History
The term took its name from the 1968 album Super Session with Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, and Stephen Stills. The coalition of Crosby, Stills & Nash (later Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) is another early example, given the success of their prior bands (The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and The Hollies respectively). In 1969, Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner credited Cream with being the first supergroup. Music writers have also applied the term, wrongly in the context of this article, to bands or vocal groups that sold huge numbers of albums, headlined massive concerts or have a high celebrity or media status, regardless of the previous (or even subsequently acquired) fame of their individual members, such as the band Led Zeppelin, wherein only Jimmy Page was well known at the time the group formed. The term is also used to describe existing bands whose members achieved individual fame after the band's founding, such as The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Queen, Genesis and Yes.
There are also instances in which an existing band added a prominent new member or members, where the resulting group might have been considered a supergroup had it not kept its original band name, such as Van Halen after recruiting Sammy Hagar and Gary Cherone, and the Eagles after hiring Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit, and Styx, hiring Lawrence Gowan, and Ricky Phillips.
Read more about this topic: Supergroup (music)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“It’s nice to be a part of history but people should get it right. I may not be perfect, but I’m bloody close.”
—John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten)