Bandmembers Who Changed Everything

has there ever been a case of a guitar player joining a band that was so much worse than his predecessor that they outright couldn't play the old material

Mick Ronson leaving Bowie's band probably freed David up to explore soul and artkraut.

xpost Bass, but Sid Vicious?

Obviously the Velvet Underground became a less experimental band after John Cale left.

Arthur Kadmon joins the Fall in 1982, records sixteen seconds of guitar for "Hard Life in the Country" and is dismissed

Brix Salenger chats up MES post-gig at the Metro in Chicago and joins the band two months later, they become slightly less abrasive for a bit

Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg join the E Street Band.

Lindsey Buckingham joins Fleetwood Mac .

Matt Sharp leaves Weezer.

Katrin joining The Ex on drums in 1985, she has been a core member ever since.

Barry Andrews leaving XTC I think freed them up to radically change their sound and get more serious

Kat rules. She is one of the most fun drummers to watch.

A lot of key coming and goings in the Bad Seeds.

Michael McDonald joining the Doobie Brothers.

Ahh I missed the part about leaving singers out of it.

Didn't he join with Skunk Baxter? Plus Michael played keyboards, so he counts!

Steve Hackett I think qualifies *twice*, first for joining Genesis and allowing them to get a lot heavier and less folky, then when he got ditched, which freed the band up to simplify their sound and start writing pop singles

wonder how many other band members could say that

James Williamson joins the Stooges. A totally different band.

Dave Grohl joins Nirvana.

wonder how many other band members could say that

Maybe Uli Jon Roth in the Scorpions?

Vince Clarke leaves Depeche Mode, Martin Gore takes over songwriting duties and they get less poppy and more darker.

Yes lost a lot of its funky energy when Bruford was replaced with White IMO.

Uli Roth is a good one

speaking of Yes I think Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman joining both changed the band's sound considerably

Nels Cline joining Wilco

^ nah they’re still boring af

speaking of Yes I think Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman joining both changed the band's sound considerably

― frogbs, Wednesday, April 3, 2024 4:22 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh yeah that for sure

J. Geils when he was removed from the J. Geils Band

Damo joining CAN
Rollins joining Black Flag (w/ Dez switching to 2nd guitar)
Milo joining as well as leaving The Descendents
Dave leaving/Bilinda joining MBV
Yamamotor leaving Boredoms
Gary Young leaving Pavement
Bobby leaving Jesus & Mary Chain
Lou getting fired from Dinosaur Jr
Suzzy joining The Roches
Eno leaving Roxy Music
Todd joining Slint
Lindsey & Stevie joining FMac

do these count?
Charlie Goucher leaving this planet (and the Sun City Girls)
DBoon dying (then trying to be replaced by Ed fromOhio)

Always thought the Matt Sharp leaving Weezer and that changing things thing was a bit of fantasy

I kind of agree that Nels Cline joining Wilco was underwhelming. the guy is a genius guitar player but I never feel like he's doing everything he is able to do in that context; their albums became much less adventurous after he joined. He's a professional so he plays to the music and doesn't overwhelm it, so I don't think their decreasing inventiveness is due to him.

I think when Nils AND Glenn AND Jim O'Rourke (also Loose Fur) were in Wilco was kind of the peak of those wild Wilco goes experimental era... but I am coming from an extremely ignorant POV as I haven't heard a Wilco song in probaby 20+ years.

Richard Thompson leaving Fairport Convention after Full House. They were never as inventive or exciting again.

dave gilmour vs pink floyd ?

Half of Tindersticks' original line-up left after their sixth album, including the violinist who had been key to their sound. They've kept going with a new line-up but they've never recaptured the glory of those first few albums.

David Jackson played for a year with the reformed Van der Graaf Generator and then fell out with the rest of them. They've soldiered on as a trio but it's thin gruel without his sax presence.

dave gilmour vs pink floyd ?

― mark e, Wednesday, April 3, 2024 2:55 PM (two minutes ago)

Syd!

yeah, but dave came in and changed everything surely.
i.e. syd was the core of the orig groove ?

