Band Names

rictified · Post by **rictified** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 3:38 pm

There used to be a local band called Beep Beep and The Roadrunners here in Ma. They were good too, used Vox Super Beatle amps. They had a local hit here about 1968. Watch out Alex, their lawyers will be contacting you soon.

aristeas · Post by **aristeas** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 2:06 pm

Here a site I put together for a band that doesn't exist - 'dotcommies':

http://worldzone.net/music/dotcommies/

The idea came from a short story I wrote about what might have happened had Che Guevara's parents emigrated to Australia and he grew up to be an auto spray-paint artist.

doctorwho · Post by **doctorwho** » Tue Mar 08, 2005 10:01 pm

That's very funny, Lee. I might have made the star in the logo a period (dot) for emphasis, and made the sickle part the guitar and kept the hammer (as in "hammer on"). Blame this penchant for symbolism on my junior-year high school English teacher who complained that I wasn't seeing enough symbolism in what I was reading ...

In grad school, if I could have gotten a band together, the name may have been "The Heteropsychos", because the compounds that I was synthesizing were heterocycles.

I recently thought up the name "Ari and The Zoners". Those in So. Cal. will get this!

tonewerks · Post by **tonewerks** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 7:43 am

Mayberry LSD / Full Moon Erection / Evilbeaver http://www.evilbeaver.us (Not Porn)

wayang · Post by **wayang** » Thu Mar 17, 2005 7:46 am

My first band (Arizona, in '74) was a prog outfit that played covers by Genesis, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, etc...we were right out of high school, and after much arguing, we settled on the name Shire...we were little Tolkien Anglophiles stuck in the wrong part of the world. All great musicians, but the keyboard player and drummer were Mormons (!) and the guitar player and singer were Dopers (!!)...and me, the Derek Smalls 'lukewarm water' between the fire and ice...an untenable position to be sure. When I got a job on the Alaska pipeline in '76, I bankrolled the band and moved them up there...but I got tired of the factionalism, and when I got a job offer in Antarctica in '79, I split. I spent a total of nine seasons there, mostly at McMurdo Station and South Pole. My first season, we were working for a contractor called Holmes & Narver which was occasionally referred to as 'Hopeless & Nervous', so we used that name for our thrown-together band. Over the years, we formed many bands...some of the names: Herman Nelson and The Darts (after two brands of portable constructon site heaters); The Ozone Holy Rollers; The Crud (generic term for the viral illness that routinely swept through the community...this afforded me the chance to say from the stage "there isn't a woman in town who hasn't been in bed with The Crud"); JAMF (named by a former Airborne soldier...stands for Jive A** M***** F*****); the Spliffs, named by two Kiwi (NZ) musicians (the U.S. Navy was so clueless they used to announce our name on the radio when we had gigs..."don't miss the Spliffs tonight at the Petty Officers' club"); and so on. I was the musical coordinator and played in several bands at the first three 'Icestock' outdoor music festivals, which are still held annually in McMurdo (go ahead...Google me!)...I've settled down here in Denver, where I play with the Perry Weissman 3. The name originated with the original members, my wife (the drummer), our Palauan trombonist and the first guitar player who worked together at Wax Trax Records...they took the name from a local High School English teacher who was a frequent and somewhat high-maintenance customer...years later, there's still no one named Perry in the band and we frequently have as many as eight people on stage, but the name has stuck. (We have two CD's out and are currently working on a third...go ahead...Google us! at PW3theband). Band names are quite a hilarious requirement of modern musical careers...

squirebass · Post by **squirebass** » Thu Mar 17, 2005 11:59 am

Wow, Wayang, that musta been cool working in Antartica... I bet you can't just send your resume to some personnel agency down there, you gotta KNOW somebody to get a job there! So how did you get all your equipment down there, and what did that kinda weather do to a Rickenbacker neck?

jingle_jangle · Post by **jingle_jangle** » Thu Mar 17, 2005 12:10 pm

JAMF is an old Redd Foxx term. There's some interesting stories around it, but I don't know any of them.

wayang · Post by **wayang** » Thu Mar 17, 2005 12:24 pm

Good questions...I got my first shot down there through a guy I worked with on the pipeline...he was a rig geologist who got the gig as South Pole manager...he called me when he found out they were looking for a draftsman with surveying experience, and the rest is history. As for taking a Ric down there...no way! That's why god made Fenders...I took my 'P' bass and my mid-60's Tele down there repeatedly...it's hard to kill those things. Ric's on the other hand...let's just say you don't take a debutante to a dogfight. (I did 'smuggle' my entire P.A. down there one year by stencilling "Inmarsat (International Marine Sattelite) Testing Gear" all over the racks and speakers...apparently, to U.S, Navy Customs inspectors, 'graphic equalizers' and 'stereo crossovers' look like scientific stuff...)
And by the way, to say it was 'cool' working there is something of an understatement...

cdaniel · Post by **cdaniel** » Thu Mar 17, 2005 5:33 pm

How did I miss seeing this thread? Anyway, here goes...

