This question came from a discussion on an ABBA board about how we will react when a member dies. It got me thinking about how many bands from the 1960’s/1970’s besides ABBA still have all their original members living. Not the Beatles. Not the Stones. Not Queen. Not The Who. Not the Beach Boys.
It seems that if drugs didn’t take a toll, getting older definitely is.
The only other group I could think of was Fleetwood Mac. I know there must be others, but it seems like such groups are in the minority these days.
The Kinks original members are alive, as are Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, the Moody Blues (I think), there are probably many more, I just can’t think of them now.
Statistically speaking, though, wouldn’t an average of say, 1 in 5 die by age 65? (just guessing). Add to that the tendency to have unhealthy lifestyle choices and a whole lot of travelling and I would think that perhaps 1 in 4 or 5 being dead by age 65 (or younger) is a fairly reasonable estimate. So considering most groups of that day having 4 or 5 members, it stands to reason that one of them would be dead.
All original members of Genesis are alive. The main 5: Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks, and Phil Collins. Minor members Ray Wilson and Anthony Phillips.
Everybody in Aerosmith is still going, right? Although it’s hard to call them a 70’s band because they’ve continued to put out good albums (well, until recently I guess).
Gladys lives in Las Vegas, and performs nightly at the Flamingo Hilton on The Strip. I haven’t seen the show, but from what I hear from those who have seen it, she performs solo. That doesn’t mean the Pips are dead, but Gladys certainly does not perform, or advertise that they are with her in this show.
One of the funniest SNL bits was seeing the group, “…and the Pips”…a bunch of guys singing only the back up version of her songs.
Many years ago I read that the most difficult thing for newsrooms was to determine which celebrities were alive. It is easy to Google a search for certain celebrities to find the date of death, but it is harder to find out if celebrities are still alive, especially if they have not been popular for many years.
Also, living in Las Vegas, we get almost all of the groups who are alive performing somewhere here…but quite often you will have one surviving member of a group who has the rights and he/she gets some back up people to build the group up and pretends it is the original group. Let me put it this way…if you see, for instance, The Drifters and one guy is 73 years old and the others are about 30, well, it ain’t the original group, even though they sound damned good.
Yep- Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Tom Hamilton, and Joey Kramer. Rick Dufay, Jimmy Crespo, and Ray Tabano (who stepped in during the band’s darker years) are also around, AFAIK.
Did a little more research. Gladys Knight is still performing at the age of sixty - forty three years after her first top ten single. The Pips; William Guest, Merald “Bubba” Knight, and Edward Patten, are all still alive in their sixties but have retired from performing.