From our vantage point in 2017, it’s easy to see humor in Sib Hashian’s massive Afro, and even easier to mock the Jimmy Carter-era ubiquity of Boston’s pomp ’n’ perfection pop.
But Mr. Hashian reached the top of a game so very, very many of us have tried to climb; he made music in front of millions, he made music that millions and millions loved, and will continue to love. Whether you love Big Star or Bongzilla or Boston, you probably dreamed that dream, too, even if it was for just a moment (or a year, or a lifetime).
I promise you this: Any musician, even the darkest, even the one who sneers at anything to the right of Swans or Impaled Nazarene, even the ones who seek unlistenable lo-fi solutions to insure that not one person could ever possibly think that they actually wanted to succeed, has dreamed the same dream.
(…)
Every single one of them has pretended to scissor kick two and a half feet high at just the right moment in a song so that the red and blue stage lights turn you into the silhouette of a perfect narrow-legged airborne wishbone.
(…)
So many of us, and so many of you reading this, have created lives and careers in the shadow of the Everest Sib Hashian actually scaled. Every day—even now, well into the 21st century—he could get into a car and hear his music, and know that music that he had helped make had defined a time, had been the soundtrack for so many of our formative memories.
