Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Reunion Tour! The Band Is Back! Wait, Who Are These Guys?

Credit...Mark Pernice

The singer Ian Hunter recently announced a reunion tour of Mott the Hoople, the British band that recorded some memorable hits in the early 1970s. But, Hunter tacitly acknowledged, it wasn’t quite a reunion.

Of Hunter’s four bandmates from Mott’s defining 1972 album, “All the Young Dudes,” two are dead and one is incapacitated from a stroke.

Multiple deaths are rarely the end of great rock bands. So Hunter will tour with the guitarist and keyboard player who joined Mott for its anticlimactic 1974 swan song, “The Hoople.” Displaying a level of honesty rarely embraced by those trying to sell concert tickets, he called this band not Mott the Hoople, but Mott the Hoople ’74.

It’s possible that Hunter could have picked some musicians from a Craigslist ad and legally presented the group as Mott the Hoople. (He declined an interview request.) Increasingly, calculated misrepresentations are part of an older band’s repertoire. Once a band name turns into a brand name, there’s a strong incentive to continue on, even with a lineup that makes fans ask, “Who are these guys?” As rock approaches its eighth decade, partially intact bands are more the rule than the exception. If you’re a purist who wants to see only bands with their full original lineups, you’d better love U2.

Kiss is on a farewell tour featuring half of its original lineup, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. (The other half, Peter Criss and Ace Frehley, are alive). Ditto for the Who, touring this spring with Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend. (The other half, John Entwistle and Keith Moon, are dead.) Yes and Journey march on, as did Boston for a while, despite not having their original singers. Styx tours without Dennis DeYoung, who wrote and sang its biggest hits. Lynyrd Skynyrd, currently on its own farewell tour, is down to one original member, as is Eagles. Foreigner tours with only one founding member, the guitarist and songwriter Mick Jones, and when Jones became ill a few years ago, the band continued without even him.

This fractious dynamic isn’t limited to classic-rock bands: The punk groups Dead Kennedys and the Undertones have long toured without their original singers. Bikini Kill’s shows this spring won’t feature the band’s first guitarist, Billy Karren. Recent tours by Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins and the Replacements, who each lacked one or more key band members, prompted social-media arguments about whether fans were seeing the “real” band.

“IF IT’S ME and your granny on bongos, it’s the Fall,” the singer Mark E. Smith, who peremptorily hired and fired dozens of members of the Fall, once said. But only a few musicians can carry off such lordly “l’état, c’est moi” proclamations. Mick Jones might be on that short list.

Over the years, Foreigner has shed every main member of its early lineups until only Jones was left. But, argued Phil Carson, the band’s manager, “There’s only been one original member, ever. Mick handpicked everyone. We’ve had five or six keyboard players, almost countless drummers. If Mick Jones says it’s Foreigner, it’s Foreigner.”

Image
Left, Foreigner in 1978, with Mick Jones, Lou Gramm and Ed Gagliardi. Right, Foreigner in 2018, with Mick Jones and Jeff Pilson.Credit...Left, Waring Abbott/Getty Images; Right, Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images

In August 2011, the group was playing a show at Jones Beach on Long Island when Jones felt too ill to continue. He was diagnosed with cardiovascular problems, but tour dates had been booked, so Foreigner continued on without the one man who’s synonymous with it.

Jones still sometimes misses shows, depending on his health. Last year, when he was forced to skip a show at a 10,000-seat arena in Tel Aviv, a fan told The Jerusalem Post he felt the night was “tainted with con.” (Foreigner is huge in Israel. Who knew?)

But Carson says fans enjoy Foreigner just as much whether Jones is onstage or in his slippers at home: “I’d say 90 percent of people at the shows have no clue who was in Foreigner.”

For each fan, there’s an invisible emotional calculus involved in deciding whether a band is or isn’t still “real.” That accounting can seem arbitrary to others. I loved seeing the Replacements in 2014 with only two of its four original members, yet I would not see Pixies, who are touring through mid-April, because they’re missing the bassist Kim Deal, one of its original quartet. If it’s weird to care that much about a bassist, well, being a rock fan is often weird.

