with a beloved OCD weirdo genius who wouldn't make it on their own

it does what it needs to do, very well. sorry there aren't enough fiery solos for you. a great musician is someone who has command of his instrument, can make it achieve the desired effect, which Johnny definitely did.

but yeah brio and balls etc. all otm musically Johnny is not incidental to the Ramones, he IS the musical center of the Ramones.

xp

again - it's not so much about how great Johnny Ramone plays or Mike Love sings, those are subjective arguments outside the totally objective Mike Love taxonomy game. The Ramones narrative is not that he was a shitty player riding on the backs of his more talented bandmates. He's no Yngwie, that's not the point.

Disagree. And im not into firey solos chief. I just dont see anything really great about the guy.

xpost

Plus he was a fucking douche

not trying to be a jerk, i do like the ramones, at least i like the first 2 or 3 albums. Gets sketchy for me after that.

hahaha 'chief'

yeah but the thing is Ramones fans don't generally hate on Johnny because they think he can't play as well as the other Ramones whereas Beach Boys fans hate on Mike Love for being a lesser musician than the other Beach Boys. It's about being a weak link in relation to others' talents.

If you were going to go after Johnny on his musical contribution, I think a better argument would be that Dee Dee and Joey wrote all the songs.

I think just to remove any possibility that anyone else can meet the narrow criteria we should just also stipulate that the band member's name has to be "Mike Love"

or Lars! yeah maybe I have made restrictions too tight to be a Mike Love. It's an exclusive club.

xp
And I guess the other Johnny/Mike comparison is the idea that they were the anti-experimentation force in the band - the ones who wanted to keep the band on a fan-pleasing familiar track and play 200 shows a year. Mike lost that battle at least for a time, while Johnny won. Whether that was best for their bands is open to debate I guess.

hahaha 'chief'

― balls, Friday, May 23, 2014 2:21 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I gotta whole bunch of those: "sport", "coach", "junior"- im good like that.

without even trying, I imagine

Was it you who called somebody "Wapner" on another thread, Bill? That cracked me up.

yeah "nice try Wapner" lol

I heard Walter Lure plays some of the guitar parts on the Ramones' records for Johnny, is this true?

yo- Stevie Nicks is absolutely a Mike Love!!

i don't think it's any big secret Walter Lure and Ed Stasium and others (Daniel Rey maybe?) played bits and pieces on some of the shitty mid-late 80's stuff

yo- Stevie Nicks is absolutely a Mike Love!!

― i also enjoy in line skateing (spazzmatazz), Friday, May 23, 2014 1:49 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wuuut no way dogg

Stevie absolutely fits all the criteria listed above. Relative weak-link in the band, became the breakout star, and didn't humor Lindsey's whims after Tusk flopped. Similar to Axl too: in the mid-late 80s when she did only like two weeks on Tango in the Night…

Plays it safe for the money, discourages the OCD weirdo savant, and becomes the perceived leader/face of a band she joined nearly a decade already into its existence. She didn't do much but sing on the records even though she wrote her songs/the germs of her songs. Totally a Mike Love.

FWIW I love Stevie

there should probably be some kind of rule that Mike Loves would be incapable of a highly successful solo career like Stevie was

ugh phrased that poorly, incapable of the kind of solo career Stevie was capable of i mean