Spinal Tap after Nigel Tufnel left. They were reduced to doing jazz fusion instead of heavy metal until he rejoined the band.
Fleetwood Mac got so much better after Peter Green left. AMLOR is a better album than TFC. 
They actually put out a good album without him – the aptly named Other Voices. The album is uneven, but so are all the albums with Morrison (though their best with him was better).
After the great 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus everyone but the drummer and organist for Spirit remained. They added a couple of musicians, but their album Feedback was a big drop-off and the group’s worst up to that point.
The Who was never the same after Keith Moon left. It was forewarned: check out the lettering in front of Keith in Who Are You
Queensryche went into an immediate nosedive leading to its inevitable implosion after Chris DeGarmo left the group.
I enjoyed their new direction…
It’s less iconic, but the Gin Blossoms - who I really like - never really recovered after Doug Hopkins died. He was the main hitmaker in the band and they got one more record to market and sort of petered out.
This is what I came to post. Post-Merchant, they had one… well, not “hit” but song you maybe heard on the radio, which was a cover of “More Than This” and I have no clue what they’ve been up to since then despite them still being around.
No. Genesis came back strong without Gabriel and made two more good albums. It was only after Steve Hackett left that they suddenly dropped off.
The Final Cut is the worst aspects of Waters. it’s all anger with no balance from Gilmour to tone it down, to bring it back to listenability. DSotM is saying the same thing (I hate the world because it killed my daddy!) but it does it so much better.
DSOtM is subtle. TFC is “fuck you Reagan and Thatcher!”. But The Gunner’s Dream is up there as one of their best songs ever, and the title song is one of my personal favorites. Not Now John isan OK song, but it is just Waters being angry again, this time about the film version of The Wall.
I always thought AMLoR was Pink Floyd lite. No Roger anger, but no Roger talent, either. The Division Bell to me is the best post-Waters Floyd. It sounds almost like a PF album. What Do You Want From Me and Keep Talking are just about indistinguishable from their best earlier stuff.
But then, I love Gilmour’s first solo album, and hated all of Waters’, so take that for what it’s worth.
[continuation of hijack-in-progress]
As a long-term Pink Floyd fan, I am amazed at the outpouring of love for The Final Cut. I rank it absolutely dead last of all the Pink Floyd albums, finding it unlistenable for the most part. Be that as it may, it’s not because the loss of Roger Waters wasn’t a near-mortal blow for Pink Floyd; it was. But Waters by himself, without the chemical balance of Gilmour and the others, wasn’t up to Pink Floyd standards either (and certainly not on TFC). I love The Wall, also, btw. Somehow the pain and misery in that works, and works powerfully, with beautiful and delicate and soul-gripping angst, whereas in the subsequent Final Cut it comes across and petulant and polemical. (The only track on the whole album I can bear to listen to is the short but moving “One of the Few”)
ETA: dammit, Just Asking Questions…
[/hijack cont.]
You and three other people.
The world of country-folk-rock is full of these questions.
Like the quality of different Byrds lineups. The effect of Gene Clark leaving the band, then the firing of Clarke and Crosby (and Jim McGuinn’s exile to Rio)… and was the band and the genre ever the same after Gram Parsons died?
Eagles, Flying Burrito Brothers, New Riders of the Purple Sage all had similar personnel changes.
Then there was Poco.
The original core of Furay, Young and Messina post-Buffalo Springfield was great, and Deliverin’ is one of the highest-energy live albums I’ve ever heard. The addition of Paul Cotton was brilliant, but the loss of Richie Furay (their self-styled leader) was a huge change*.
*Many thought that’d be the end of Poco, but as it turned out, Rusty Young was the backbone of the group.
Hmmm, that could be another thread: “Bands that survived/thrived as long as one member stayed”.
Seconded. Wouldn’t catch no DLR screeching out no stinkin’ loooourrvve ballad. Band went from streety scroggin & fightin to … whatever poseur crap Hagar drones on about. Barph.
