The Perils of Solo-itis
Two of the most fearsome words in the entire rock ‘n’ roll lexicon: solo career. The genre is strewn with the wreckage of great and near-great bands that shattered into lesser side projects, seldom managing to summon the magic that attracted a mass audience in the first place.
There are some exceptions: Van Morrison was better off on his own than with Them, I prefer Clapton to Cream and maybe even Simon without Garfunkel. But, generally speaking, creatives tend to be better off collaborating and butting heads with stubborn equals rather than commanding pliant employees.
The most iconic archetypes are the individual Beatles, of course, who’d been well on the way to becoming solo acts before finally formally breaking up in 1970. But even as they were writing together less and less, and recording more and more of their parts separately, there was still that lingering inertia and competitiveness and need to live up to the legacy brand name providing some quality control.
I’m hardcore enough a fan to love each Beatle’s solo discography, with a soft spot even for Ringo’s ill-advised foray into disco. Yet it’s hard to ignore that, but for John’s stark Plastic Ono Band and George’s lavish All Things Must Pass (which both included Ringo), there aren’t too many tracks that wouldn’t obviously have benefited from the others’ input. The scattered songs featuring one another are almost invariably the highlights of any particular album, bringing out each other’s strengths, but there were fewer and fewer of those as time went on. I quite liked Sir Paul’s Covid-era McCartney III, recorded entirely on his own, but it didn’t attract half the excitement as the subsequent “Now and Then,” the apparently final Beatles song as finagled by overdubs on an old John demo enhanced by algorithmic witchcraft.
By early 1970, there were certainly what felt like lots of good reasons to break up and stay that way: the distracting Yoko, the rapacious manager Allen Klein, the tiresome legal and financial squabbles, the sheer exhaustion of having run at maximum throttle for years, and the likelihood of each doing plenty well without having to compromise with the others. But after five decades plus, whatever the egos and rationales, it feels like a missed opportunity—the fellas should have taken a few years off for vacation and family and resolving legalities and getting whatever solo larks out of their systems before convening again fresh to get back to getting the best out of one another. But alas, fans are left to sift for minor gems on mostly mediocre records.
The ultimate example of ‘solo-itis’ might well be one of my all-time favorite bands, The Verve, often considered one-hit wonders in North America for the megahit “Bitter Sweet Symphony” but who got huge in their native U.K. and Europe with several big singles from the multiplatinum Urban Hymns back in the late ’90s, including “Lucky Man” and “The Drugs Don’t Work.” They’d been an inherently combustible combo from the beginning, their unique cosmic intrigue derived from the foundational clash between the pop classicism of the brilliant frontman and emerging singer-songwriter Richard Ashcroft and the oceanic grooves of the rest of the band—especially the enigmatic guitar genius Nick McCabe.
I once submitted a book proposal about the fraught sessions piecing together The Verve’s big breakthrough. They’d barely survived (literally) the making and touring of their second LP, and perhaps mercifully broken up shortly thereafter. Yet within weeks the restless Ashcroft had reunited everybody except for his primary foil, bringing in a more miscellaneous guitarist, and begun months of lukewarm journeyman rehearsals and recordings nowhere near releasable. It was only when in desperation he’d swallowed his pride and given McCabe an apologetic phone call that the classic record really started to come together.
Some of the sessions were new jams, some were revived old chestnuts, some were judicious overdubs on material already taped—and it all took tons of painful compromise, as increasingly revealed across various bootlegs over the years. But by mid-1997 it had come together into something extraordinary, almost like a more romantic and spiritual Oasis. Urban Hymns wasn’t quite a psychedelic cult classic like the band’s previous works, but delivered the essential sound to a vastly larger audience.
Inherent in the “Verve voodoo,” as the band’s chronic dysfunction had become known, was that they’d inevitably become victims of their own success—and indeed Ashcroft quickly jumped ship for a solo career bringing along only the drummer. Even as he evolved as a singer and songwriter, he seemed obsessively intent on proving he’d never needed the others, working mainly with forgettable yes-men and botching the bulk of his recordings even as reviews soured and sales declined. And it wasn’t like the rest of the band were covering themselves in glory, either, on what little they were up to.
