Which rock group has had the most "official" members at the same time?

Cafe Society
1

Just picked up Slipknot’s new CD, “Iowa”, and they list NINE OFFICIAL members of their band:

“DJ Sid Wilson, drummer Joey Jordison, bassist Paul Gray, percussionist Chris Fehn, guitarist Jim Root, sampler Craig Jones, percussionist Shawn Crahan, guitarist Mic Thompson and vocalist Corey Taylor” (Actually the music sounds like 5)

Is this a record number? I think ELO at one point had a lot of members. Lynyrd Skynyrd may have had up to seven.

Remmeber, to qualify, I’m only talking about OFFICIAL members of the band, not studio musicians, backstage or backup musicians.

For instance, recently the Rolling Stones went from 5 to 4 members when Bill Wyman left, and obviously they used another bassist, but whoever that is is NOT a member of the Stones.

2

I think at one time Little Feat had 9 members, not including guest singers.

3

Looks to me like eleven in Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

4

Earth, Wind, & Fire has had as many as 10 at once.

5

The question is not well-enough defined to allow a single correct answer. What constitutes a band? What constiutes an official member?

I think Cafe Society is probably a better place for this thread anyway.

bibliophage
moderator GQ

6

The London Philharmonic.

7

Oh oh oh oh… the thread title says rock group.

Mea culpa.

How about No Doubt, The Moody Blues, and ELO. Aren’t each of them approaching a dozen or so official members, not counting studio musicians?

8

Lyle Lovett and His Large Band had 10 members at one point.

9

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at one point had … 8 or 9 members, I think.

And I think Lynyrd Skynyrd had around 9 or 10, including their back-up singers.

10

The Talking Heads had nine members when they did their Stop Making Sense tour. Five of those people were only around for that tour, so I’m not sure if they count.

11

I think the largest that I know of if the Frank Zappa’s Grand Wazoo Mothers of Invention who toured the country in September 1972. They had a total of 20 members. Frank Zappa’s Christmas 1976 (not counting Don Pardo) band and his 1988 band both had 12 members.

12

I don’t remember exactly how many, but I seem to recall that Little Red Corvette and 1999 era Prince and the Revolution had a whole lot of mofo’s on stage.

And while he doesn’t exactly qaulify as “Rock” and they weren’t “official members”, that stupid bastard MC Hammer had about 200 of his friends on stage all the time.

13

Big Pig had 7 members, not a record here but interesting in that 3 of them were drummers (and would all play in all the songs at once).

How about the Residents? Although only 4 appear at a time, there are supposed to be many many people who put on the eyeballs at one time or another. But the same thing could go for Pigface, for example.

14

I submit Oingo Boingo. According to my cite here
“On the average there are 5-8 members of Boingo, but there have been as many as 20, playing all sorts of traditional and not-so-traditional instruments.”

15

There were quite a few in the Doobie Brothers and The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, but I’m a lazy, lazy man.

16

Didn’t the Grateful Dead have a lot? And I remember counting about nine in Chumbuwamba…

17

Brian Setzer plays with that big orchestra. Does that count?

18

Is Parliament a rock group?

19

Lambchop would be up there–a Nashville collective with a large membership. I don’t know how many people they usually take on tour–I gather a lot–but the two albums I have, How I Quit Smoking & Thriller, each have 13 bandmembers (and Thriller explicitly identifies the entire personnel as “Lambchop”, in case we’re being fussy about questions of “official” bandmembers).

I don’t know if they’re “rock” but they’re hard to pin down to any other style either–they get an entry in my Country referencebook under “alt.country” but I can’t detect any perceptible “country” in Thriller at least.

20

I think Chumbawumba once had about 15-20 members, the All Music Guide mentions 11, so some may have just been odd ends that wandered their way onto the stage - in the true spirit of planned anarchy.

For other big over the top lineups, I guess we have to look at the rock/funk/jazz “fusion” type groups of the late 60’s and 70’s. Like War, and the already mentioned Earth Wind and Fire, and the whole Parlaiment-Funkadelic agglomeration.
With War for instance, the All Music Guide Site only lists 7 or 8 official members at any time, but I think pretty much every working musician in south and east Los Angeles may have been a member of War at one point betwen 1969 and today.