The ’90s Nostalgia Rock Tour: Awesome or Lazy?

Weezer's Rivers CuomoWikimedia Commons

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Last year, beloved geek-rock band Weezer hit the road with a “Memories Tour,” playing The Blue Album (1994) and Pinkerton (1996) in their entirety over two nights. Front man Rivers Cuomo told MTV that the tour was an “emotional, cathartic experience” and that “to see 5,500 people singing along to every last word through every song on the album, even the really difficult ones, was incredibly validating for me.”

Similarly, in 2005 the Lemonheads regrouped after a nine-year hiatus and are now touring exclusively to the tunes of their 19-year-old It’s A Shame About Ray. Likewise, after a 12-year breakup, the Pixies reunited in 2004, and have spent parts of the past two years on the road celebrating their 1989 release, Doolittle, by playing the 15-song album in its entirety. All of these bands are selling out shows. But are they also, well, selling out?

The answer lies somewhere between rock and a hard place. There’s a reason why certain albums are described as timeless. (Not gonna lie—just reading reviews of the Memories Tour made me want to break out The Blue Album, and I haven’t listened to Weezer in years. Say it ain’t so, whoa-oh!) It’s not unusual for touring bands to focus on the hits that made them legendary, and indeed, if one is going to have a decades-long career, it’s practically a necessity to revert to the classics from time to time. But a time-travel tour also feels a bit like the band has given up, or that they’ve become, as MoJo editor Mike Mechanic puts it, “the antithesis of RAWK.”

The flashback tour isn’t just about boosting rock star egos or tickling fans’ wistfulness for times gone by. It’s also about making money, of course. With music sales declining, artists are making more of their moolah by touring. Concert sales are on the rise, despite rising ticket prices. Part of this uptick in concert-going involves the nostalgia-industrial complex. Jimmy Buffett perhaps encapsulates this best. No one goes to a Buffett concert to hear new music. They go to don Hawaiian shirts, get wasted, and sing and dance like no one’s watching. I will never forget the day I was heading home on the El in Chicago after a Jimmy Buffet concert. It was like entering a menopause-themed karaoke bar the size of a walk-in closet. These people were enthralled. They were serenading the world, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted to hear it. The average ticket price for a Jimmy Buffett concert this summer is $216. Two hundred sixteen dollars! He’s clearly not wasting away in Margaritaville anymore. (Journey tickets are selling for a pretty penny as well, clocking in at $148.)

On the flip side, it’s not a new phenomenon for bands to shun their hits in favor of playing only new music. Kate Nash, MGMT, and Radiohead come to mind. Refusing to play songs that fans have paid oodles to hear smacks of egotism, but is the same true of seasoned bands only playing oldies? I mean, you didn’t often hear anyone complaining about the set lists of Dead concerts, and don’t say it’s because they were too stoned to care.

The concert experience, unlike endlessly playing your iTunes tracks on repeat, is one that never ages. This is especially refreshing in the heyday of Auto-Tune, where even Rebecca Black can be made to sound halfway decent. For this reason, nothing beats the unique, however blemished, familiarity of a live show from a favored musician or band. Case in point: Bob Dylan sounds like he’s been eating asphalt for a quarter century when he sings now, but still—it’s Dylan! I will gladly raise my cemen-tini glass to salute him.

I took the reunion tour question to Facebook. My fellow music fans seemed pretty on the fence. One friend said, “I went to see Weezer in ’02 and they pretty much only played songs from The Green Album. Needless to say, I was disappointed. I think the fact that they’re touring with their old songs says that they’ve realized their new music is crap, but do the fans even care anymore? I don’t.” Another put it this way, “Profitable though it may be, I can never get behind the dinosaur act tour model. I was thrilled when I saw Soundgarden reunite at Lollapalooza last year and found their set to be spiced up with several deep cuts and early tracks. I also give Paul McCartney much respect for playing Wrigley Field last week and still having the gall to play his 1980 travesty ‘Temporary Secretary.'” Another friend was more favorable, noting, “Sometimes it’s a nice treat, like when They Might Be Giants posed as their own opening band to play Flood all the way through.” Another was less forgiving: “Pure laziness.”

Whether old bands performing exclusively old tunes is a gimmick, a validation tool, or a genuine desire to appease reminiscing fans, the staying power of music relies on so much more than its usefulness as a commodity. Isn’t the tried and true marker of rock legacy the ability to play something written years ago and still be able to blow someone’s mind?

Get More: MTV Shows

Click here for more music features from Mother Jones.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate