I've seen bands split up for five years and do nothing. That sounds great to me, but it just hasn't worked out that way.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's hard for bands to stick it out because people grow up, and it never really pays off. If you're looking for some sort of payoff, it's not gonna happen.
It's hard to say when the life of a band starts and stops... but playing music together is an act of trust. When that's broken, it's impossible to continue.
Every now and then, a lot of bands doing the same kind of music will organically sprout up at once.
It's been such a group effort. When you're a new band and you have limited resources, you end up getting people that are there because they love what you do, and that's great.
Being in a band is far more than playing an instrument. It's surviving. It's getting an album together.
Most bands have a two-year success rate. By the third year, it's sort of over. Here we are in Poison still together 26 years later.
I think a lot of bands go on way past the point where they're relevant. Some of them keep doing it because they're making millions of dollars. Or people are afraid - they don't know what else to do. It's scary to get out of a relationship of any kind.
In the late summer of 1986, the band I had been in for five years stopped playing. Suddenly, I was on my own. This new state of bandlessness was, at first, traumatic. When your group breaks up, a lot of broken parts hit the ground.
You have to keep the business side together as well as the creative side. We have constantly surprised people and stayed with bands until they have grown on people.
People forget that keeping a band together is hard; man, it's really hard. All the cliches apply about living in each other's pockets; of it being a relationship, a marriage, a family.