"The Tubes" Live Winterland 1978 with Aynsley Dunbar

[Eliot Rosewater]

[Binkie The Clown]

1. a Las Vegas wedding, a Mexican divorce, a solid gold Kama Sutra coffee pot,

OR...

[Miles Archer]

2. Amazing band. Saw them twice at Bimbo's in SF and once at the Paramount in Oakland,

They spent so much damned money on presenting the best stage so possible that the record sales didn't offer their expenses. I've mentioned this before on DU, but Mingo Lewis was brought in on congas and percussion, and they told him they didn't want him to become an "official" member because they didn't want him to shoulder their financial burden.

1978 was really the end of The Tubes as seen in this video. 1979 brought Todd Rundgren in as producer, David Foster for the next two, and Rundgren for the fourth and final, Love Bomb, in 1984.

The first three studio albums, plus the live "What Do You Want From Live," are my favorites, because they are free of any acknowledgement of the record business as a "business." They followed the muse and did what they wanted to do, and from 1979 onward, they were in pursuit of hit singles. I understood it at the time and remained loyal to the band in terms of buying their albums, but I missed that original spark.

According to the band's Website, they have four live shows scheduled for the next few months, so it's good that Fee's still out there doing his thing. The 2018 band includes Fee Waybill plus original members Roger Steen, Prairie Prince, and Rick Anderson. David Medd has been with them for a while. Vince Welnick, as we all know, passed away in 2006. Bill "Sputnik" Spooner had one solo album and did an acoustic duo thing called "The Folk Ups," but in 2018, he seems to be off the grid.