Brian Koppelman, a former record executive and current pop-culture maven who co-created the Showtime series “Billions,” saw Van Halen play in 2006 without its longtime bassist Michael Anthony, and felt it wasn’t “the real Van Halen.” And despite the magnetism of Robin Zander, he refuses to see Cheap Trick now that the drummer Bun E. Carlos isn’t in the band. “His playing and attitude, the way he held a cigarette, that’s Cheap Trick to me,” he said. “I want to know that we don’t have to die. When I’m with my favorite bands, I can forget mortality for a minute. But I can’t if they’ve been affected by time and the vagaries of the world.”

Koppelman believes there’s a “purely romantic ideal” to loving a band, especially one whose set list can summon feelings from days you often can’t remember. He and I are not the only reunion truthers prone to dramatic feelings about bass players.

Briony Edwards, the editor of the music site Louder, loved Smashing Pumpkins when she was “an angsty teenager,” and she especially cherished the bassist, D’arcy Wretzky. Last year, Smashing Pumpkins reunited for a tour that purportedly celebrated its legacy, but Wretzky wasn’t in the band. “People say D’arcy wasn’t important, she didn’t write songs,” Edwards said, “but my enjoyment of their music is based on the relationship I had with them when I was a teenager.” Edwards saw the D’arcy-devoid Pumpkins at London’s Wembley Arena, and felt cheated: “As a fan, you come preloaded with ridiculous opinions you’re willing to die for.”

Rock music constantly asks the question, “What’s real and make believe?” Strict constructionists like Koppelman, Edwards and I may scoff at some incomplete band reunions, but for less skeptical fans, including apparently many people who adore Foreigner, there’s a simpler, ontological litmus test. If you have as grand an emotional experience seeing Journey without Steve Perry as you would with him, how is your experience not real? Because if Journey won’t perform with Perry, your choice isn’t Fake Journey or Real Journey, it’s Semi-Journey or No Journey at All.

WHILE FANS MIGHT feel joy at seeing a band that’s missing a key member, there are few happy feelings for the spurned exes. DeYoung, for instance, has not gone to see Styx play with a lineup that doesn’t include him. “I saw them plenty in the first 20 years,” he wisecracked.

Image
Left, Kiss in 1982 with Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, Eric Carr and Paul Stanley. Right, Kiss in 2019 with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley.Credit...Left, Luciano Viti/Getty Images. Right, Kevin Winter/Getty Images

When Styx began to perform in 1999 without DeYoung, who was ill with a virus that left him sensitive to bright lights, he was one of four partners in the band who jointly owned the name. He sued, claiming misuse of the Styx trademark, and his ex-bandmates countersued. “We came to a settlement,” DeYoung said. “I can’t divulge the details, but I won’t have to sit on a street corner and sell cookies.”

He is currently on tour with a show billed as Dennis DeYoung and the Music of Styx, and Styx still tours with Lawrence Gowan, a keyboardist who sings DeYoung’s hits in an imitative tenor. “I’m not in the band I helped make famous,” DeYoung said with a mix of frustration and resignation. “I wish I was in Styx, but I’m powerless.”

Disputes over the rights to a band’s name are thorny because they combine elements of trademark law and contract law, said Loren Chodosh, an entertainment attorney whose clients have included Nada Surf and TV on the Radio.

Band names typically qualify as trademarks, and trademarks can be assigned by contract. “A band agreement, in a lot of ways, is like a prenup,” Chodosh said. “It’s about what will happen if things go wrong and somebody leaves, which nobody wants to talk about. Bands don’t start to hate each other until they’re successful.”

Most bands, Chodosh said, never establish contractually how the band trademark is owned. In the absence of a contract, she added, “Trademark law prevails. And because trademark law is not uncomplicated, it’s difficult to say who owns that trademark.”

Before there was an internet where fans could find up-to-date information, bands engaged in outright chicanery. When the Velvet Underground played England in 1971 with the drummer Maureen Tucker as the only original member, a Melody Maker reviewer deemed it “a travesty, a masquerade.” Then Tucker quit, and the group continued.

One of the faux Velvet Underground’s tours of England was arranged by Clifford Davis, the manager of Fleetwood Mac, who in 1974 fabricated an all-time deceit. The band had canceled tour dates after the drummer Mick Fleetwood discovered his wife was in love with one of his bandmates, but Davis was unwilling to return the advances promoters had paid, so he cobbled together a sham band while claiming that he owned the name. “He can put four dogs barking on a leash and call it Fleetwood Mac,” the singer Bob Welch quipped in Rolling Stone.

