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Access Atlanta > American Idol Buzz > Archives > 2007 > October > 19 > Entry
10/19: Next Great American Band starts tonight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I held back on this entry only because the previous entry about the reality show featuring Diana DeGarmo and Bobby Brown was so delightfully amusing and I wanted to keep that on top for at least the morning hours.
But alas, tonight, another “Idol” spinoff is starting, “The Next Great American Band.” It will be a two-hour episode tonight starting at 8 on Fox. (I’ll blog about it over the weekend.) We didn’t an advance copy so I’m not sure how it’s going to play out but I think the first hour is auditions of the top 60, then performances from the top 12 in the second hour. This show will have no results show so each week after this, when it’s only an hour, they will announce who was ousted during that show.
Next week, two will be eliminated, then two again the following week. After that, it’s one band at a time.
Nigel Lythgoe, in a phone press conference Tuesday, said overall, the format is similar to “Idol” with three judges and bands performing thematically. Interestingly, the first theme is Bob Dylan. I asked Nigel if there has ever been a Dylan song sung on “Idol” and he doesn’t recall.
“We aren’t asking them to change their style to turn them into Bob Dylans,” he said. “We are asking them to put it in their own styles.” He’s also doing an original music theme week (though the bands will play a cover tune, too, that week.)
He said there aren’t as many truly incompetent bands as there are incompetent solo singers in “Idol.” “Even bands that were terrible,” he noted,” were musically competent.” Some of the more ridiculous ones wanted to be like KISS, he said, some wanted to be Ziggy Stardust. “It’s a cacophony of sound.”
Out of 14,000 applicants (found through auditions, MySpace, videos, checking out rock clubs et. al), Nigel and the other executive producers picked 60 bands for judges Johnny Rzeznik, Sheila E. and Ian “Dicko” Dickson to track. And of the 12 finalists, he said “eight are absolutely terrific. It’s the sort of talent not given the opportunity anymore on radio or with recording executives. From that point of view, that’s why we believe in the show.” (There are a couple of what he terms “novelty” acts among the dozen but he couldn’t say anything more specific.)
Lythgoe “believes the audience is bored stiff with hip hop and won’t even buy it. If this television program is successfull… the market will open up with it.”
There won’t be guest stars because the show has so little time as it is. “We’re not padding anything,” he said, implying that some other shows he’s done (ahem) can feel a bit, um, padded. Then he got a bit jocular: “Your face will be contorted by the end of the show from pain of what you’ve not enjoyed or the speed we’re traveling.”
Now a bit about the three judges:
Johnny Rzeznik(above, center) is the lead singer of the Goo Goo Dolls: Being a professional musician in a place where he has to critique other pros, “he started a little bit like a deer in headlights,” Lythgoe said
Sheila E is a female percussionist who has worked with Prince extensively over the years and had a few hits in the mid-1980s (most notably, “The Glamorous Life” and “A Love Bizarre”) Lythgoe: “Sheila E says it like it is given her musicality and background. She got up one time and started playing with one of the bands. She will try to help whenever possible. She’s not a Paula, all heart and love and just desperate to see people succeed.”
Ian Dickson (above) was the Simon Cowell-type on “Australian Idol.” Lythgoe: “He’s very bright and knows his way around the music industry… He fits that category of saying it like it is.”
I also spoke briefly to Sheila E. (above) about a month ago. Her thoughts of the auditions: “It was pretty awesome… Some talent came through. We’re excited we have some good bands coming.” And as a musician, she felt the same as Rzeznik at times, that it was hard to critique people. “At times, I felt really bad. Sometimes, I don’t want to say anything.”
Inexplicably, they held the auditions in Las Vegas in 118-degree heat. “It was kind of crazy,” she said. “I got a little dehydrated as much as we were drinking Gatorade. I had to take electrolyte pills. I was getting dizzy. It didn’t matter how much we were drinking.”
Sheila, who turns 50 in December (but sure doesn’t look it), liked the mix of bands she saw, including hip-hop mixed with R&B, R&B with gospel, pure rock, swing and a country act that did a remix of Tupac lyrics. “That threw us for a loop!” she said. She was disappointed she never came across a good Latin band.
Sheila E’s favorite from this past “Idol” season? Melinda. “I hired her for a gospel tour two or three years ago,” she said. “She was one of the eight singers we had. We had a 12 piece band. She was incredible. She was so shy. She never wanted to step out and do leads.”
As noted earlier, she is still buds with Prince. (I would have loved to have gotten some real dirt about Prince, but she wasn’t going to dish. ) She loves playing with him, the lengthy encores, the afterparties. For Prince, “besides recording, he loves performing… his music has grown. He’s grown as a person. We’ve all just learned about life in general.”
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