Six Degrees of 33s

Bands & Lineups9 articles

Membership, reunions, splits, and families.

• Born in the Band

  5,579 bands contain at least one pair of siblings. At the top of the table: twelve Rodrigueses, nine Winanses, eight brass-playing brothers, and seven Kanneh-Masons.

• Motown Was a Family. Literally.

  Start at Berry Gordy and follow only blood and marriage — three hops reach Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross's children, Redfoo, and the entire Jackson family. Fifty people, one payroll.

• Ships of Theseus

  The Fall had one fixed point and forty-odd moving parts — a complete membership chart of the most replaced band in Britain, plus the working groups that no longer contain anyone who founded them.

• The Divorce Album, Measured

  9,684 marriages between musicians, 1,035 divorces with discographies attached — and a timing pattern the mythology gets backwards. The divorce album ships before the divorce.

• The Duplicate Men

  One working musician in seven answers to a name that belongs to somebody else too. Miles Davis hired Bill Evans twice, twenty-three years apart — different men, 52 and 45 recordings with him apiece, zero recordings together. A case study in 421,712 borrowed names.

• The Empty Stage

  The database cannot prove that anyone is alive; it can only prove that someone has died. Among 72,200 bands of three or more, there are 742 where it has now proved it for everybody — the Andrews Sisters, the Goons, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Rat Pack. This is the only census in the collection guaranteed to grow.

• The Idol Machine

  AKB48 has had 361 members and 80 subgroups. Its franchise family spans 1,400+ performers from Jakarta to Bangkok. Anatomy of pop's strangest organizational chart.

• The Long Silence

  The longest gaps between albums, measured within artists' lifetimes — 98-year-old Marilyn Maye's sixty-year wait, the yé-yé girl revived by Mad Men, and how to tell a comeback from a vault.

• The Long Way Round

  Two men left Country Joe and the Fish in 1968 and next shared a band in 2012 — a band they named The Former Members. Nine verified reunions, 29 to 44 years apart, including the case that nearly fooled the court: the graph accused Weir and Lesh of a 38-year separation, and the complete file said otherwise.