worst reunions

Very few of these I actually want to player-hate on at all, worse things they could do with their songbook and time. but there are a few.

Velvet Underground is kind of embarrassing in hindsight thanks to lou's "Severin take the whip baby severin take the whip now" scattage but as a young aspiring alt-kid at the time i was ecstatic.

queen + paul rodgers was actively embarrassing and while i wish may & taylor had just done some kind of low key small hall thing where they'd just sing the stuff they wrote I can't hate on them for wanting to do "we will rock you" at the big places and they've since replaced rodgers with adam lambert so they've learned their lesson.

The post-Deal Pixies have been pretty embarrassing but i was all for the foursome raking in the $$$ on the road.

So I'm probably voting for Doors 21st Century because holy shit Ian Astbury are you fucking kidding me

LL - I seem to remember from past posts ya dig the GBV - I'm disappointed on that 'OTM'. Give the new stuff a chance - I'd rank Cool Planet up there w/ Propeller, UTBUTS, Vampire On Titus ... I think they're post 2011 stuff (yes, 'let's go eat the factory' was a mis-step) gets better as each album comes out. Now that they've gotten rid of Fennell as a drummer, they're only sounding better. Yes the Pollard 'bro'-y' performances are a little cringeworthy live, but the original spirit is there for sure. Don't give up. They won't hit re-united MoB or DJr. levels, but I think what they're putting out is special in its own right.

That said - Black Flag debacle may be worst on this list.

doubling down on doors 21st century as my choice since the guys were gradually forced by lawsuits to make their name less doorsy as they went from the singer from the cult to the singer from fuel to the singer from steelheart to the singer of a doors cover band.

I recall some reviews saying the Von live reunion was a disaster.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, July 18, 2014 5:09 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if this is the black metal Von I saw them play to like 20 ppl tops and I thought it was fine

seen reformed GO4 twice, both at (indoor) festivals, first time was great and second time it was Andy Gill + dudes who I doubt were born when they broke up first time. they reduced a ~1000 audience to about 200 a while before the end which was tough to witness

in terms of cred damage, it might be hard to beat Lynyrd Skynyrd 1987-present

didn't densmore sue the rest of the doors for using the name almost immediately, forcing them to use 'doors of the 21st century'? he also wrote a big thing for the nation congratulating himself for singlehandedly preventing cadillac from using 'break on through' in an ad.

brad c otm - ppl know about the crash but that doesn't prevent them from letting clownshow skynyrd paint their impressions of actual skynyrd. not sure even mike love can top that.

oh yeah probably would have voted for skynyrd if that'd been an option

and had no idea about andy gill & friends version of go4, thought that reunion was just the short tour they did a decade ago.

re: doors, group was always called Doors Of The 21st Century, the lawsuit is what forced them to change it to D21C in 2005, then Riders Of The Storm, then Manzarek-Krieger as they went through singers

def knew the gang of two had gone on without the original rhythm section, but i was shocked when i belatedly heard jon king left

hahahaha i had know idea the doors kept changing their name after that, my lord.

Pixies have gone on waaaay too long as someone mentioned upthread. I had no problem with them reuniting at first. I went to their gig in Phoenix Park in 04 and it was great but the recent Glastonbury performance was lifeless and at a recent gig supporting Arcade Fire, Frank Black walked off after 30 mins saying that his guitar was "broken". The new tunes are wretched. No Kim Deal either.

VU reunion was a heap of shit too but at least it was short and they didn't release any music

the fake kim deal vocal on "bag boy" is definitely the saddest reunion-related thing i've heard since paul rodgers and queen's "c-lebrity"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOIfqbKVvrI

that vid probably wins saddest reunion-related thing i've seen

Guided By Voices. Bad enough that I began to wonder why I ever thought they were good. Still undecided, but leaning heavily towards purging the 5% of their albums I own (which is like 8) and just keeping Human Amusement.

― campreverb, Friday, July 18, 2014 10:51 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

would probably go with this too. releasing a 4 hour live documentary called The Electrifying Conclusion and reuniting 6 years later is one of the most irrationally-angry-making things I can think of.

Feel like Steely Dan should have at least been an option. I've never listened to the post-Gaucho albums myself, or seen them live ($$$), but there's something weird about a band that was so much about hermetic perfection and no-live-shows becoming such a touring machine (including full-on human-jukebox whole-album shows).

Yes it was Von the black metal band. It was a review in Terrorizer of an (indoor?) metal festival that Ihsahn, Jarboe and Watain also played. It was highly anticipated but apparently it was awful. But that was just one show.

I didn't mean that I disliked live reunions, I just can't get that excited about even some of my favourite bands playing the hits. And some bands build such a legend in your mind that even though the idea of them playing live is exciting, it's very unlikely they'll perform at the level you'd hope for (actually Slowdive and Chapterhouse might fall into that category for me but I'd go see them if I could anyway). I found Butthole Surfers mostly quite underwhelming but that was a hiatus, which they seem to have went back on.
The two early gigs from the Pixies reunion were amazing, about as good as I could have expected aside from the dream situation where I could request two more songs ("Alec Eiffel" might have made it perfect).

Live reunions with no new recordings make total sense if they have no new worthy material, which might be most of the time.

