Ask Lemmy

Sugar Babes, but somehow they are back to the original trio :)

Gong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gong_%28band%29?wprov=sfla1

The Puerto Rican boy band Menudo from the 80s. Members are replaced once they hit puberty, Ricky Martin was one of its members. The group had 50 members in it's lifetime.

Yes

Richmond, VA has a few of these. the most famous one is GWAR

Velvet Underground's last album Sqeeze is basically a Doug Yule solo album and made without any original members. Yule joined the band about halfway through its existence. For that reason many don't consider it part of the band's catalog. Personally, I think the album gets unfairly judged. It's pretty good, just not on par with Lou Reed's work, but what is?

Is anyone left from original Deep Purple?

Journey apparently only has one original member left. I mention them because I remember them having a lot of turnover.

napalm death had this happen on their debut album. first side is one group of guys, second side is a completely different group, except the drummer

Tull comes close. Anderson at one point said the band was over without barre but he reformed the band this millenia without him so at this point he is the only one who has always been with the band and indeed many people think his name is jethro tull. The band has had a crazy amount of turnover even early in its career and a crazy amount of ex members in other well known bands. Heck in the first or second studio album there is a song about members that left the band before its success. The 20 year album had a little flow chart of band members who ended up in other groups.

Does Skid Row count? The original band saw people come and go all the time, to the point that nobody really knew who was a member at that point. In 1987, Gary Moore, who hadn't been a member anymore, actually "sold" the name to a US band. The last original member still disputes the sale. So, you have two bands with the same name, with the original band had members replaced multiple times, with even the last remaining original member leaving and rejoining twice.

Dr Feelgood was a band where this happened

Newsboys, a major Christian rock band founded in 1985. All original members have been replaced.

Blood Sweat & Tears had like 200 members, my dad knew one of the founding members and went to one of their concerts a couple years back. Got to talk to them after the show and not one of them had even heard of the guy. Feels like the ultimate example of this

Journey?

Any originals left in that band?

Tangential, but I this made me realize I honestly don't know the member names of most of the bands I listen to. I kinda know their faces if they have videos.

Glenn Miller Orchestra was formed a while after Glenn Miller (of "Glenn Miller and his orchestra"-fame) disappeared in 1942. The new band was more or less a continuation of the old band, with some overlap in members. They're still active today.

IIRC, the intention was for Deep Purple to continuously have members come and go, effectively making them a Band of Theseus. However, there was one lineup that was a lot more successful and famous, so changing the lineup would be detrimental to success.

The Ink Spots are an interesting case. They're a vocal group from the 30s. Not only did that group Theseus itself and then dissolve by the 50s, but afterward there were legal disputes. A bunch of the past members claimed rights to the name. Courts ultimately said 'nobody owns the name, you can all use it'. So anybody with any connection was going around performing as The Ink Spots, and those groups were also changing members. Over the decades there were probably multiple fully Theseus'd versions of the group going at the same time.

Andrew Hickey has a good podcast episode on it that you can listen to/read. https://500songs.com/podcast/the-ink-spots-thats-when-your-heartaches-begin/

Not up to date personally, but I feel like at one point Guns n' Roses was just Axl and all different musicians

ELO is an interesting case. Pinning down the original members is already a bit tricky, because the first album was really just a side project of The Move, before Roy Wood left to start Wizzard in the middle of doing their second album. If we're generous and say their third album was really their first as a seperate band, we end up with a group that's fairly static throughout the 70s and that most fans would call the classic lineup. the only two truly original members, though, were Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan, and everyone else in the and was technically considered an employee, which you can imagine led to all sorts of legal chaos

in the late 80s Jeff decided to shutter the band. Bev Bevan wanted to continue but Jeff considered himself synonymous with ELO being their writer, so eventually the two of them agreed to let Bev tour under the name ELO Part II with a lot of the members of the classic lineup. In the early 2000s, Jeff wanted in again but the "employees" thing and some legal trouble between him and Part II left him wanting to start fresh. No one knows the full story, but Bev, who was seemingly still enthusiastic about touring, suddenly decided to retire. Part II had to rebrand to The Orchestra, no longer having a The Move representative, but kept touring. Meanwhile Jeff did an album and a short tour with his new ELO, which had their classic keyboard player but The Orchestra had basically everyone else from the classic lineup. Jeff's ELO went dormant until 2015 where it went by the literal name of Jeff Lynne's ELO. Keyboard player Richard Tandy recently passed away, and with violinist Mik Kaminski retiring this year from the Orchestra, ELO has not one but two ships, one of which has been completely and thoroughly Theseused and the other just one plank away.

Napalm Death though the current line-up has been the same since their third album with sad exemption of Jesse Pintado who passed away in 2006.

there's a metal band called Zao that's been around for ages and have had all members replaced. they wrote a song (called ship of Theseus) about it.

Yes for a couple of decades was like the anti-Ship of Theseus. They would go on tour with everybody who had ever been in the band at any point. They even had Peter Banks (guitarist on their first two largely unknown albums) and The Buggles with them.

Actually kind of a cool concept as their studio albums used a lot of overdubbing which was impossible for single musicians on stage to reproduce. Having 17 guitarists means you can do it all.

Technically "Panic! at the Disco", if you can count every band member except the singer leaving, and being replaced by sessionists