Just stumbled across this chart of Queen's band members on Wikipedia:

Can someone do this for NPG et al.?

[Edited 4/1/23 21:26pm]

EnDoRpHn said:

^
Are you seriously considering doing this? If so, kudos to you - it's going to be a lot of work.

I am sure you probably already know this, but the wikipedia timelines always show only permanent members for studio recordings. So for example, The Rolling Stones timeline shows only the people considered to be band members, there are many more people listed separately who contributed to studio recordings but were never considered a permanent member of the band. There's sometimes a separate timeline showing the additional touring band members.

So I don't know how you should best approach this. If you were to follow the wikipedia model for The NPG as a studio recording entity it's relatively straightforward - it begins in Spring 1990 and ends December 92, and you only need to include the personnel who were considered members of The NPG. But that's not the whole NPG story. Diamonds and Pearls, Symbol, and Plant Earth are all also credited as Prince and The NPG albums. Then there are myriad other recordings during those years (and before and after) that some or all members of some iterations of The NPG played on. Then, for the complete picture you'd also need to do a separate NPG Touring band timeline.

It might be best to approach this not as a distinct "The NPG" timeline, but rather a Prince and whoever else was involved studio recordings timeline, and a separate Prince and whoever else was involved touring timeline.

For an initial approach for the studio recordings, you could choose your starting point and do a timeline of everyone involved in the studio recordings - regardless of whether or not they were considered to be a member of The NPG, or whatever the current band may or may not have been called. That way you wouldn't (at least initially) need to worry about which iteration of the NPG is which, or such things as who was officially in The NPG, or if a specific iteration of the band could be said to exist because despite existing at the time as a touring band, and despite some or all of them being involved in some or all of the released recordings, those recordings were not attributed to anyone other than Prince.

As far as other resources are concerned, Scififilmnerd's excellent Chronological Prince recordings index might be a good place to start. This will be useful for determining what was recorded when - I have no idea how Scififilmnerd managed to compile all this information, but it seems to include every recording session, although it does not list the personnel involved, so you'd need to go to Princevault for that.

The Released Songs and various Discography sections of Dawnation might also be of some use for cross-reference.

Between them, the Chronological Prince recordings index and Princevault are the only resources I am aware of with the level of detail required for the studio recordings part of this undertaking.

Or you could wait until Duane Tudahl gets around to writing a book for this era, and let him do the work for you.

As far as dates and personnel for live appearances are concerned, I know the information is out there, I just don't have any links to hand at the moment, but I am sure somebody else will.

Would be interesting to see who gets the most 'days' in the band - I think fink and Levi had a lot - but Mr. Hayes I think gets the most (or Kirk, who stuck around as a kind of valet/bodyguard until the end)

[Edited 4/3/23 18:16pm]