@@RickCaty Perhaps, except the Rolling Stones still has it's original lead singer. Jules Alexander plays guitar and sang back-up vocals. My guess is the majority of people who paid for this performance went home disappointed. I doubt that happens with the Rolling Stones.
I saw them at the South Shore Room in Harrah's Club in Stateline, Nevada sometime in the mid 1980s. Buck Ram's Platters (not a single original member of The Platters were present) opened and The Association were the headliners. Because my little blues band was playing in the Cabaret in the Reno Harrah's Club, we got in free with backstage access. We met them briefly, and I remember telling them that I remembered hearing Windy and The Wind Cries Mary on WLS radio (Chicago) when I was kid. One of them said something like "That was 1966 or 1967. How old were you then?" I told him I was 10 in 1966. He just laughed and said something like "We never played any Jimi Hendrix covers..." I of course, was thinking of their song "Along Comes Mary"... God, I was so _embarrassed._
You have to cut 'vintage' performers a certain amount of slack. At one point Joey Molland in essence agreed w. you,. abandoned the BF name, put out a CD and played shows under his own handle. Public response? Zilch. Nobody (except the most diehard fans) recognized his name. Eventually he (and a zillion other artistes in the same boat) had to surrender pristine ethics to practicality. You could make the same argument as regards names much bigger than Badfinger's. How much does the band that made superdupermegabucks as Fleetwood Mac have to do with the bluesband fronted by Peter Green in the 60s? Today there is an entity out there called The Beach Boys. with not one person on stage with the last name Wilson (!!). If it were just called Mike Love and Acquaintances (I'd say "Friends" but I don't think he has any), how many people would go? Back in (I wanna say) the 1990s, Pete Townshend decided that The Who as an entity had run its course, so he mounted a tour promoted as "Daltrey, Entwistle and Townshend play Quadrophenia". Nobody went, presumably because (impossible as it is to believe) nobody recognized their names. About halfway through the US tour playing to half-empty houses, ClearChannel intervened and said F#<k this, we are not underwriting a traveling ghost town. From that point forward it was billed as THE WHO, and sold out. Get used to it. Eventually a band name becomes the brandname for a certain repertoire and style, not for specific personnel. Cf The Ship Of Theseus on Wikipedia. I used to look at the covers of my mom's Mormon Tabernacle Choir albums and muse 'I don't think those are all original members.' Just sayin'
