Blood, Sweat & Tears — Blood, Sweat & Tears Greatest Hits

Vinyl, LP, Compilation, 1972

By the time A Momentary Lapse of Reason was released, there was only one original member remaining in Pink Floyd: drummer Nick Mason. No wonder band founder Roger Waters was so pissed off that they kept using the name “Pink Floyd,” especially after the album was so non-Floyd and such a gross middle-of-the-road pile of hot garbage that Waters yelled “someday the world will know the depth of this entire hoax!”

The band had evolved — through a few founding members leaving, a few weird breakups, and a contract that was weighted heavily toward making Pink Floyd a business, not a band — but was it still the same?

Our tolerance for shifting out players and still supporting the larger group waxes and wanes depending on the situation. We are cool with The Rolling Stones swapping nearly every position over their entire career, but can’t handle Pink Floyd. We learn that Blood, Sweat & Tears has had at least 140 members over it’s lifetime, most of the last 15 years without a single original member, and we ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but somehow we’re weirded out when Journey of all bands replaces Steve Perry (eventually) with a Filipino who sounds EXACTLY THE SAME.

Our insistence on keeping a crew together under a common game is fleeting. We watch sports, which is the very definition of the Earth, Wind & Fire model, with no one person ever taking over the name itself, and yet we have a hard time when the original cast of Hamilton leaves — it’ll never be the saaaaaame. We do not tolerate cast switches on our television shows, but are more than willing to watch film reboots where every characters has changed.

It’s as if we don’t really know what we want. It’s as if we have to go through 140 different ideas to land on something that works.

Mostly, it’s just that change is hard unless we’re expecting it. And when we expect it, it can’t come soon enough.