The Julian J. Gonzalez Music Challenge – Name a band that has had multiple lead singers?

Thank you River listener Julian J. Gonzalez for this cool music challenge question.  Lead singers are often the hardest member of the band to replace but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.  Ego’s, drugs and sadly sometimes death are often the cause.  To be honest it is very rare that a new lead singer ever captures the original spark or love of the fans but occasionally they do.

One band that had multiple lead singers and one of the greatest voices of the nineties was Stone Temple Pilot.   The band had some amazing songs and Scott Weiland’s voice was so pained and soulful that the band are still thought of as a huge part of nineties music history.  However after years of pent-up frustration and anger over Scott Weiland’s drug problems and erratic behavior the other three members of the band—Dean DeLeo, Robert DeLeo, and Eric Kretz—took the unprecedented move of firing the late lead singer from the band he co-founded. What happened next was rather bonkers, however: Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington jumped into the group as lead vocalist for both live dates and new studio music. (Although the act initially had to call itself Stone Temple Pilots with Chester Bennington, it reclaimed the STP moniker after hashing out legalities with Weiland.) The new singer readily embraced his frontman role—in fact, he basically cosplayed Weiland onstage, both sartorially and mannerism-wise—before leaving at the end of 2015 to focus on Linkin Park. (and of course we sadly lost Chester in 2017) The remaining STP trio launched a search for a new lead singer in early 2016. On November 14, 2017 the band revealed that Jeff Gutt had been chosen as their new lead singer.

Here is a clip of Chester Bennington singing a song made famous by original frontman Scott Weiland.