If you haven’t already, check out Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports album. When Syd left, Nick took over as the voice of surrealism in the band. Gilmour is a guitar master and would probably be totally comfortable in a society in which folks communicate with strings rather than voices–Simply magical, etc. gush, etc.–but very, very Serious. The Damned wanted Syd to produce their second album because they wanted to move in a more psychedelic direction. Pink Floyd’s management advised them, “Syd isn’t well (he’s back at the hotel). But here’s good old David Gilmour. He’ll give your record what it needs.” Despite the first 7 seconds of the album sounding exactly like the first 7 seconds of Interstellar Overdrive, The Damned were not entirely thrilled with the experience. I can totally see Mason & Gilmour constantly checking each others’ more over the top self indulgences (Gilmour’s work in Berlin’s Pink & Velvet is allegedly a tiny snippet of a heavenly hour long rambling solo he gifted to Berlin to use as they saw fit in the song). Evidently, they are ALL given to navel gazing, and they failed to check Waters before he managed to crawl all the way into his own backside and get lost in The Final [del]Crack[/del] Cut
Pink Floyd is my favorite band ever, but I don’t like AMLOR and TDB at all.
Johnny Marr leaving The Smiths.
Much of the attention was focused on Morrissey but the reality is that it was Marrs work that made the sound of the band.
Morrissey has always been something of a prima donna and imposed his own view of the bands direction with little consideration for the views of Marr.
Marr went on to his own solo career, so did Morrissey but I get the impression that Marr is the happier person - but that’s almost a given.
I’d pay to see a Marr gig, I would not do the same for Morrissey
The J Geils Band was on top of the world in the early 80s. Peter Wolf left, they put out one more crappy album and then sank so fast their noses are probably still bleeding.
It is perhaps the subject and the politics, which rings much truer with a son (me) of the Shipyards, just shut on the Clyde, getting namechecks, and the full scale asset stripping of the country by Thatcher in full flow at that time, leaving the regions and the industry to die.
Dictators (Pinochet) deals as their lone ally in South America on her all or nothing gamble on a war in a forgotten colonial island, saving her from the fact she’d ran the country into the ground over a four year period and was about to lose an election. Marching the poor to their deaths so she can get reelected.
It rings true to certain parts of the UK. I can see why it doesn’t ring true for the rest of the world, the same way a Tory voter in London might listen with bafflement and wonder who’s complaining about the wonderful boom going on down there.
I completely get why you wouldn’t like it.
It wasn’t for you. It was for the likes of me…
I don’t agree with this at all. In fact, I would cite Wish You Were Here and “Dogs” from Animals as prime examples of the band working collaboratively together, with more balanced input from each member. The Wall is when it starts becoming much more of a Roger Waters enterprise, with more outside session musicians being used. I prefer the band’s earlier stuff to The Wall.
While I find Roger Waters’ lyrics overly-negative, I appreciate that he’s a better lyric writer than the other band members. A Momentary Lapse of Reason certainly suffers a drop in lyric quality, but I’m someone who focuses on the music, and doesn’t pay so much attention to the words being sung.
As a long Floyd fan, I respectfully felt the opposite :). MLoR felt to me much more simplistic and trite than any previous Floyd, it really suffered for loss of lyrical and compositional complexity, Gilmour struggles on his own writing anything beyond simple rhyming couplets. I loved Final Cut and found it dense and layered, it had some dud spots with little more than being spoken word passages, but then The Wall also had the same proportion. Final Cut mostly lacked any kind of stand-out single.
I don’t know if this fits the thread exactly, but the loss of Tom Johnston from the Doobie Brothers allowed Michael McDonald to completely ruin the band’s musical style.
Mick Jones leaving the Clash. This is the objectively correct answer.
I find both TFC and MLOR unlistenable. Clearly it was the creative tension between Gilmour and Waters that made the band great.