A third provided the session player who went on to front the behemoth that dominated the lot of them as far as rock superstardom was concerned. That's Jimmy Page's transformation of what was going to be The New Yardbirds into Led Zeppelin, in case you were wondering.
And Manfred Mann and The Kinks. What happened there?
Well, in the first case there's a South African-born keyboard player whose opposition to the apartheid system saw him move to London in 1961. He met drummer Mike Hugg and formed a jazz-blues combo called the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, wangled a record deal with EMI in 1963 and went on to deliver a string of moderate hits that had character. Think Do Wah Diddy Diddy, Pretty Flamingo and Mighty Quinn for starters. But they were essentially an outfit that found interesting material to cover and did a respectable job of it.
After they split in 1969 there were Manfred Mann Chapter Three (the Paul Jones and Mike D'Abo fronted versions of Manfred Mann being, presumably, Chapters One and Two) and Manfred Mann's Earth Band, which is apparently still a going concern.
And The Kinks, who managed to transform themselves from the outfit who gave us You Really Got Me and All Day and All of the Night into the social commentators who delivered A Well Respected Man, Dedicated Follower of Fashion, Sunny Afternoon, Dead End Street, Mister Pleasant and Waterloo Sunset" That's an impressive list, as impressive as the run of early Who singles, and they followed them with a couple of reasonably classy Dave Davies solo hits and the Ray Davies penned Autumn Almanac, Days, Plastic Man, Lola and Apeman.
Given that run of hits, all written by Ray Davies, suggesting a writing talent who would appear to be a logical suspect for superstardom when the album replaced the hit single as the pinnacle of rock music achievement.
So what happened?
That, basically, is the question that intrigues me as I rediscover the proverbial back catalogue that I skipped past at the time.