How Super Are Supergroups?

Jack White will sleep when he's dead. Which may be sooner than he thinks if he doesn't stop forming bands and trying to keep them all going at once. The guitarist/singer from White Stripes and The Raconteurs is now the drummer in Dead Weather, another "supergroup" that also features Allison Mosshart, the singer from The Kills, and members of Queens of the Stone Age and The Raconteurs. Two of their songs are on YouTube ("Hang You From The Heavens" and "Are Friends Electric?"); one of them sounds like a White Stripes leftover and the other is an unexpected remake of an old Gary Numan (!) song. Nothing wrong with that, but I think I'd rather hear the Kills, and White Stripes.

This is the big question with so-called supergroups. (Another question is, when is it a supergroup, and when is it just... a group? To me, Cream is a group, not a supergroup, though as Wikipedia points out, they have been "Retrospectively determined to be the first supergroup.") Sometimes a supergroup is simply less than the sum of its parts. Even when it works - as with Blind Faith, perhaps the first really good supergroup in rock (and an offshoot of Cream) - you still have to wonder if it's better than what the musicians would've done with their separate bands. Blind Faith actually did some classic songs (on their one album), and The New Pornographers - an indie-rock supergroup including alt-country singer Neko Case; Dan Bejar, leader of the band Destroyer, and Carl Newman, who records solo as A.C. Newman - may actually be the exception that proves the rule, although I happen to like all of their solo stuff a lot too. But think of the ultimate supergroup, The Traveling Wilburys. I mean, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Tom Petty, AND Jeff Lynne all in one band? Four of those five are among the biggest names in rock (sorry Jeff); this band should have been the greatest thing to happen in the history of rock music. But while they had some fun, and released a couple of really good songs, they were not able to come up with anything on the order of a "Subterranean Homesick Blues" or a "Pretty Woman" or a "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

I'm not saying a bunch of musicians can't get together and make music for the sheer joy of it. That's absolutely fine. It's certainly better than so-called supergroups that smack of desperation, like the brand new Chickenfoot, with guitar hero Joe Satriani, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ drummer Chad Smith, former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and frontman Sammy Hagar - an unholy alliance held together by their common problem of no longer being the big names they once were. All I'm saying is that real genius is often a solitary thing, and when you put several of them together, it rarely inspires anyone to a new level.

Tell us: Do you have a supergroup that actually was worthy of the name? Or do they generate more hype than heat?
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