10 Perfect Band Members That Everyone Forgets About

Not every job in rock and roll is supposed to be destined for the spotlight. Even though the singer or the guitarist gets top billing for most of the greatest acts in the world, there are many people in the band that the camera tends to shy away from a lot of the time. Just because they aren't in front of screen doesn't make them automatically less important though.

In fact, some of the greatest musicians in the world of rock have done their best work behind the scenes, steering the band through the good and bad times and managing to keep everything going without rocking the boat too much. There are a lot of times when some of these musicians do some of the best playing...you just don’t hear it all that often. For years, you can listen to these tracks over and over and not realize that the coolest part of the song is actually being played by one of the lowlights in the band.

In some cases, you also get to see the alternate side of your favorite acts, as these musicians bring the kind of strange energy that makes everything flow together so well. No matter how many times that rock history tries to erase these people from memory, we wouldn't have the music industry as it is right now without having them hidden in the background.

For all of the work that they have put out in the past few years, is it even worth calling Radiohead a rock band anymore? Ever since Kid A, the kind of art rock that Thom Yorke and co. have put out seems to be genre fluid at this point, going from slow ballads with acoustic guitars and then switching to the kind of ambient electronic tracks without a care in the world. The rock might be a bit muted these days, but it will always be a part of their DNA as long as Ed O'Brien is a part of the band.

Though Jonny Greenwood tends to get most of the praise for the guitar prowess in Radiohead, Ed's approach to the instrument is still indebted to the atmospheric guitar playing going on in the '80s from the likes of Andy Summers and Johnny Marr. If you go back and listen to the kind of riffs filtered throughout OK Computer, there's still that one aspect of their sound dipping ever so slightly into rockier territory, especially on songs like Electioneering.

When Radiohead made that transition to ambient music though, Ed never put the guitar down, instead trying to find different ways to make his guitar sound like other instruments, like the different feedback sounds in Treefingers. Even outside of Radiohead, there's still that rockier side of his sound waiting to be unleashed, like when he turned Paul McCartney's newer track Slidin into something a lot heavier than it would have ever been. While Radiohead might not be one of the biggest examples of traditional rock music these days, Ed O'Brien still has that same rock and roll spirit that he had in the beginning.