I thought American Music Club's reunion albums and tours were very good and I don't recall anyone being unhappy about it.

I heard the Bauhaus reunion album was great.

Slint reunions totally acceptable to me. Nothing too embarrassing, and it allows Brian McMahan to support his family, and Britt Walford to support whatever the hell he does with his time.

Go4's rerecording of their best songs was pretty pointless, tempted to vote for that.

for the most part, but the original line-up versions of the Songs Of The Free were pretty outstanding

the Songs Of The Free material, I mean. LOOOOOOOVE their take on "We Live As We Dream Alone" esp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWb8_dDAaL4#t=47m23s

at 47:23

Most of these I don't even give half a shit a shit about but the whole Pixies debacle is pretty grim.

I don't know why people are being so down on GBV, I still find them kind of endearing.

man it totally hadn't registered with me that the Pixies had been back together for so long. why do they bother?

They've been reunited now for as long as they'd been broken up, and longer than they were together in the 80s/90s.

^^A thread idea I've never pulled the trigger on: "Bands whose reunions lasted longer than their original tenure"

OK, I totally forgive the Bauhaus reunion album, because it was both great, but also revealing of the cracks that broke them up in the first place.

what did them in finally? My recollection was that the final breakup was quite sudden.

Daniel and Peter; conflicting egos. Both of them got too used to being the sole frontman, I'd say.

They seemed to have several rounds of reunion, too. Like I remember seeing a reformed Bauhaus in NYC before I left in 1998, and then the album, in what, 2003, plus second lot of touring?

Reunes what I have seen:

Buzzcocks: There was nothing wrong with this one, all four dudes of the classic period, sounded like they'd never been away.

Velvets: Very nice of them to get back together and play my local midsized venue and have the elements conspire to allow me to get tickets.

In both cases, the following albums were .. Um, souvenirs? The buzz one was alright just about, the velvets live disc was kinda unplayable really.

When Television got back, I really did not want to see it, and I don't regret not going even though that means I have never seen them live.

I saw the Pixies play Doolittle, and had a blast. I had to admire how formulaic they were - they played the whole record in order, then played the B-sides, also in order. But they sounded great and the audience just treated it like a big celebration of this record that the Pixies were conducting. But after that I had no interest in seeing them again.

Pavement was great and they played better than they did in the olden days, with a killer setlist of just about every song you'd hope to hear from them. This was at the Greek in Berkeley when they managed to drag Gary Young out as well, who managed to hang in there for a couple of songs.

in terms of cred damage, it might be hard to beat Lynyrd Skynyrd 1987-present

i saw skynyrd on the '87 tour and it was awesome. but yeah

Write-in for Magnetic Fields without Susan Anway

write-in for magnetic fields without n3ll b3ram*

Didn't Yuck have a reunion after a breakup that lasted about 2 years at most? Does it count with relatively new bands?

I'm curious how people rate Mercyful Fate's reunion.

Write-in vote for the DKT/MC5 tour in 2008.

Bad Brains circa Rise, anybody?

Another write-in for Os Mutantes - maybe not the absolute worst, but the most disappointing for me.

yeah the Velvets one was amazing imo. saw them at Glastonbury 93 aged 19 and immediately bought the banana album on cassette straight after! i'd be amazed if anyone would begrudge them a bit of success and limelight as theirs was the classic way of doing it; come back, play a few shows then fuck off, no harm done.

first few uk Pixies comeback gigs at Brixton were an absolute riot.

no mention of MBV? great shows at first but less so the recent ones, the comeback album saves the day i suppose.

I saw one of the Roth van halen shows and it was probably the worst concert I've ever seen.

Last years Sabbath reunion resulted in a mediocre to fair album but the shoddy treatment of Bill Ward makes it a strong contender here.

Pixies is obviously they play this big a room under that name and this small a hall if they book as Frank Black. It's kind of surprising that they just did not keep going without Deal back in the 90s, since Charles pretty much pushed her tunes off the CDs. It's probably good some air got taken out of that balloon anyway, as they were cool and a good band but I think some people made them out to be a bit more than they actually were.

you're certainly not alone in that last opinion there, I never got them at all.

When I saw the Stooges play live it felt like they could not have possibly been any better than in the heyday. Of course that is probably wrong but it was such.an ecstasy. The album's have been poor for sure but I would still call their getting back togethor an unmitigated success.

Jefferson Airplane '89 lp is bland as fuck.

I've heard that VU reunion sped Sterling's death thanks to the way Lou was behaving. & I found that it seemed like the band felt like a unit plus his ego somewhat separate from watching them on tv. Wonder if that was different live in the same room .

I think it was the opposite, that he started to be unwell and did the reunion while he still could.

Also, my guess is that Lou tired of it fairly quickly. I was lucky to get one of the early gigs.

Well, it's good to know that piscesx has me on KillFile! ;-)

like if they could afford or legally rationalize touring with a hologram, they would totally be doing that.

Well, they in that case is just Eric Wilson the bass player and Rome Ramirez at this point, as Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh quit in regret pretty early on and hired gun Josh Freese left a year or two ago.

In March 2015, Ramirez appeared on Blues Traveler's album Blow Up the Moon, co writing the song "Castaway" and "Vagabond Blues" with Dirty Heads.