Music POD's

Romantic Nihilist

What are some music POD's that can be expanded upon? Some obvious ones are Kurt Cobain living though there are some interesting ones that can be looked at.

I'll start:


  • The Smiths sign with Factory
  • Gang of Four play TOTP instead of Duran Duran which leads both bands on different career trajectories
  • Henry Rollins killed alongside roadie Joe Cole
 

BillyShears

Some Beatle-related ones...
John Lennon doesn't get shot, or gets shot and lives
Paul McCartney never forms Wings, or forms Wings earlier
Jimi Hendrix lives and forms a band with Paul McCartney and Miles Davies
John and Paul collaborate in New Orleans

Some others...
The Kinks don't get banned from touring the US
The Kinks' Arthur TV rock musical is actually made by Granada
Bob Dylan never has his motorbike accident
Syd Barrett doesn't go insane
Cher never hears the engineer fiddle with auto-tune on her voice for Believe
 

GFW

Gary Numan never spots a synth in his studio.

Aerosmith pick the plane Lynyrd Skynyrd ended up on.
 

dilbert719

Cliff Burton doesn't win the card draw against Kirk Hammett, and survives the bus crash that OTL killed him. (Possible knock-on effect: Hammett dies instead.)
 
Lemon flavoured

Lemon flavoured

Loads of random stuff:

Kurt Cobain goes to rehab and actually stays there after his Rome overdose.

Amy Winehouse survives long enough to release her third album.

Dimebag Darrell doesn't get shot, or still gets shot but survives.

Not an artist, but John Peel's heart attack isn't fatal and he recovers enough to carry on his radio career.

Joss Stone is actually murdered by the men who were arrested for planning to do it (In OTL they got lost looking for her house, and were arrested when a neighbour thought their car was suspicious.)

Green Day manage to release Cigarettes and Valentines instead of the tapes being stolen.

Britney Spears succeeds in killing herself after her "meltdown" (The story I've heard is that in OTL she tried to hang herself, but was cut down in time.)

The weather in the UK is different in the UK in spring 2007, which means Rhianna's Umberella isn't at number one for as long.
 
oldironside

oldironside

Brian Jones decides not to go for a swim.

Paul Weller wakes up in a cold sweat in 1982 and realises that forming the Style Council is a terrible idea, so he immediately goes and plugs a Rickebacker into an AC30.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards don't have that fortuitous meeting on a train.
 

BillyShears

oldironside said:
Brian Jones decides not to go for a swim.

Paul Weller wakes up in a cold sweat in 1982 and realises that forming the Style Council is a terrible idea, so he immediately goes and plugs a Rickebacker into an AC30.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards don't have that fortuitous meeting on a train.
Click to expand...

What a wonderful world that would be
 

Glass Onion

It's a fairly common practice in pop music for some songs to be shopped around between different artists. So you could have a situation in which songs that were hits for one artist are instead hits for another, or flops for the other artist depending on whether they could have released the song in question successfully.

For example, if I remember correctly, "Hit me Baby One More Time" was originally offered not to Britney Spears, but to TLC among several other artists. Now I don't know if it could ever have worked as a song for anyone but Spears. Because if the singer isn't a teenager, the song becomes phenomenally creepy, to the point of being off putting. And another group would probably perform it differently. In TLC's case there'd have to be a mid-verse rap for Lisa "Left Eye" Lopez. But in any event, someone else could have recorded that song, which was Britney Spears' first major hit, which could have all sorts of butterflies for her career.
 

Glass Onion

BillyShears said:
Some Beatle-related ones...
Jimi Hendrix lives and forms a band with Paul McCartney and Miles Davies
Some others...
Syd Barrett doesn't go insane
Click to expand...

1. Wait, what? I could see some kind of Hendrix and Davis collaboration as Bitches Brew indicates the latter was interested in exploring a more rock influenced Jazz sound. But how would Paul McCartney fit into that mix?
2. From everything I've read and heard, avoiding Syd Barrett's meltdown would be hard, as he seems to have had some kind of underlying condition for most of his life, though if his family is to be believed, it wasn't Schizophrenia. Not sure precisely what was wrong with Barrett because I've heard arguments in favor of various diagnoses, but whatever the condition was, it may not be possible to avoid entirely.

Here are two divergences which could alter the late Beatles period pretty substantially. Not sure how precisely to pull them off, and they both require some sort of earlier divergence to justify as you might need to solve the management puzzle, but anyway what if

1. Paul McCartney had agreed to release Cold Turkey as a Beatles single as John Lennon originally offered?
2. Let it Be had met with McCartney's satisfaction somehow?

The result? Lennon is still ambivalent about the Beatles into the end of 1969, and McCartney doesn't announce his departure from the group when he releases his first solo album. Later on the Beatles continue to occasionally record together in the 1970's. Everyone in the group has said they could have continued on for at least a little while longer than they did even if a split eventually was inevitable.
 
