ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is It Still AC/DC if You Replace Every Member but One?
It appears that Angus Young, the band’s lead guitarist and sole remaining founding member, is undeterred. He will soldier on to create new music and tour with replacements, including Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose. After all, there’s still a strong demand for AC/DC music and a limited supply of lead guitarists who look good in schoolboy uniforms.
Steven Hyden, in his new book Twilight of the Gods, refers to the phenomenon as “shrunkgroups.” Lindsey Buckingham can’t commit to a tour? Fleetwood Mac simply recruits Mike Campbell and Neil Finn to suit up for the squad. Glenn Frey passes away? The Eagles tap country star Vince Gill and Frey’s son, Deacon, to fill in.
What’s important is that the machine stays well-lubed and the ticket-buying fans get to hear the songs they’ve been singing along with for decades.
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Could the future of classic rock look something like the modern-day incarnation of Foreigner? The band, best known for late-’70s and early-’80s classic-rock cornerstones such as “Cold As Ice” and “Urgent,” now features just one original member in Mick Jones. One other guitarist dates back to the mid ’90s, well after the band’s heyday, while everyone else has been added since 2004.
Over the past few years, Jones has missed quite a few shows due to various health issues — but the shows have not been canceled. At times, the audience is paying pretty good money to see a version of Foreigner in which every band member is, well, foreign to any of its chart success.
Wikipedia defines the concept of a “ghost band” as being “in the case of big band jazz, a band that performs under the original name of a deceased leader. In the case of rock, under a relaxed definition, it is a band that performs under the name of the original band whose founders are either deceased or have left the band. Use of the phrase may refer to a repertory jazz ensemble, such as a Dixieland band, with a longstanding, historic name. But in the strictest sense, a ghost band is connected in some way to a deceased leader.”
As that page goes on to note, there are already a few rock & roll ghost bands. There will be plenty more to come in the decades to follow; as Hyden makes clear in Twilight of the Gods*, for “classic rock” the brand is everything.
* Which is a fun read, if you can get past the occasional reflexive lefty shibboleths.