Unfortunately, no amount of success can stop the worst from happening and some of the biggest
bands in music history have been forced to split up when a member passed on.
Here are some successful groups that only broke up because a member died.
Nirvana was Kurt Cobain's band through and through.
He was the primary songwriter and lead singer, had formed the band, was in charge of personnel
decisions, and dictated the direction of the music.
It was Cobain's leadership that would make Nirvana one of the most vital rock bands of
the 1990s if not all time.
Cobain's fierce ownership of the group's creative spirit threatened to derail their rise as
often as it fueled it: In 1992, he wrote an angry letter to the president of his record
label threatening to end the band, and drummer Dave Grohl almost walked away in 1993 after
he heard Cobain criticize his drumming abilities.
Cobain also struggled with addiction and depression, and in 1994, he took his own life at his home
in Seattle.
"Where are you right after Kurt dies?
“Just lost."
The surviving members of Nirvana did eventually reunite in a sense, two decades after their
heyday.
In 2012, Grohl,Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear performed with a member of another important
band that famously never reunited serving as ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's backing band
on Saturday Night Live.
The three also performed together at a Hurricane Sandy benefit, after hooking up with him in
the studio for a new song, "Cut Me Some Slack."
When Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, Grohl, Novoselic,
and Smear also played with a series of female rock stars past and present taking on vocals,
including Joan Jett, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, and Lorde.
With classics like "She's Crafty," "Hey Ladies," and "Paul Revere," the Beastie Boys helped
bring hip-hop into the mainstream in the mid-1980s.
The group's breakthrough album, 1986's Licensed to Ill, became the first rap record to top
the Billboard charts which was pretty surprising considering that the New York trio had begun
life as a punk band, when some of its members were still attending private school.
But from the punk days through to their hip-hop heights, the Boys stuck together for decades
and that bond led directly to their retirement in 2012, when founder Adam Yauch, better known
as MCA, passed away from cancer at just 47 years old.
Adam Horovitz, also known as Ad-Rock, told GQ in 2015:
"We're done.
Oh yeah.
Adam Yauch started the band.
It's not like a thing where we could continue without him."
The Beastie Boys have always made it pretty clear that they consider themselves three
MCs and one DJ.
When one of the three MCs who had been a part of the band for more than three decades passed
away in 2012, they simply couldn't continue to exist.
The hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest was among the most vital rap groups of the '80s
and '90s.
But when Tribe reunited to perform on The Tonight Show in November 2015, they hadn't
played together in years, and hadn't released an album since 1998 thankfully, however, the
stars realigned.
As group member Q-Tip said:
"The energy for us that night was one that we hadn't experienced on stage together in
some time."
Sadly, Tribe member Phife Dawg died just a few months later, in March 2016, of complications
from diabetes.
By that point, he'd already recorded much of what would wind up being the Tribe's final
album: We Got It from Here…
Thank You 4 Your Service.
After releasing Service in November of 2016, the group took a brief victory lap, with remaining
members Q-Tip and Jarobi White performing anti-gentrification anthem "We the People"
on Saturday Night Live four days after the 2016 presidential election.
They also played a few more concerts, the final one at Bestival 2017 in Dorset, England,
when in the middle of "Whateva Will Be" Q-Tip told the crowd:
"We lost our boy Phife Dawg.
This is gonna be our last show as A Tribe Called Quest, ever."
Many different people contributed to the loud, fast, grimy, and utterly anarchic sound of
classic British metal band Motörhead over the years, but the face and heart of the group
behind "Ace of Spades," "Overkill," and "Killed by Death" was party monster and rock legend
Lemmy Kilmister.
The gravel-voiced singer formed Motörhead in 1975, and swiftly became a beloved metal
icon.
Widely known simply as "Lemmy", the booze-and amphetamine-loving singer lived a fast life
but still made it to the ripe old age of 70, dying from an aggressive cancer just two days
after he was diagnosed in December 2015.
The end of Lemmy spelled the end for Lemmy's band.
A few hours after the death of his bandmate, drummer Mikkey Dee told Expressen:
"Motörhead is over, of course.
Lemmy was Motörhead.
We won't be doing any more tours or anything.
And there won't be any more records.
But the brand survives, and Lemmy lives on in the hearts of everyone."
Pink Floyd started off as a playful psychedelic band in the '60s under the leadership of songwriter,
guitarist, and singer Syd Barrett.
After Barrett left the group in 1968 due to serious mental health issues, Floyd went full-on
prog rock in the 1970s and early '80s, releasing a bunch of classic LPs that explored weighty
concept-driven themes.
The band frequently clashed over creative direction, and bassist Roger Waters wanted
to do his own thing so bad that he left for a solo career in the mid-'80s; the group continued
on for a decade without him, releasing the hugely popular albums A Momentary Lapse of
Reason and The Division Bell, but the only time Waters ever returned was for a Pink Floyd
reunion show at Live 8, the 2005 climate change awareness concert.
A full Pink Floyd reunion subsequently became impossible Barrett, who spent much of his
post-Pink life in virtual seclusion, died in 2006, and keyboardist Richard Wright passed
away in 2008.
