We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together... Probably

Give it up, Smiths fans. Your favorite band is never getting back together. I know, I know, you've seen the Pixies reunite; you've seen The Police reunite; you're thinking it's gotta be your turn next. Well, I'm sorry, but Morrissey and company aren't jumping on the reunion bandwagon any more than Sleater-Kinney is... What?!? They did?

Okay, well, it seems Sleater-Kinney is reuniting after all, with both a new album, No Cities To Love, and an extensive tour. But don't go getting those hopes up, you long-suffering fans of The Smiths. They may not have announced their breakup with quite the elan of, say Death Grips -- whose "we're breaking up" announcement consisted of a Facebook photo of a note scrawled on the back of napkin -- but they are just as truly dead and buried as that experimental hip-hop...

Oh, come on! Are you kidding me?!?

So, anyway, Smiths fans, I was just gonna say "don't give up hope." Because apparently, nobody stays broken up anymore. Some, like Death Grips, announce their breakup and then almost immediately announce they've finished their "last" album, the powers that b, and then a few months later release another surprise album, Fashion Week. Others, like Sleater-Kinney, spin off into other projects -- most notably Carrie Brownstein co-creating and co-starring in Portlandia, but let's not forget that she and Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss have all gone on to other righteous rock bands, like Wild Flag, or Weiss' stints with Quasi and Stephen Malkmus. Which reminds me, all you Pavement fans: Stephen Malkmus is never getting your favorite band back togeth… Oh, to hell with it.

It’s not like this is a new thing. After The Beatles split up, a favorite pastime of their fans was trying to decipher who might be reaching out to whom in an attempt to broker a comeback. By the end of the 1970s, Mott the Hoople had split up and reformed so many times that not a single original member remained.

Robert Fripp, the only consistent member of King Crimson, broke up the band and retired in 1975. He broke up the band again in 1985. And in 2004. Finally, in 2010, he adopted a more measured approach, telling listeners to my New Sounds program that he was retiring “from commercial music” but would continue to look at performing his electric guitar soundscapes in sacred spaces. Then, he re-formed King Crimson... again.

The band Guided By Voices, led by the almost comically prolific Robert Pollard, has gone through similar lineup changes and breaks, many short term while he did other projects but at least one long-term interregnum from 2004 to 2010. That band's reunion was met by a curious mix of joy and puzzlement (“They were gone?”), since Pollard never stopped making music during that time. Pollard further muddied the waters by telling the press that “I am Robert Pollard and I am Guided By Voices.” (Unless he was admitting to some sort of psychosis.) Then, he got the classic up together for awhile, before he broke up the band again.

There are many reasons why bands break up. Oasis fell prey to fraternal strife (“He was looking at me!” -- or whatever the expletive-filled, fisticuffed version of that is). The Kinks were torn apart by the same force.  Death of course played a role in many breakups, and in The Beatles’ case, scuttled any possibility of a meaningful reunion. But R.E.M. made a carefully considered decision. Peter Buck told me last time he was in the Soundcheck studio that he sees the other guys all the time. “We have an office, there’s still lots of R.E.M. business to deal with," he said. "I see them now almost as much as when we were a band."

And Jeff Mangum broke up Neutral Milk Hotel just as the band was beginning to gain traction because he was tired. In 2002, he sounded almost like a wise man at the top of the mountain when he told Pitchfork, "I just feel like these windows open up for something to be honest, and they don't stay open for very long." When Mangum began performing again a few years ago, it was in small, almost private spaces. Eventually, he too reunited the band and hit the festival circuit, but by then the reunion seemed a genuine artistic impulse, not a quick cash grab. Although, the band recently announced its next tour would be its last for "the foreseeable future."

And this is where we get to the key point of all this reuniting. At some point, the audience will catch on to reason why you have chosen to share a stage with the people you formerly couldn’t stand the sight of. When Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno buried the hatchet a few years ago, the reason was simple: they’d grown up. But let’s face it: we don’t go to rock music for grown-up behavior.

When the Pixies reunited, it sparked delirium on the part of their fans and white-hot concerts from the band. At first. Then the old frictions set in and it became, frankly, kind of dispiriting to watch them trudge from gig to gig, and wondering who’d be playing bass since Kim Deal left. But that was nothing like watching The Police. Boy, that was fun. Listening to the music was secondary to the almost visible glow of the hate-fuelled force fields that surrounded the three musicians. Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland especially seemed to be seething as they played. Seething, and perhaps mentally tallying the interest as it compounded in their bank accounts.

At some point, all these reunions might make you think of the Dan Hicks song, “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away.” It’s okay to take some time off between albums, like Radiohead does. Or to splinter into solo projects for a while, like the Wu-Tang Clan. Or even to spend a decade figuring out your next move, like My Bloody Valentine, who managed to produce nothing from 1998 to 2007 without actually "breaking up," and eventually, finally put out an album after more than 20 years. Of course, there are other ways to deal with reunions: in the late '70s, the groundbreaking English folk-rock group Fairport Convention, rocked by the death of singer Sandy Denny and a series of lineup changes, decided to say farewell with a final concert. Then they decided to make their farewell an annual event -- a cheeky way of skewering what was already a cycle of bands saying goodbye and then returning.

Alright then: At this point, who is left to reunite? What band imploded, or announced “an indefinite hiatus,” or simply faded away, and hasn’t gotten around to riding the reunion gravy train? Let us know what reunion you’re hoping for.