10 Hard Rock & Metal Bands With No Original Members Left

Rock bands tend to be complicated beasts, to say the least.

Along with playing musical circles around their contemporaries, oftentimes you have to worry about clashing egos and infighting all while trying to create the most pure-hearted music that you can muster up. Though fans eventually get the amazing tunes, it does end up coming at a fairly heavy price.

While no band is really safe from the occasional blowup between band members, these acts have proved to have some of the most dysfunctional lineups in history. Whether because of the mortality rate of the band members or the age-old personality conflict, these acts have become virtually unrecognizable compared to how they started out. It's one thing to have one of the members take a leave of absence, but to have no original members at the helm is something much more interesting to deal with.

At this point, why would you even listen to these acts when they are a glorified tribute version of what came before? Well, there are many ways in which this could be an improvement though. Over the years, the "new blood" of these acts ended up turning into the shot in the arm that they needed, giving them a completely different lease on their musical life. While these acts look a lot different than before, don't let that fool you into thinking the quality has gone down either...

RIOT tends to be one of the more overlooked acts of the golden age of rock and roll. Being birthed around the same time as other New York natives like KISS, the music coming from these guys was a lot more muscly than their contemporaries, with Fire Down Under and Narita being considered underground classics. However, maybe the reason they couldn't settle into a groove was their constantly shifting lineup.

In the first version of the band, Guy Sparanza was the main sonic force behind the mic, with a delivery that was greatly influenced by the bluesy acts of the time. After a few years of slogging it out though, Guy abruptly quit, leaving RIOT to move forward with Rhett Forester, who had the right amount of grit to compete with acts like AC/DC. As the years went on, you practically needed a scorecard to keep track of everyone leaving, with no less than 5 vocalists and 7 drummers coming and going throughout the years.

Though the sole original member Mark Reale had been the common thread among the group, things took a dark turn when Reale died in 2012 after a long battle with Crohn's Disease. As a new version of RIOT takes to the hard rock circuit, this is nowhere near the kind of band we started out with.