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If you read a lot about Jagger...He really watched James Brown a lot when he was starting out.
So he studied the greats when it came to showmanship and working an audience.
It's a lost art now. The new bands look like dorks and have about as much charisma as a doorknob. There are no great frontmen who know how to work a crowd in the new bunch.
And I think I know why.
In the "old days"...right up until the 1990's...bands would work the club circuit. You busted your ass, paid your dues, and honed your craft in front of live audiences playing in bars and dives as you built up a following.
That meant that bands had their shit together before you ever heard them on the radio.
And because they were "baptized by fire" so to speak...they had to not only have their musical chops, but they also had to have the skills to entertain audiences and draw crowds into bars.
That's not easy to do.
And it's something that none of the bands of today have.
The music scene in bars all but died out by the mid-1990's as bands were replaced by karaoke and of course the big DJ craze that is going on.
Without that nationwide network of "A Circuit" rooms that I used to play for a living...bands aren't left with a way to play 7 nights a week and learn how to be entertainers.
It's almost like baseball's "farm system" where they have the minor leagues.
Music has lost it's "minor leagues" and doesn't have that experienced talent pool of bands and frontmen coming up through the ranks anymore.
These days they just throw a Justin Bieber out there.
He's a mutli-millionaire now...but if he had come up in the 1980's he wouldn't have made the cut and wouldn't even have gotten a second look because he would have been among the least talented and least experienced. The competition used to be fierce because of the dues you had to pay.
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