It's hard to believe that Johnny Marr was only 20 years old here. Man, what a fucking genius.

Don't Cry/November Rain/Estranged- Still love the trilogy

In fairness Guns N' Roses by that point had achieved sales with Appetite for Destruction that even Oasis could only dream of, so I am not surprised that five years of drug and drink fueled excess, hero worship from fans and media scrutiny led them to such outlandish recordings.

In a lot of respects I could see in attitude and outcome Oasis having been like Guns N' Roses if Liam had been the main songwriter as well as the singer, and/or they had cracked the USA in the same way G n' R did. Can you seriously imagine the scale of chaos if Be Here Now had sold 18,000,000 copies Stateside alone after the madness surrounding it's recording? I honestly think every Rock n' Roll excess story would have been reenacted and a fair few new ones created, presumably with the band splitting due to Noel disappearing on a Hunter S Thompson reenactment of his 1994 disappearance only to be discovered in 2018 alive and running a Tequila bar in Mexico 

I know he used to wind up The Stone Roses, particularly Ian and John, over the fact he completed The Smiths career before he was 24 and therefore had that under his belt before they had even recorded the first official Stone Roses album!   It puts it into context the achievement and how young the band were really, given that Noel Gallagher for example was 27 by the time his debut came out, and by Marr's 27th he had finished The Smiths, worked with Paul McCartney and Pet Shop Boys amongst others, formed Electronic and joined The The!

can never hate on green day, american idiot takes me back to good times.

You have your beautiful future at front of you, young man!

Oh to be young and naive again.

Happy birthday Revolver

great song plus the pianist is beautiful.

I tried to create a Smiths CD but it has too many songs. I don't know what songs I want to drop...

Haven't listened to this album for a while, so I picked it this afternoon.
This is absolute one of his best solo albums. Viva Moz!

Depends on the type of group, in the Berry Gordy/Motown days for example vocal groups were very much about the song rather than poster image, so these groups still tour with both new and surviving members to this day in several cases. By contrast people like Lou Pearlman (N'Sync & Backstreet Boys) and Simon Cowell (1D) made it very much about the image which was targeted primarily at teenage girls, which date stamped the careers of the band members but in theory could generate a great deal more revenue.

This whilst a successful and netting both men hundreds of millions of dollars took the focus away from song quality and shifted the emphasis to image with it's associated merchandising sales, appearances both touring and at non-performing events, etc. That isn't to say they missed a trick as both had involvement in the publishing and recordings copyright so they took a slice of royalties there as well.

Lou Pearlman in particular took this to the extreme, paying the Backstreet Boys $300,000 between them plus covering expenses for their non-stop recording and touring schedules between 1993 to 1997 whilst netting millions of dollars through the various revenue streams. A good article from 2007 on the man, his business and personal practices as well as the ponzi scheme that brought him down that he had orchestrated when the boy band craze died off can be found here- Lou Pearlman- Vanity Fair He was sentenced to twenty five years in 2008 for money laundering with a month reduction for every $1M he helped recover, a far cry from his peak wealth of $300M with ambitions to own an air charter service (which later became his ponzi scheme basis).

Briefly going back to Berry Gordy and his ilk it doesn't mean they didn't profit handsomely from their artists, but in their case the revenues came from taking most if not all in some cases of the record sales  along with the publishing to Jobete Music which was a Berry Gordy owned publisher of Motown songs. Over a period of years he took circa $331,000,000 from EMI Music Group for the eventual sale of all his shares in that company, whilst by contrast many Motown artists, both those who wrote songs and those who did not, continued to perform out of necessity or struggle due to lack of royalties.