The timing! Just about to post the below suggestion:

Pink Floyd had like 2 majorly impactful changes. Almost the poster boys for this thread

Syd leaving while Gilmour joins
Waters leaving

BTW here's a fun electronic music entry:

Andy Turner and Ed Handley leaving Black Dog for Plaid

It wasn't Dave coming in that changed everything as much as Roger taking control.

xps

fair enough ..

another suggestion : trevor horn vs yes ?

Nils, Glenn and Jim were never all in Wilco at the same time though

Pulp three times:
Simon Hinkler joining in 82
Russell Senior joining in 83
Steve Mackey joining in 88

Bill Berry leaving R.E.M.

Wonder how much Russell Senior led them down their path of the uneasy listening years, following the gentle poppiness of It

(Pulp of course)

Nils, Glenn and Jim were never all in Wilco at the same time though

― PaulTMA, Wednesday, April 3, 2024 3:17 PM

Ah... that's my ignorance showing there. I searched to see if they ever toured together and stumbled upon this reddit post:

I had the opportunity to talk to Nels Cline a couple times at his shows. Suffice to say, he didn’t seem to be a huge fan of Jim O’Rourke. He said he was basically fired from Sky Blue Sky for wanting to make it sound like YHF and AGIB. “I don’t think Jim O’Rourke likes music anymore,” I remember Nels saying.

Speaking of Yes, Trevor Rabin gave them the pop writing chops they never managed on previous attempts to commercialise the sound.

Speaking of Genesis, Phil Collins upped the rhythm game quite considerably.

Eric Bell being replaced by Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson in Thin Lizzy - turned them from a bluesy rock band tring to play heavier into a twin guitar hard rock powerhouse that were soon filling arenas worldwide (plus doing shedloads of drugs).

Paul Thompson being fired from Roxy Music cut them off from the full range of styles they had mastered by that point.

I argue that was a lot more important than Eno leaving.

I agree. Losing Thompson is when they lost muscle and got slick. But they stayed weird for years post Eno.

i mean if we're talking wilco i'd say Jay Bennett (joining and leaving) had way more of an influence on them than Nels Cline

Daniel Fichelscher joining Popol Vuh.

The George Duke era of Zappa is also a standout.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson)

see that's the interesting thing, most of the members of the band stayed on for the spring '75 tour with beefheart which you can hear on _bongo fury_, including george duke, tom fowler, napoleon murphy brock, and on that tour they sounded _very_ different than the fall '74 band is. like not to attribute _too_ much to underwood's presence but to me, that tour was where the late '70s sneering grossly misogynist zappa really _started_. there was some of that on the '73-'74 tours, like, "dinah moe-humm" and "camarillo brillo", stuff like that, but those songs were not exactly the core of the '73-'74 band's material, they were more like, hey, let's play "dupree's paradise". when the '75 band played the old material like "echidna's arf" and "florentine pogen" they sounded like an oldies act doing their old hits, or like zappa would do a lot in the late '70s going "ok let's do some Weird Stuff" and to me, that's just a huge fucking waste of george duke's talents. the shows seemed to be more about shit like "carolina hardcore ecstacy", "advance romance", and "the torture never stops". boring blues numbers. captain beefheart was _there_ but he wasn't _there there_, if you know what i mean, whether or not beefheart had his own billing it was zappa's band. don didn't want to be there, zappa was "doing him a favor" and made sure don knew it.

the other change for that tour was terry bozzio replacing chester thompson, and there's definitely a difference, but there had already been a difference between thompson and ralph humphrey - but there was still that sense of continuity. the "bongo fury" band didn't have that sense of continuity, for me.

talking about ian underwood, though, i will say that his _joining_ the mothers really changed them. the mothers at that point already had at least one top-notch musician in don preston, but underwood's background was more suited to, i think, zappa's formal writing. a lot of the stuff on _uncle meat_, for instance, underwood being in the band was a _huge_ part of what made that possible for zappa. and you can't really hear that live because there are basically no live recordings from before fall of '67, but from what there is, yeah, underwood's joining just made them a fundamentally different band, to the extent that zappa, who was, uh, not one to share the spotlight, kind of highlighted underwood's playing in a couple of places on _uncle meat_. and then of course zappa and underwood were the shared backbone of _hot rats_. they weren't quite _equals_ i wouldn't say, but i think underwood had more influence on that than he did on any of zappa's other projects, and i think a lot of what differentiates _hot rats_ from zappa's other projects _is_ down to that influence.