Band ownership isn’t about what’s right or fair, but about what’s legal. In 1954, Clyde McPhatter of the Drifters sold his half-share of the vocal group to its manager, George Treadwell, who signed new members to personal services contracts, then hired and fired them at his whim. After he died, the trademark passed on to his wife, and then their daughter, as though it were an ancestral quilt.

Chuck Negron, a founding member of Three Dog Night who sang several of its biggest hits, including “Joy to the World,” said that bandmates had him sign a contract — which stipulated that any member fired from the group would have no further right to use the name — while he was a heroin addict.

Image
Left, Styx in the mid-1970s with Chuck Panozzo, Dennis DeYoung, John Panozzo, James Young and Tommy Shaw. Right, Styx in 2018 with Lawrence Gowan.Credit...Left, Fin Costello/Redferns, via Getty Images; Right, Harmony Gerber/Getty Images

Negron was later fired for missing shows. His attempt to bill himself as “Chuck Negron, formerly of Three Dog Night” led to a legal battle that the two parties resolved by agreeing that he could use the “formerly” designation, provided that in all print advertisements, the words Three Dog Night were no larger than half the size of the words Chuck Negron.

After his former bandmate Cory Wells died in 2015, Negron listened to a current version of Three Dog Night and felt it was “a rip off. Not to say the people in the band aren’t good, but they just aren’t the same ilk.” Though bitter, he’s also proud that the music is still meaningful to people. “There are people who just want to hear that music and relive that time of their lives, and don’t care if two cats and an elephant are singing it.”

IF YOU’RE ONE of those people who can enjoy a band even if most of the founding members are gone, consider two cases of groups with zero original musicians.

The drummer Bobby Colomby co-founded the New York jazz-rock group Blood, Sweat & Tears, which grew to eight by the time of its 1968 debut. Band members left and were replaced, and by 1974, Colomby was the only original member in the group. “We had an agreement: Last man standing owns it,” he said.

While Colomby took a less itinerant job, as an executive at CBS Records, he leased the Blood, Sweat & Tears name to David Clayton-Thomas, who sang the group’s signature hits, including “Spinning Wheel,” but was not an original member. After a 20-year lease, Clayton-Thomas formed a new band in 2004, so Colomby hired musicians to tour as his salaried employees. “As far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m the guy behind it, it’s still the original band,” he said, adding that if his 1960s bandmates still played in the group, “you’d see guys with walkers onstage.”

Blood, Sweat & Tears still play 55 to 65 shows a year, according to its manager, Larry Dorr. In a phone interview with Dorr and Colomby, neither could name all current members of the band. But Colomby likens it to a franchise: “When you go to a Yankees game, what do you see? There’s no Babe Ruth, no Mickey Mantle. But you’re going to see the pinstripes, a tradition, a style.” Blood, Sweat & Tears, he insists, isn’t a group of specific people, “it’s a musical concept.”

Soft rock bands are not exempt from legal feuds. Wayne Nelson, a bassist who joined the Little River Band in time for the successful group’s sixth album in 1981, said with a laugh, “We fought as much as a metal band, but it was all passive-aggressive.” Nelson was a paid employee first, and then was made a partner via LRB Proprietary Ltd., the group’s unit trust. When singer Glenn Shorrock left, he was paid $85,000 to turn over his shares, Nelson said.

Eventually, the name was owned by the guitarist Stephen Housden, who had joined for the group’s seventh album, and stopped touring in 2006. Now, Nelson effectively licenses the trademark from Housden, who earns tour income without ever leaving his home.

Shorrock and two other founding members tried to perform as the Original Little River Band, but Housden forced them to change the name. Since then, the band’s ex-members have called the current lineup “a tribute band” and “a joke.” No musician grows up dreaming of fighting in court and parrying insults, but, Nelson concluded, “That’s the life of a band in these times.”

A correction was made on 
March 22, 2019

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article, using information from the source, misidentified the year of the picture and one band member. The photo was of Kiss in 1982, not 1984, and the picture included Ace Frehley, not Tommy Thayer.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: The Music Lives On, Minus Familiar Faces. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT