Posted on 05/31/2025 8:45:04 AM PDT by DallasBiff
That was a great movie!
Colm Meany sitting under pics of Elvis and John Paul II and telling the wife he’ll go brush his teeth when she agrees to his amourous inquiry was funny.
When he scrambles to brush and she answers “that’d be nice”, w/o looking up from her knitting I thought my girl friend would bust a gut, lol.
They weren’t. They were a manufactured band, compared to 4 or 5 guys starting out in a garage during high school. Sort of like the Hullabaloos, and the group that came from the other music show in the ‘60’s.
The dirty little secret is that plenty of your favorite bands received help from studio pros when they went to record, particularly with the bass and drum parts, but even guitar solos.
These studio ringers would receive a one-time fee, no album credit (other than in the "thanks" section on the liner notes) and would keep their mouths shut, knowing that if they ever spilled the beans that your favorite band's drummer didn't actually play on the album, they'd never work again.
I was just getting ready to mention the Gorillaz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhPaWIeULKk
They (or he, the creator behind it) had some really catchy songs and several hits a decade or so ago.
“…by ambitious producers looking for the next Big Sensation. “
This was never more so than during the Sixties. There were so many “sounds” coming and going so quickly it was unbelievable.
Blues Brothers was full of real musicians and was a band. So adding that one to this “list” is kind of silly but then often these lists are just contrived clickbait anyway.
But I’ll play along — one exposed fake band with lots of drama was Boney M. Many never heard of them but if you were in a disco in the disco era you heard their songs.
Boney M was a front for Frank Farian a disco producer. He recorded material and then found people whose looks he liked to form the touring band and lip sync to the material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boney_M.
I always thought Kiss was a fake band.
I saw Glen Campbell on the Johnny Carson show one night in the 70s. It remains, to me, to be the best, rock, guitar, improvisational solo I have ever heard. Now I am thinking that it may be on You Tube! ;-)
Refine your definition; it relies too heavily on who you do or don’t consider a legitimate “matchmaker.” VERY few bands ever spontaneously came about because four friends wanted to form a band and that was it. Almost always, such bands are torn apart and “original members” are matched up with replacements found through auditions and producers.
The thing about the Monkees is simply they existed as a fictional band first.
That was probably true of almost every popular band that come out of California at the time, except CCR.
Leon Russell had a pretty good career outside the Wrecking Crew.
It almost never happens organically like that. On some level almost every band is constructed. Whether it’s the fully synthetic “casting call” bands like the entire J-Pop K-Pop and Boy Band industries, or assembled in the studio that’s all “solo” artists in rock and roll, or responding to adds in the paper which is the rest of rock and roll. Pretty much the only fully “organic” bands that ever are supergroups, when people fully established in other bands or as solos say “hey, we should do something”. And oddly enough most supergroups suck. I mean there’s the occasional awesome one like Cream or Traveling Wilburys, but for every one of those there’s half a dozen The Firms and Power Stations.
So just like in the grocery store, organic is overrated.
Eddie and the Cruisers, On the Dark Side
How about Foreigner, Golden Earring and other bands that continue after the last original member has retired or died? Are they still the real band or some sort of licensed tribute group?
The Beatles were the Fab Four; the Monkees were the PREFAB Four!
Golden Earring had the same lineup since 1970, they retired when George Kooymans got ALS a few years ago.
Unique talents/great musicians.
They’re real bands. Especially if they make new music, but even if they don’t. Golden Earring recently retired. Maurice White setup Earth Wind and Fire to survive him. Then of course there’s always the Sons of the Pioneers, 92 years and still going.
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