The Long Way Round

The membership table is a ledger of partings. Every stint has a begin date and most have an end date, and when two people's stints overlap in the same band, the graph has witnessed something no press release bothers to record: two particular humans, sharing one particular marquee, for a bounded stretch of their one bounded life. Which makes possible a very particular question. Of all the pairs of musicians who shared a band, parted, and then — under some other name, in some other decade — shared one again: who waited longest?

First, a caution from the case files, because the court nearly convicted an innocent band. The initial sweep returned Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, 38 years apart: the Warlocks, 1965, then The Dead, 2003. It looked magnificent. Then the complete file arrived, and sitting in the middle of the supposed silence was an entry the sweep had mishandled: Grateful Dead, 1965–1995 — thirty continuous years of the two men in question sharing a stage under the world's least-secret band name. Case dismissed. Every pair below survived that same full-file check. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data, and a worse one to stop pulling the file one folder early.

The champions are David Bennett Cohen and Bruce Barthol, two men of Country Joe and the Fish, who last shared that band in 1968, at the absolute high water of psychedelic protest, and then did not share a marquee for forty-four years, until 2012, when they surfaced in a band whose name closes the case for us: The Former Members. You could search the whole database for a better title and come back with your hat in your hand.

The gallery behind them is a study in the shapes a silence can take. Henry Padovani's membership in The Police consists, in its entirety, of two entries: part of 1977, and part of 2007. Thirty years between shifts at the same job, which must be some kind of record even in the music business, where the concept of notice periods was never strong. Marina Occhiena left Ricchi e Poveri in 1981; Angelo Sotgiu never left at all, so when she returned in 2020 the band was still there, door held, thirty-nine years of Italian pop having passed through it in the meantime. The Speer Family shows the gospel version: Rosa Nell stepped out of the family business in 1948 and back into it in 1980, and her brother Jackson Brock, who served from 1925 to 1999 without interruption, had simply kept the shop open — some bands are less like bands than like farms.

Martin Gore and Vince Clarke parted inside Depeche Mode in 1981, when the band was one album old, and next shared a project in 2011 — VCMG, a duo, as if to run the experiment with no witnesses this time. Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger waited twenty-nine years after The Doors closed in 1973, then toured under the only honest band name available to them: Manzarek–Krieger, two surnames, no article, no implication that anyone else was coming. And Peter Giles and Ian McDonald, who shared Giles, Giles & Fripp in 1968 — the polite little trio whose members kept wandering into King Crimson — reconvened thirty-four years later in the 21st Century Schizoid Band, a name any King Crimson listener can carbon-date to within twelve months.

The second-act industry

The reunions above are the marathon champions, but the graph can date the invention of the ordinary reunion too. Count every documented case of a musician rejoining a band they had verifiably left — a dated leave, two clear years away, a dated return:

The reunion had to be invented, and the chart names the decade. In 1965 a rejoining was a freak event — two in the whole documented year, about four in a thousand new memberships. The first real surge is 1973–75; by 1987 — sixty-nine documented returns, four percent of all joinings — the second act is an institution, and it holds near three percent right through the 2000s, peaking in 2007. (The bars sag after 2015 because the paperwork does: recent leavings haven't had time to become returns, and the graph does not extrapolate.) The nostalgia circuit, the festival re-formation, the one-more-tour: all of it is right there, a cultural invention as datable as the release-day flip.

Twenty-five years is a career. The sweep found seventy-seven pairs for whom it was an intermission — go stretch your legs, raise a family, bury a genre or two, the second act starts when it starts. What the graph records, in the end, is that the second act does start, at a rate that should worry no actuary and comfort everyone else. The seats stay warm indefinitely. This costs the graph nothing. The people, presumably, are another matter, but the membership table doesn't carry that column either.

Method: membership stint edges with begin/end years; a pair's joint stint = overlapping years in the same band node; gap = reunion start minus the latest end among all earlier joint stints. The candidate sweep (77 pairs at ≥25 years) capped bands at 12 members to keep idol-factory rosters out, which can hide an intervening shared band — exactly what happened in the Weir/Lesh false positive — so every pair named above was re-verified against the pair's complete dated membership record, with no cap. Undated stints (e.g. McDonald & Giles, the 1970 duo) are excluded from gap arithmetic; pairs whose gap depended on undated records were dropped. See also [The Long Silence](/6d33/long-silence) for the solo version of this question. Computed August 2026 against the 2026-07-25 MusicBrainz build.