Grace Slick was third best after Marty Balin and Paul Kantner in Jefferson Airplane. Unless it was one of the other two.
Richie Furey was third to Stephen Sills and Neil Young in Buffalo Springfield.
Ah, so you decided to take the bait in Tibby’s otherwise (?) excellent post.
I was thinking possibly Fleetwood Mac, The Moody Blues, or The Eagles.
But it is a short list.
Another point about boy bands: they are manufactured products, conceived and assembled with little regard for the music aside from how it can be turned into revenue. They may as well have been built in a laboratory.
The Beatles formed, grew, and matured organically, playing dozens of shows a week in the early days to hone their talent and develop their sound. Sure, they wanted to make some cheese, but the music was always the central reason for their existence.
mmm
Stephen “Window” Sills, of course, was quickly replaced by Stephen “I made an illegal fortune from” Stills because he had to be held upright when the band jambed.
So THAT’S why! Worked like that for me fifty years ago and I finally know I was just being psychologically manipulated. 
Silly me, I thought it was Millie Small in 1964.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dwrHCa9t0dM
Um, he wrote the 9th after he went deaf.
“The Monks started without the “boy band” foundation, so they had a hard time getting heard”
"So, yes, a band that was plentiful amounts of good, able to pivot when they needed to, and were lucky to pivot the right way and capitalize on their previous successes. "
??
Boy, are you twisting and spinning away here or what? One might say “The Beatles were a maserati everyone could drive. They were the best and we are lucky to have coexisted with them. Get used to it. Live it love it” to you. You can’t suppress it with this banal wallpaper.
Boy band is not something that existed at the time so you are just hindsighting here, but you knew that. It’s kind of related to doo-wop, but I don’t hear much in it, not like say bubblegum has got.
“The Beatles were the original boy band” seems to be a thing on the internet these days. Maybe we’re getting to the point where they were so long ago that people aren’t actually familiar with the early history of Rock, or with the Beatles themselves?
I think that’s the case. I doubt many people referring to them as such actually remember how different popular music was before and after their arrival. And then too, if you look at the videos of their live performances without having seen the impact their music had on the culture, you might come away with the impression that all their fans were screaming teenage girls.
Yeah, that’s what I meant, although I see now that I could’ve expressed it more clearly.
But his playing it would probably be embarrassing, since the conductor told the band to humor, but ignore, the old, deaf co-conductor.
We all know the images from The Ed Sullivan Show and A Hard Day’s Night. The deeply important difference about the Beatles is that boys were an equal part of their fanbase. They didn’t get the cameras turned on them but they bought the records, filled the clubs, and auditoriums, and stadiums, wrote the fanzines, and started bands of their own.
And screaming girls were part of every group’s audience in the early days. My first concert was in 1967. The Beach Boys headlined, with the Buckinghams and Tommy James and the Shondells backing them up. All I remember from it are the screaming girls. The music was somewhere buried underneath it.
If screaming girls made the Beatles a boy band, then every single band of that era was a boy band. Nothing could be more meaningless than that.
When Fleetwood Mac had Danny Kirwan, Christine McVie, and Bob Welch it was a perfect balance of composers all at their peak.
You probably weren’t referring to that era though, alas.
Well, they were a pre-packaged look presented to be safer than how they had dressed earlier, and they sang safe songs about holding your hand. That’s pretty much a boy band, in my book. The developments of boy bands not playing instruments (or not even being able to sing) was later.
All rock music was teenybopper? Ehh, no. At least, some of it was already being geared more toward late teen/early adult themes. Instrumental surf music was certainly willing to deal with subjects more dangerous than kissing, teen love, and wanting to hold your hand, rockabilly did too. Why? Because those bands were often still bar bands like The Beatles once were before they got cleaned up for the teen girls. Those bands played to their audience, same as The Beatles did. If changing your act to appeal more easily to teen girls doesn’t make them a boy band, I don’t know what would.
You mean that “later” development as in when boy bands became an actual thing as opposed to a figment of your imagination looking backwards out of complete ignorance?
Instrumental music doesn’t have lyrical subjects man.
You think I don’t want to hear the other side, but I really do. I would like to hear it well stated by someone with some new ideas, but this is just a fail.
Boy bands started somewhere. I’m sorry that you’re not willing to accept they can take the “first” moniker there, maybe.
Instrumental songs have subjects, though. For instance, every one of them has a title. I don’t think I mentioned them having lyrics. You also ignored rockabilly for reasons that aren’t clear.
I notice you also didn’t address the meat of my argument, which was that they changed their act to chase the teenybopper market. It’s not a sin, and it put them on a path to being very wealthy. So, they were a boy band for a time. It’s not the end of the world.
Dude (or dudette), there was no other market. There was no distinction, like there is today, between pop/rock music for teenyboppers and “serious” pop/rock music. All rock and roll was teenybopper music. The Beatles played to audiences of teenagers at the Cavern Club before Brian Epstein cleaned them up and they played to the same audiences after. The only difference was they no longer looked like a gang of idiots (as Paul McCartney described their Hamburg leather look), no longer ate, smoked or drank beer on stage and didn’t stop in mid-song to catcall someone in the audience or suddenly start playing another number.
The changes Epstein made were to make them more attractive to promoters who could put them in better venues: he wanted them to be taken seriously as professional entertainers, partly out of personal pride and partly so he could command better fees for them. (He made them restrict their sets to an era-appropriate half-hour, which allowed them to play more than one booking a night.)
Epstein never dictated what they should play; he wouldn’t have known what to suggest, and if he had, they wouldn’t have listened to him.
The Rolling Stones were always the raunchy and gritty alternative to the polished Beatles. The early Beatles were marketed as a wholesome band that parents let their kids watch. Heck, they were introduced to the US on the Ed Sullivan Show. Neatly presented along with the old vaudeville acts Sullivan usually booked.
It certainly worked. The Beatles were commercially successful.
They were certainly the largest market, but they weren’t the only one. There were other markets, that were largely intended for adults. The chitlin and the honky-tonk circuits were the places where a lot of American rock and roll artists got their Hamburg-like experience. Plus, The Beatles played in the red light district of Hamburg. I doubt there were really a lot of teenagers there, at least not the same type their early singles were aimed at. .
The chitlin and honky-tonk circuits were irrelevant for a British act, and in an era when the charts were rigidly segregated by region and race, would have been closed off to the Beatles anyway; it’s not as though white guitar bands could choose to have their records on the R&B chart instead of the pop chart. (Not least because there hardly were any white guitar bands.)
Being irrelevant to the British market isn’t the question, though. It’s a question of where a working musician could work. Yes, there was a lot more money in selling records to teenagers than endlessly touring or working in a bar, that’s obviously why they made the change.
I’m honestly amazed that anyone finds it shocking that they would do that to chase the teenybopper market, or that anyone would behave like doing it is somehow a mark that would besmirch the rest of their careers. It’s economics, they did well by it. As you yourself noted before, the same was done with the Stones. Lots of people did it, the only ones that are it’s a mark against are the ones that couldn’t move beyond being a teenybopper act.