Band Timelines

These timelines are a simple way to visualize personnel changes over a band's history. In order to keep them brief and managable, they're primarily focused on the personnel on studio albums, and not live albums or tour personnel, except in cases where another aspect is more interesting, or a live album represents a major personnel shift. The tables should scroll horizontally and line up well on most modern browsers, though they've only been tested in recent releases of Firefox and Internet Explorer, so if things are a little off, it's probably because of type size overrides or nonstandard browser features. Bands that have had a higher total number of participants may break tables on smaller display sizes.

Each band member is assigned a bright color, and in cases where the band member's influence on a particular album is very minor, a darker shade. The whole project and in particular assigning a band member a minor influence on an album is highly subjective, so your analysis might not match mine. Reasons for assigning a darker shade might include participation on an album limited to writing one song, or an album whose content is very nearly a solo album with the rest of the group assigned strictly to playing, etc. A deceased band member will be noted on the most recent album or the first album released after the death that did not involve that member's participation. Session musicians are generally only included if they later become "official" members of bands they've worked with. While "position" is notated on the timeline (vocals, guitar, etc.), this is only a general guide to help keep personnel changes slightly easier to follow. Much to the horror of purists, I'm not going to spend a lot of time differentiating between "lead guitar" and "rhythm guitar", and will generally lump all keyboard instruments under "keyboards" rather than specifying organ, piano, synthesizer, etc. Most bands with extensive catalogs see members filling multiple roles for various songs, albums, or even eras.

I'm using several sources, listed below. As this is not a primary source work, please take it with a grain of salt. This is not so much focused on bands I listen to as in bands whose personnel changes I find interesting. I enjoy documentary work on bands I don't even like, so there's not necessarily any corrolation between a particular group appearing here and my liking them.

None of this is comprehensive, and to illustrate the idea of a comprehensive overview of personnel changes as being different from an album-based timeline such as mine, I can provide no better example than an exhaustive personnel timeline of Black Sabbath by Joe Siegler, which while not the inspiration for this project, was the primary source for the Black Sabbath timeline.

Primary Sources:

allmusic.com
artistdirect.com
wikipedia.com

Additional Sources:

black-sabbath.com (Black Sabbath)
www.faust-pages.com (Faust)
theultraheavybeat.com (KMFDM)

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