My guitarist (Mark, a Gibson ES335 guy) and I went to high school together and have been jaminating in Mark's basement since 1976, when I got my very first bass, a 3001. (Why not start at the top?) He and I would play parties around the neighborhood (a suburb of St. Louis), and in 1978 (our senior year) somebody rented a hall and wanted to sell tickets for our performance, so we had to come up with a name. I was watching an old Bette Davis/Errol Flynn movie called "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex," and in one scene Olivia de Havilland is singing a song making fun of the queen, whereupon Bette orders her to stop and calls her "You brazen wench!" Well, I just had to write THAT down. Mark thought it sounded metal enough for a band, so the tickets were printed up for "Brazen Wench." We rehearsed with a drummer for a few weeks and ended up doing pretty well with our covers of Rush, ZZ Top, Max Webster, and Ted Nugent songs, until the party ended in a drunken free-for-all after two girls started fighting over shoes. (Don't ask me, and I was there!) We went through a succession of drummers that never clicked until we found Tim in 1982 (he was the only one who ever kept up with us during our sped-up version of "La Villa Strangiato"), and we've been Brazen Wench ever since. We never wanted to do the "bar scene" or impugn our integrity by seeking cheap material things like "fans" or "success," and we're still jaminating away in Mark's basement. (Okay, now it's a home studio, but it IS in his basement.)

dannyboy · Post by **dannyboy** » Tue Mar 29, 2005 8:04 am

Couldn't let that one go by...
We started in 76 as the Beaters...'guess we didn't like it since it sounded too much like our idols! So we switched to "Les Valets" ( that's french for Jacks as in playing cards!)It fitted the four of us... and came from a saying we had at the time, from our difficulty to find a trade in school: When you're a jack you can't be the King!!(It's a translation from the popular saying: jack of all trade, master of none!)
Then I moved and joined "Tamara". 70's rock.
In the 90's I played with "Il était une foire" and after them, it was the " Black dogZ".
And to my great pleasure, the guys from Les Valets contacted me for a reunion, last year, and it worked so well that we're back on tracks!

roadrunners · Post by **roadrunners** » Tue Mar 29, 2005 8:28 am

ah yes, There are actually Copyrights on the names The Roadrunners.....The Liverpool Roadrunners........The Rockin' Roadrunners.........but nothing on
The Road Runners............we've got them beat there....

roadrunners · Post by **roadrunners** » Tue Mar 29, 2005 8:29 am

kinda like how the beatles couldnt use Help.....but they could use Help!

brammy · Post by **brammy** » Sun May 29, 2005 11:37 am

Whew! what a topic! I found that getting a consensus on a band name was near impossible. We started out as the "The Algorhythms" because the founder of the band was a math teacher and we practiced in the school band room. I thought it was a cool name but nobody seemed to get it, or when the did they'd say something stupid like...
"oh yea, like Al Gore, right?"

Then for a brief time we went to "Special Delivery" which I didn't like too much but was the name of one of our original songs.

Then there was a band shakeup so we decided to find another name and getting buy-in from everyone was a TOTAL headache. I compiled huge lists for everone to consider (there are numerous web sites devoted to naming bands).

We wound up with "The Nightshades" not because it was the best, but it was the only one we could all go along with. I'm thinking that democracy in a band might NOT be that good of a thing.

Personally I was pushing hard for "The ______s". Other options we batted around were

The GoldTones
The SilverTones (we're all 50-53 so it fit)
The Curiosities (not a bad one, that)
The DeVilles (one guy had a Fender Deville amp)
The Falacies
The DailTones
The Crabs
The Centipedes (theres lots of them here in HI)
The Accelerators
The Bermudas
Pat and the Perkocets (founder is named Pat and it sure seemed to fit how we feel after hauling all the stuff around from gig to gig. I wanted to go for it, but was outvoted.)

roadrunners · Post by **roadrunners** » Sun May 29, 2005 3:25 pm

Yea, My band had the Silvertones for a while! I had a melodica lying around from the Silvertone company small world

ted_williams · Post by **ted_williams** » Mon May 30, 2005 6:09 am

I was in a band called The Crabs back in the 80's. We released a 4 song EP just before breaking up.