which record was this? because the Strontium 90 stuff seems pretty split between Sting and Howlett - "Visions of the Night" reappeared as a B-side, parts of "3 O'Clock Shot" were reused on Police songs, there's that demo of "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic"...was this a record that just never came out? clearly there wasn't really a finished product there. anyway, Andy Summers is on this stuff, from what I remember of the booklet Andy had some other work so Padovani came along, but then Andy retook his spot

― frogbs

oh ok thanks for the correction lol, my apologies, i should get my facts straight before "correcting" people :)

all that tuned percussion stuff on Uncle Meat was Underwood correct? big part of that record, always wondered if Zappa truly deserved the songwriting credits he gave himself there

Zappa can be accused of a lot of things - except not composing very precise marimba and vibraphone lines.

Eddie Jobson joining Roxy.

I was thinking about this in relation to my posts yesterday, and even though the violin solo in "Out of the Blue" is maybe my favourite moment in the catalog, there's something "merely ornamental" about a lot of his contributions.

his replacement of eno was a major change in the band's approach and sound tho, come on

RINGO

that does make me think of a fun new idea for a thread: new band members who changed nothing. starting with the ramones shuffling their members in the 80s

his replacement of eno was a major change in the band's approach and sound tho, come on

The songs were "going that way" by Stranded anyway, he was by no means the instigator. It's as if Ferry told him, "play my keyboard part, but fancy".

Neil Young firing Danny Whitten from the Harvest sessions is pretty monumental in what followed.

RINGO

Anyone who underrates what he brought to the group should have to listen to their Decca audition tape repeatedly.

The songs were "going that way" by Stranded anyway, he was by no means the instigator. It's as if Ferry told him, "play my keyboard part, but fancy".

― Halfway there but for you,

Ferry has said Jobson's hiring freed Ferry from his keyboard, making him a frontman at last.

Fair enough, I'm thinking of records rather than live shows. That really widens the scope of the question.

Jannick Top really changed Magma's sound, in fact he's responsible for a certain strain of Zeuhl, specifically the more grindy bass-heavy stuff

bob stinson leaving (or, rather, being told to leave) the replacements. his, um, replacement was a very different guitarist and a very very different presence, and they were an irrevocably different band after that.

Fair enough, I'm thinking of records rather than live shows. That really widens the scope of the question.

― Halfway there but for you

yeah, when YouTube became a thing I was struck by how much of their live sound (and studio presumably) depended on Ferry's keyboards; Eno handled the FX and more outlandish sounds.

Doug Gillard. Both times he joined Guided By Voices.

Jannick Top really changed Magma's sound, in fact he's responsible for a certain strain of Zeuhl, specifically the more grindy bass-heavy stuff

― frogbs

he did, but what _really_ changed them IMO was when the "jazz" players left... ok, look, i'm a huge bootleg nerd, and that 1001 degrees centigrades period, very jazz, and all through that time you have this thing that started as "mekanik kommandoh" growing out of it, and what comes out of that, to me, the first time you hear it is at the chateauvallon festival in august 1972, something that is clearly recognizable as the "mekanik destruktiw kommandoh" on the album, with the vocals taking center stage. like if you listen to them playing it less than a month before in avignon, it's still this very funky, jazz kind of thing. and at chateauvillon it's not, it's more martial. and teddy lasry, jeff seffer, faton cahen, they're all about to leave.. ... they play no more of a role, really, than they do on the album version. they're ornamental. and right after that show they players leave, i can't remember why, the nature of that dispute.

and the period after that which you have is very interesting, it's this very skeletal group, kind of what you'd hear on "Wurdah Itah" but without Top involved. to me the big influence you have here is the organist, Jean-Luc Manderlier, who isn't seen as a major member but who I think had a major influence during this time period. Because you also hear him at Chateauvallon, which is where this big change to MDK happens, and it's the keyboards that are really leading the music here, without Top involved. And Rene Garber, he's also, I think, a big name, a close collaborator here, even though you don't necessarily hear him play much. And of course Klaus Blasquiz, but he's a singer, not an instrumentalist.

