It’s interesting that after 50-60 years, all of the biggest rock bands still have living members – some of them still performing: Beatles, Stones, Who, Zeppelin, Floyd, etc.
What is the biggest rock band with no living, original members? Feel free to define your own terms for ‘biggest’, ‘rock band’, and ‘original’.
Solo artists, like Elvis, don’t count. But bands named after a front person, like The Jimi Hendrix Experience, are ok.
All the original members of Bill Haley & His Comets (“big” in the sense of 9 top twenty hits) are no longer with us. The last to go was drummer Dick Boccelli* at the age of 95 in 2019.
*he replaced an earlier drummer before the band’s first big hit, “Crazy Man Crazy” in 1953, so he was sort of the band’s Ringo Starr.
I’m not going to attempt to name the “biggest” of the nominees so far. Nobody is ever going to agree on that and my personal opinion about rock bands changes all the time.
This is actually an interesting question; I’m skipping around Wikipedia and there are many fewer of these than I would have expected. Half of The Doors are still with us, two-thirds of The Kinks, the lead singer of Paul Revere & the Raiders, two out of the five Animals, half of Herman’s Hermits, a couple of the Bobby Fuller Four, and on and on. I’m hoping somebody pops up with a good “oh yeah, didn’t think of them” candidate.
ELP was pretty big, right? Yeah yeah, Carl Palmer is still alive. But the short-lived offshoot band while Palmer was in Asia, ELPowell, has no surviving members.
If we want to limit it to still existing bands with no living original members, the easy pickings are Doo-wop groups like the Drifters or the Coasters. Those bands go on forever with a revolving door lineup long after all of the original members are dead.
Is the OP’s question a big enough band with no living original members or no living, performing, original members?
As a practical matter, a band first becomes a Band of Theseus when the last original member moves on from performing with that band, not later when they die. The next step in further fossilization (needs a better word here) is when the last original member retires from performing in any capacity whatever with anyone. And the band is fully enzombified when all original members are dead and yet the band still shambles out on stage someplace sometime with a wholly different cast. Who may themselves be pretty youthful people despite the band’s great age.
My choice for biggest: Foreigner is still touring without Mick Jones (Parkinson’s) or Lou Gramm (has his own eponymous band which doesn’t go far from his home). In fact, they’re listed on one of those Kid Rock shows, in a crossover with another thread.
Interesting that this is the only pure UK band so far. I always think of the UK as more band-oriented and the US more solo-oriented (at least here in the states). Update: ELPowell is all UK too.
Agreed. It could be sales, influence, artistic merit, even number of members.
Agreed. I think there are quite a few bands without original members still performing. When I tried to answer the question of which is the biggest, I realized that most bands still have at least one living member. This surprised me considering it is an industry with a lot of premature deaths.
For the purposes of this thread – any interpretation (living, performing, etc.) is fine with me.
Of my three nested categories, the largest / least restrictive is bands with no original members still performing with them for whatever reason. That set must be huge. The smallest / most restrictive category is bands still performing with no original members still living.
And IMO that last one is the first of them that gets small enough (and significant enough) to be interesting to talk about its individual member bands. It speaks to the staying power of the brand (deliberate, not typo) and the music itself beyond the lives of the mere mortals who got that ball rolling (and rocking ).
If Mike Love dies before Bruce Johnston that will likely be what happens with the Beach Boys. Then again, with Mike gone, original member Al Jardine might rejoin.
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