Last week, when Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—which is a sham and will probably be addressed in another column—they needed someone to replace the deceased Kurt Cobain. So in came a quartet of female singers: St. Vincent, Lorde, Joan Jett and Kim Gordon.
While these were obviously extenuating circumstances, it struck me with the thought of what happens when bands replace members who have either left the band or passed away.
Last month, I saw The Allman Brothers Band, a band that features all of three original members of six. Although no one can replace Duane Allman, Derek Trucks is objectively the best slide guitar player to play for them since he died in 1971. Replacing Dickey Betts is a tall order as well, but Warren Haynes is (mostly) up to the task.
Trucks and Haynes weren’t always in the band and some of the replacements before them were less than stellar. Zakk Wylde of Ozzy Osbourne’s band and the Black Label Society stood in for Dickey Betts in 1993 and this led to one of the biggest culture clashes and worst performances in music history—only slight hyperbole, the show was documented on the bootleg Zakk Goes Wylde, where you can hear how terrible of a combination they were.
In 1980, when lead singer Bon Scott died, he left a massive void in AC/DC. In stepped Brian Johnson, and by the end of 1980,the band released Back in Black, an album that has sold more than 50 million copies. Johnson is not Scott, but both have similar howls. Johnson has little trouble hitting the insane high notes Scott was able to and more than faithfully recreates the music when performing it live.
Few people know pre-Bruce Dickinson Iron Maiden and its fairly safe to say that without Dickinson, Iron Maiden wouldn’t be a household name. They still might not be, and many of you who read my column on a regular basis are probably confounded by the presence of Iron Maiden on this list. They are not just one of the best metal bands of all time, but one of the most talented bands ever. Their use of a three-pronged guitar attack is revolutionary and works perfectly.
After that not-so-brief aside, back to Dickinson. His incredible vocal range works perfectly with the band’s sound and brought stability to a band that saw more than a dozen members cycle through their lineup in the late ’70s.
This harmony lasted until the mid-90s when Dickinson split from the band and they brought in Blaze Bayley, who was awful. Whereas other people on this list thus far have fit like a glove into their new roles, Bayley had no business reaching some of the high notes that Dickinson is able to hit. When the band acrimoniously split with Bayley, they brought Dickinson back.
Appetite for Destruction is the greatest debut album ever, but the history of Guns N’ Roses has been anything but steady. When they replaced drummer Steven Adler in 1990, they relatively seamlessly replaced him with Matt Sorum, who was more than palatable on Use Your Illusion I and II. When bassist Izzy Stradlin was replaced just after Use Your Illusion II came out, that was troubling. When they replaced guitarist Slash, Guns N’ Roses became Axl Rose and Friends.
While personally I would’ve loved to have seen them with Buckethead, the lineup they are trotting out now—filled with session players from Los Angeles—is capable except when it comes to songwriting. The long-anticipated Chinese Democracy, which took upwards of a decade to complete, is horrible in its own right and when you compare it to Appetite, it sounds even worse.
When Van Halen replaced the fantastic David Lee Roth with Sammy Hagar, the band went from being one of the seminal rock bands of their era to a giant joke that wrote terrible lyrics. While “Eruption” has no words and is one of their best songs due to Eddie Van Halen’s guitar theatrics, Roth’s lyrics were witty and clever whereas Hagar’s are just bad.
Yet Hagar was not the worst lead singer Van Halen has trotted out. Gary Cherone took a stint as the front man in the ’90s and they released Van Halen III, an album so indescribably terrible that the follow-up album they were recording was shelved.
My final example of terrible replacements is both Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert. In a post-Freddie Mercury world, Brian May needed something to do and when his solo stuff wasn’t working out, so May and his Queen bandmates brought in Rodgers.
Rodgers was in Bad Company and Free, both of which are fine ’70s rock bands, but they’re not Queen. Queen was Queen due to Mercury’s theatrics, something Rodgers severely lacks. You need to be a front man if you are the lead singer of Queen, you can’t just go up there and sing.
Rodgers’ tenure in the group was (thankfully) pretty short, and the group just announced that they were bringing in Adam Lambert of American Idol fame. I don’t care that the judges kept alluding to the fact that Lambert was the next Mercury: Such a thing does not exist. He has performed with them in the past and Lambert’s hammy style certainly fits in, but Mercury was so successful due to his individuality. For the same reason why someone can’t be more unique, as unique means one of a kind, there are some people you can’t replace. Mercury is one of them.
To conclude, on the off chance that you don’t have Phil Collins drumming and singing for you—in the case of Genesis when Peter Gabriel left—replacing a key band member is always a dicey proposition that is a coin flip at best as to whether or not it works.
Is a band more than the sum of its parts? Let Brian know at weidy@wisc.edu