Drummer Nick Mason and frontman David Gilmour pieced together unreleased material to form
the final Floyd album, 2014's The Endless River, but it was never meant as anything
more than a belated coda.
In 2015, Gilmour told Entertainment Weekly:
"We are done.
And it would be fakery to go back and do it again."
Part of what made Led Zeppelin so distinctive was the drumming ability of John "Bonzo" Bonham,
whose volcanic riffs helped make them one of the biggest rock bands on Earth all while
he earned a reputation for the hard-partying lifestyle that would eventually kill him.
Bonham's body was discovered on September 25th 1980 at guitarist Jimmy Page's mansion
in Windsor, England, where he'd spent the previous day rehearsing while knocking back
quadruple vodka shots.
According to the coroner's report, Bonham consumed roughly 40 servings of vodka and
passed out; unable to wake when his body started to expel the booze, he inhaled his vomit and
died.
About ten weeks later, in December 1980, Led Zeppelin announced their split via a press
release.
Cause of breakup: John Bonham's death, in no uncertain terms.
The group wrote:
"We wish it to be known that the loss or our dear friend and the deep respect we have for
his family, together with the sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager,
have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were."
That decision has stuck, too.
Page, singer Robert Plant, and bassist/multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones have been persuaded to briefly
reunite for charity every now and again, and Page and Plant hooked up for a pair of Zep-adjacent
LPs in the '90s.
But calls for a full reunion have gone unanswered.
Plant in particular has proven stubbornly unwilling to consider it.
He said in 2018:
"Led Zeppelin was an amazing, prolific fun factory for a period of time, but it was three
amazing musicians and a singer living in the times.
Those times.
That's not going to stop me doing what I'm doing now."
Few bands are more synonymous with the 1960s counterculture than the Grateful Dead.
Jerry Garcia's band of merry musicians certainly looked the part, and provided the soundtrack
of a generation with their groovy, guitar-based jam sessions which quickly inspired a cult-like
following.
Jerry Garcia subsequently became an icon, leading the Dead through a nearly endless
tour of 30 years; but when he died, so did the Grateful Dead.
In August 1995, the 53-year-old musician succumbed to a heart attack, his body weakened by numerous
health problems over the years, including drug addiction and type II diabetes.
Four months later, the rest of the band, including guitarist Bob Weir and drummer Mickey Hart,
announced that the Dead were, well, dead.
In a statement, the band said:
"The remaining members of the band met yesterday and came to the conclusion that the 'long
strange trip' of the uniquely wonderful beast known as the Grateful Dead is over.
Although individually and in various combinations they will undoubtedly continue to make music,
whatever the future holds will be something different in name and structure."
That statement proved prophetic.
Although the Grateful Dead ended with Jerry Garcia, the surviving members have continued
to move in one another's creative orbits, recording and touring under a variety of Dead-like
configurations that have traded in on the group's enduring legacy.
Most recently, guitarist John Mayer has joined up with a group of Dead vets for the collective
dubbed Dead & Company.
When a band is actually named after one of its members, it's going to be pretty hard
for the rest to soldier on together after that member's death but it's not outside the
realm of possibility.
After Buddy Holly famously died in a plane crash in 1959, Buddy Holly and the Crickets
became the Crickets, and they carried on for decades with several different lead singers.
If they'd wanted to, the Heartbreakers could have stayed together after Tom Petty passed
away in 2017 only days after finishing a huge 40th anniversary tour but it just wasn't meant
to be.
In one of his final interviews, Petty said the band would be taking a richly deserved
break, but it wasn't supposed to be the end.
He told the Los Angeles Times:
"If one of us went down, or if one of us died God forbid or got sick…
Then we'd stop.
I think that would be the end of it, if someone couldn't do it."
The lineup had weathered departures before, but the death of Petty himself has almost
certainly spelled the end for the Heartbreakers as a creative unit although the surviving
members were persuaded to reunite for a mini-set at a charity show in early 2018.
Nobody embraced the starkness and darkness of the late '70s "post-punk" movement quite
like Joy Division.
Combining moody lyrics and haunting instrumentation, the English band released just two albums,
including the legendary Unknown Pleasures, and a handful of singles, such as the beloved
goth classic "Love Will Tear Us Apart."
In May 1980, the band was set to embark on its first tour of the United States.
But they didn't make the trip just before their planned departure, lead singer Ian Curtis
took his own life.
Curtis was prone to mood swings and depression, possibly exacerbated by the powerful barbiturates
prescribed for his epilepsy, which wasn't helped by his busy and stressful life on the
road.
Later that year, the surviving members of Joy Division moved on together as New Order;
embracing synthesizers and a somewhat sunnier approach, they became one of Britain's biggest
bands of the '80s.
"We didn't have to do much grieving, we just buried our heads in New Order stuck together
and ignored it, basically."
While their reformation came as a response to a tragic situation, Joy Division member
Stephen Morris has speculated that a breakup probably would have happened sooner rather
than later had Curtis lived.
In 2012, he told GQ:
"If I'm honest, I don't think we would have carried on anyway because of Ian's illness.
I think we'd have knocked the whole thing on the head."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).