So a lucrative reformation seemed increasingly in the cards, especially after Ashcroft performed “Bitter Sweet Symphony” with Coldplay at Live 8. I was as pumped as anyone when a big reunion was announced late in Urban Hymns’ 10th anniversary year, not just touring Britain and beyond but recording again anew. The Verve were outstanding when they came to New York, especially the second night, even as it was palpable that these people didn’t like each other too much. A new album, Forth, came out that summer just as the band was disintegrating again with even more acrimony than before; even if the record was clearly a Pro Tools-assembled race against time before the impending implosion, it was still easily the best thing any of them had released in a decade.
Over the next number of years Richard Ashcroft attempted a hip-hop inflected comeback with the dubious “United Nations of Sound” that sank like a stone, and Nick McCabe and the bassist embarked upon their own new band, eventually known as Black Submarine, which released its lone album New Shores ten years ago this spring. Fans had long dreamed that McCabe and co. would at last release a sprawling opus of mind-melting soundscapes, just like the old days. But the eventual self-released LP was curiously muted, a tentative compromise between the Verve-y psychedelia audiences wanted and its own gothier tangents. There were a handful of great tracks that could almost stand toe to toe with The Verve, but not enough for the record to catch fire or attract much notice.
After some years of silence Ashcroft eventually reemerged with a couple of pretty decent solo albums clustered around Urban Hymns’ 20th anniversary, and lots of headlining festivals as backed by generic hired hands. When he’s hungry, with something to prove, I’ve seen Richard Ashcroft rate among the all-time greats, but he’s been phoning it in for years. Nick McCabe, for his part, has uploaded several hours of spacey noodling onto his Bandcamp. It's pretty excellent if you’re into that kind of thing—to my ear McCabe belongs in the conversation with sonic auteurs like Brian Eno and Kevin Shields—but perhaps not about to inspire the multitudes.
As a fan, it’s an utter tragedy: that a toxic stew of pride and ego and resentment prevents these immensely talented artists from achieving peak performance together. Year by year, song by song and show by show, the opportunity costs of operating without one another grow more and more egregious. And in that respect, it’s reminiscent of what’s been happening across our fragmented society, with people retreating into self-indulgent “safe spaces” affirming all their priors.
I’ve previously suggested that the left and right symbiotically need each other, and that both are indispensable for a functional polity. Without the conscience and ambition of the best of the left, the right readily slips into complacency and fatalism. And without the gimlet-eyed skepticism about institutions and human nature from the best of the right, the left easily slides into utopian stridency. The viability of any public policy depends on artful weaving in of strands from throughout the political spectrum, the way the great Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to try for, but that’s become vanishingly rare in the stultifying monoculture that’s overtaken our governing institutions.
Absent such range of cultural and philosophical input, policy quickly turns hollow and brittle and nonsensical—no good for anyone not actively getting paid, and usually making problems even worse. Is this really the best we can do, squabbling at each other’s throats, or is it finally time for America to start getting the band back together?
Next: Diamonds and Rust
Nice read. For me, McCabe was/is the genius of The Verve and an incredible guitarist. The early EPs, 'A Storm in Heaven' and 'A Northern Soul' will always be my favorite albums. Early live videos from the 90s highlight just how intense they were. Shame the egos, mainly Richard's, ripped them apart.
Mark Lanegan is the best example of solo work exceeding the band. As much as I liked The Screaming Trees, Lanegan's solo work is far more creative. It's also more varied and has significantly more depth and artistry than anything the Trees ever produced.
I can't imagine you could have this general opinion and "prefer Clapton to Cream", as Cream was miles more energetic and colossal than any other project its members had, except for Ginger Baker's Air Force when he had the Gurwitz brothers in it.
But anyway. "Creative tension" often seems better from outside; but it wears on you over the course of years, the frustration is corrosive and cumulative. I've worked for (regional) "name acts" and groups a lot, and their dynamics internally are different; often the "names" are perfectly fine, it's just that the perception that the previous groups evoked was like amphetamines to critics, and they were super-mad to be deprived of it and took it out on the solo projects. A lot of these "legacy acts" benefit heavily from the collective halo of critical hindsight; even tho' they were a product of time and place, reflected such, and said critics drew meaning and cultural power from interacting with them. Times end, places change; and said writers react to that by pushing Nostalgia (and thereby their own "I Was There" credentials) and denigrating everything else after.