Right, but the point I'm trying to make is that what you're describing wasn't because saxophone was on the bleeding edge of pop culture relevance at the time.
That was the last big pop-culture echo of the big bang that was Lester Young, five decades earlier. There wasn't a wide movement of innovation within pop music centered around the saxophone at the time. And by the mid-1990s, the conspicuous presence of the saxophone was almost entirely gone from pop music (with a few prominent exceptions).
We're now a bit over five decades removed from the Beatles and Hendrix, and I feel like the guitar is in a similar position. It's still got a presence in pop music. There is even at least one "guitar hero" who has released charting albums as recently as three years ago.
But this seems unlikely to keep recurring into this coming decade. Those who already have fans/audiences will probably continue to have them, but new "guitar heroes" will build their followings among niche audiences.
I don't want to make it sound like this is bad news. It's just the natural progression of things, and as has been alluded-to above, "guitar band" and "guitar hero" culture was too often packaged with a lot of sexism, shallow machismo, and other things better left behind (or actively repudiated).