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Romantic Nihilist

Oasis started as a Baggy-influenced band while Blur released their debut during the heights of Shoegaze. If Madchester and Shoegaze have prolonged success then you butterfly away the stylings of two of Britpops leading lights. This also affects Ride; maybe Andy Bell doesn't spend his latter years copying Liam and Noel Gallagher.

Reconvening after the disappearance of Richey Edwards, the Manic Street Preachers were unsure of soldering on. James Dean Bradfield for instance, was rumoured to be joining Therapy? as a touring guitarist.

Krist Novoselic was asked to be in the first lineup of the Foo Fighters.
 

BillyShears

Glass Onion said:
1. Wait, what? I could see some kind of Hendrix and Davis collaboration as Bitches Brew indicates the latter was interested in exploring a more rock influenced Jazz sound. But how would Paul McCartney fit into that mix?
2. From everything I've read and heard, avoiding Syd Barrett's meltdown would be hard, as he seems to have had some kind of underlying condition for most of his life, though if his family is to be believed, it wasn't Schizophrenia. Not sure precisely what was wrong with Barrett because I've heard arguments in favor of various diagnoses, but whatever the condition was, it may not be possible to avoid entirely.

Here are two divergences which could alter the late Beatles period pretty substantially. Not sure how precisely to pull them off, and they both require some sort of earlier divergence to justify as you might need to solve the management puzzle, but anyway what if

1. Paul McCartney had agreed to release Cold Turkey as a Beatles single as John Lennon originally offered?
2. Let it Be had met with McCartney's satisfaction somehow?

The result? Lennon is still ambivalent about the Beatles into the end of 1969, and McCartney doesn't announce his departure from the group when he releases his first solo album. Later on the Beatles continue to occasionally record together in the 1970's. Everyone in the group has said they could have continued on for at least a little while longer than they did even if a split eventually was inevitable.
Click to expand...

It's actually a thing that very nearly happened, of which there is evidence, Hendrix asked Paul to jam with Miles Davis, but he was away in Scotland at the time and never got the telegram, which apparently hangs on the wall of a Hard Rock Cafe somewhere :D
 

Life In Black

Phil Collen joins Iron Maiden
Ray Gillen stays a part of Blue Murder
Pete Way remains a part of Fastway
Jake E. Lee sticks with Dio causing Vivian Campbell to remain with Sweet Savage
Tony Iommi fully joins Jethro Tull

If I think of any more, I'll post them.
 

Glass Onion

BillyShears said:
It's actually a thing that very nearly happened, of which there is evidence, Hendrix asked Paul to jam with Miles Davis, but he was away in Scotland at the time and never got the telegram, which apparently hangs on the wall of a Hard Rock Cafe somewhere :D
Click to expand...

Very interesting. Though I guess I shouldn't be surprised Hendrix was interested in working with McCartney. He covered the Beatles, and McCartney recommended Hendrix appear at Monterrey in the place of the Beatles.
 

Ed Costello

Here's one I've pondered on occasion:

The La's are a bit of a cult band in Britain - something akin to a scouse Velvet Underground for the Thatcher Years - who for one brief period in the late Eighties looked set to spearhead the post-Smiths wave of British guitar-pop. Of course, what happened was that Lee Mavers got hooked on heroin, became obsessed with 'sixties dust' and ditched about five album sessions (not necessarily in that order), and the Stone Roses came along and nearly ruined everything.

So, what if the band had managed to not only complete their album on time, but get it out there before the Roses? How does that affect British music in the late Eighties and early Nineties - do we get a version of Britpop five years early, how does it interact with shoegaze, and can we be spared the torment of baggy?
 

BillyShears

Glass Onion said:
Very interesting. Though I guess I shouldn't be surprised Hendrix was interested in working with McCartney. He covered the Beatles, and McCartney recommended Hendrix appear at Monterrey in the place of the Beatles.
Click to expand...

I remember reading a bit of hearsay a few years ago that when they were beginning to prepare McCartney's archive releases they found all his stuff in a complete state, old master tapes shoved in shoeboxes under beds and things like that, and he found a cassette tape in a drawer apparently in his Mull of Kintyre house of Ram demos, one in particular was marked out for Hendrix, 'Get On the Right Thing'. He died in late 70, and the Ram stuff would've been written somewhere around winter to summer '70, I'd estimate, so its certainly possible if true, and very interesting.
 

Hades

Jeff Hanneman doesn't get that spider bite.

Countdown to Extinction goes to #1 instead of Achy Breaky Heart

Dave Lombardo joins Metallica in 1986 (apparently, Hetfield and Burton were interested in working with him).

Eazy-E finds out he has AIDS earlier.

ETA: John Bonham doesn't die in 1980.

Aerosmith get Skynyrd's plane instead. Ouch.
 
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