>Glad he’s still doing music, haven’t check for him in
>ages. He should be on Kravitz level of success at least I wish
>he was cuz he’s better. That 2nd album really did him in.

Although I'd like for him to have the greatest amount of success, it is wholly unrealistic to expect him to have had much popular appeal post "Introducing..." -- it's not just the second album that "did him in," he consistently strayed further and further beyond anything that could be considered to have much popular appeal, especially beyond Wild Card.

Let's be clear: his 2015 record "Return of the Zugebrian Time Lords" was a double album organized around the concept of people/entities who travel back in time to change the past. On the one hand, that's cool as shit. Less cool is that in interviews, it sounded like he actually believed this... and I'm not sure that's the weirdest thing he's ever suggested.

I *love* Neither Fish... and Symphony or Damn: they are personal classics for me. Despite that, even I can easily attest that the latter is pretty bloated, and Neither Fish would be a hard sell even in more generous times. We can't even touch on Vibrator here as that deserves a post in itself.

But all that said, I think it's everything that came *after* that first handful of records that kept him from achieving greater success. Because there are lots of folks just as musically adventurous as he is, even just as weird as he is, who figured out how to play the game enough to build more of a steady rep. One place to start: don't make every release a double record or multiple volumes. Even for fans those releases can be a slog.

(Total sidenote: I recently read an interview with Gabriel Garzon-Montano, whose shit I really love, that absolutely confirmed that as much as I like his music and maybe think he's a bit of a genius, he'd probably be a terrible person to sit and have a conversation with. There was just an air of the worst type of pretension there, the type that conveys itself in a constellation of forced references, not merely in the idea that one is better than another (which is far more forgivable). Not everyone has to be likable or personable, but I think that might be a good predictor of potential career arcs. And when I finished the interview I thought, damn, this dude sounds like TTD... and I didn't mean it in a good way.)

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~