Top is a big influence - you can hear over this time K.A. evolving into Kohntarkosz, and Top is a big part of that, and you have particularly this _incredible_ transformation of "Sowiloi", a piece which dates back to at least '71, into something even greater than what you can hear on the "Inedits" album - it's really an exceptional piece, and Top is key to that. And then you have kind of the slow collapse of the band, that legendary tape from the end of the year that's held within the inner circles, the weird occult fascist shit that goes on, this might be around the time when Nico got them all addicted to cough syrup, I don't know.

But the thing is when you have the '75 band come together a couple months later, it doesn't sound like a new band, even with the tremendous influence of Didier Lockwood. They sound like a continuation of that same sound, even though it's Bernard Paganotti (who I love so much, BTW, he's my personal favorite of Magma's bass players - listen to his solo on MDK on the Reims '76 release, plus of course Weidorje) on the bass instead of Lockwood.

So if there's any one person I'd name as a key influence, I'd say that I'd say it would probably be, oddly enough, Jean-Luc Manderlier. That he was the one whose presence coincided with this sea change in Magma's sound.

Ernie Isley joining the Isley Brothers made a _huge_ difference for them.

Chris Jasper + Ernie joined at the same time and Jasper's keys/synth and songwriting was a huge game changer for them.

Bernie Worrell joining Funkadelic, though his influence grew over the years.

Steve Shelley joining Sonic Youth, for sure.

Another drummer who added muscle: John Weathers of Gentle Giant.

hah - I knew we had someone big into Magma bootlegs around here. I agree the biggest change was whatever happened after 1001 Degrees but I never knew if that was due to lineup turnover or if it was just Vander starting to realize his creative vision. certainly the seeds of it were there on the first 2 albums, but he's not the only songwriter. I might be wrong here but I thought Jannick Top was the only one past that who actually got a songwriting credit on a Magma album - at least, up until their latest one

off the top of my head, i think rene garber got a cowrite credit on "eliphas levi"? an early version of which was on his unreleased "heart music" album. which by the way is terrible, it's a bad album, and the version of "eliphas levi" on there isn't nearly as good as the _merci_ version either.

No, the aforementioned jazzers wrote stuff on the first two albums.

(xp) Oh sorry, misread you.

ah, you're right. Paganotti also has a credit on "Weidorje" on Udu Wudu.

looking this up informed me to the fact that Jannick Top has a son named Jimmy Top, not to be confused with Jimmy Pop of the Bloodhound Gang

Steve Shelley joining Sonic Youth, for sure.

Yeah, when I revisited their first decade of work recently, I really wondered what they might have become if Richard Edson had stuck around on drums. They could have been like Konk with clanging guitars! But really, Shelley was the drummer they needed (and he seems to be a primary force behind their wave of archival releases).

Guess the inverse of this is when 3/4 members are replaced but the band still sounds the same

I think this is kinda true for The Stranglers where the only original band member left now is the bass player, but their work and performances remain strong & consistent with their sound and overall variety. They found an amazing frontman with Baz. Of course, this is discounting the Paul Robert years (which certainly had its moments as well but also a couple of their weakest albums, can't help but see Paul standing in the shadows of Hugh and Baz).

Cake were like that too, I think the entire lineup minus the singer and trumpet player turned over after their 2nd album. They didn’t exactly sound any different

And of course The Fall, who regularly turned over the lineup but for Mark E Smith and yer gran on bongos, but always sounded the same.

Well they didn't really tbh

Dunno if that’s the band members themselves as much as it is MES finding people willing to do what he wanted, iirc most ex band members say he wasn’t really a fan of their creative liberties

ah, you're right. Paganotti also has a credit on "Weidorje" on Udu Wudu.

― frogbs

oh yeah, i forget that's technically a magma song. it's more of a stealth pilot, like that time mork and mindy appeared on, uh... was it laverne and shirley?

Happy Days