Iron Maiden comes to mind; while they obviously exploded with the arrival of Dickinson on Number of the Beast in '82, the Di’Anno-lead self-titled from 1980 and 1981’s Killers performed reasonably well on the charts as their touring began to take off; the latter had a top 5 UK single, the former I think cracked top 5 on some permutation of the UK albums list.
Hell, they managed it thrice, as, a few years later, they continued right along (as well as any of the major metal acts of the 80s could be described as “continuing right along” after the rise of grunge) with 1995’s The X-Factor with Blaze Bayley stepping in for Dickinson when he departed. . . and on through 1999’s Brave New World when he came back, through till the present day, rocking out in stadiums across the world pretty much continuously.
Maiden and Anthrax came to mind for me also, but given the heavy metal niche, success is a moving target. In the case of Di’Anno, they had a small level of early success, but Air Raid Siren Dickenson combined with Number of the Beast just exploded them. When I look at this question, I don’t think Maiden would have had the success they had in later years with Paul. Likewise, I remember seeing them in arenas, then when Blaze came on, they were basically playing large clubs like Avalon in Boston. I don’t feel they had much success with Blaze. When Bruce came back with Brave New World, boom, arenas and great albums. One of the best tours I saw after he came back was Maiden, Dio, and Motorhead. What a loud lineup.
Van Halen, though, definetly is the exception. They have an outstanding body of work with Roth, and an outstanding body of work with Sammy. I don’t consider the Cherone experiment a success, and the last Roth era was likely a nostalgic success on tour, but the creative spark just wasn’t there. Even though I came of age during the Roth era, I slightly prefer the Hagar era. It felt like they just were having more fun. Plus, they didn’t have stupid middle parts like “hey, Dave, that suit is you. One break coooooomiung up” completely ruining a great song like Unchained.
Journey sort of fits the bill, but they are kinda riding on their past body of work now – as are most of the 80s bands.
Also, staying on topic, there are two guitar players that had an identifiable influence on my playing: Eddie and James Hetfield. Eddie for the tapping and bluesy riffs; and James for that heavy muted picking attack.
They did. Denny Laine was their original lead and they had a big hit with Go Now, when he was with the group but he moved on and the Moody Blues became something completely different from the r&b style that they had in the early 60’s. Denny was a great talent who went on to other excellent gigs, including being a founding member of Wings. He also worked with Ginger Bakers Airforce.
To be fair though, The Moody Blues when evolved from Laine they really didn’t have just one lead singer. Lodge, Hayward, Pinder, Thomas and Edge all took turns at lead vocals although Hayward and Lodge carried the heavy load.
I’m a huge Journey fan. I saw them a year ago. Let’s just say they not only have ridden past their work, it’s now the one man bicycle show that is … Neal Schon. For the first three songs of the concert they didn’t even shine lights on Arnel Pineda (new lead singer) and had all lights on Neal and his overdone guitar solos … EVERY … SINGLE … SONG.
It came off as stupid. We weren’t the only ones that felt that way, reviews of the stop and several others were poor.
Arnel can sing extremely well. If they just rode that like they should, I think it would have been better.
I was more referring to Steve Perry becoming Journey’s new singer in the 70s after a few albums with keyboardist Greg Rollie being vocalist. They were on a few albums together with Rollie also doing lead vocals on some songs until he quit when Perry was given more songs.
Funny, didn’t even remember Perry had a replacement.
