Simon and Garfunkel had a single out in 1957 under the name Tom and Jerry.
I don’t think groups named for the members (c.f. Jan and Dean, Les Brown) are in the same naming genre as the OP is looking for.
“The Simon and Garfunkel” just doesn’t work, so those groups never had “The” in the name, unless there was another noun, like “The Glen Miller Orchestra”, or “The Alan Parsons Project” making the names some sort of adjective clause (I’m probably hopelessly mangling the grammar construct there).
As an aside - the spell checker knows Garfunkel, I mistyped it as Garfunkle and got the red squiggly.
I don’t see an “everly brothers” example.
A little research shows Sounds Orchestral from 1965.
I have to guess that these bands knew they would be referred to as “The…” even if they weren’t.
Phrasings like The pink floyd, the cream, the jefferson Airplane were probably all used in the early ads for these groups to convey that they were groups and not corporations, say.
Buffalo Springfield were another one, from 1966.
I can’t believe I forgot about Them! That’s the new winner.*
Looks like Jefferson Airplane also beat out Cream, although they did once use “The.” So did Pink Floyd and Buffalo Springfield, although none of those names makes any more sense with “the” than they do without. I doubt any poster ever touted “The Them.”
*until someone else makes me look premature again
Chad and Jeremy had a hit in 1960.
When I saw Pink Floyd in Boston in '73, they were billed as “The Pink Floyd” on all the marquees. By then there were pretty well known and bands without “the” existed.
Neither here nor there, but I recall seeing a ticket for a concert in the early 80’s featuring “The U2.”
Moving the goalposts again – I should have also excluded bands that were (or included) people’s names. I was really looking for that weird (for the time) concept of a band adopting a singular, non-sequitor-ish concept as their name, e.g. Them, Cream, etc.
Maybe it was actually an air show?
Sounds Incorporated (1961)
probably best known in the US for 1965 “In The Hall Of The Mountain King.”
Don Henley famously insisted that his band was called Eagles. Not The Eagles. Just Eagles.
Why is “The” so popular? Are there alternatives to it that fulfill the same function in some other way?
Were “popular bands” something that started in the 60s as a major cultural phenomenon? If you put “most popular band 1920s” in Google, you can find examples of bands without “The” although I have no idea how popular they were. I guess we haven’t culturally retained many bands from before the '60s in the same way we haven’t culturally retained many movies from before the '70s.
Look at the jacket for the album Simply.
I think it was sloppiness rather than them changing their billing back and forth.
How about MC5, who formed in 1964?
Were they at the Garden?
My guess is at that moment they weren’t Pink Floyd as we think of it yet. They were having their first hit, and DSOTM was new.
Does anyone else call them that? I think of them as a the.
I love the way these sentences look.
I think sometimes it’s the scansion, the ad copy writer etc.
Weird. I thought London was the US arm of Decca. Here is this Everly Bros 78 on London UK. ??
Thee Headcoats
Th’Faith Healers
A Certain Ratio
Every Mothers Son
I think that the beatles were the model of the bands we remember. I think they generate an ambivalence in some because of that. But the answer is yes, the Brit invasion made a new template and it seems to have lasted.