Long car rides send my mind along strange and twisted alleys, and so it was while driving up to State College that I determined what is the best band name of all time. But before I tell you, I should say two things:
(1) You won't agree. You just won't. If you have a strong opinion about best band name, you undoubtedly know more about this than I do and should stop right now. And I am pretty sure that if you have ever thought about best band names even for a moment or two, you have NEVER thought of the name that I chose. You might as well know that up front.
(2) I mean something very specific by "best band name." I don't mean the most creative band name or the most original or the funniest or the catchiest. I mean something else. I mean the band name that most perfectly intersects with the music.
Words fascinate me, of course. I'm not sure when that happened. I never played scrabble. I was -- and remain -- terrible at crossword puzzles. Puns often leave me cold. I was legendarily inept at diagramming sentences. But somewhere along the way, I started to spend a lot of my time thinking about words, what gives them power … and what is that power? I would read books and articles and stop midway through to re-read the same sentence again and again just to understand why it worked, and to wonder if it would have worked had one word been changed.
Is DiMaggio a great baseball name or did he make it so? What if John Unitas' name had been Ryan Leaf and vice versa? Would "Ryan Leaf" have sounded as good when spoken by John Facenda on NFL Films? Would John Wayne have had the same career had he stuck with Marian Morrison as his name? Would we remember the 1980 Olympic hockey team exactly the same way if Al Michaels had shouted "Do you believe in dreams?" What if he had not shouted anything at all? What if Abraham Lincoln had said "Eighty-seven years ago …"
Band names have, of course, become their own fun kind of word game. Anytime you see words crashing together that don't quite match up -- to pick two things off my table right now "The Aquafina Potters" or "The Rocketfish Scissors" -- it sounds like the name of a band. I think one of the hardest things in English is to come up with a great band name because the possibilities are too vast. When writing something -- say a blog post like this one -- there are countless ways the writer can go. But each path is limited by the rules of language. I began this blog post with "Long car rides send my mind …" which may or may not be a good lede, but it makes a bit more sense than "Trash light floor skewer dancing bassinet Jonathan blue key." The words in a story have to be aligned in at least some sort of order. But they don't in a band name.
Most rock band names seem to me to be inside jokes, or allusions to sex, drugs, and death. Especially death: The Dead Kennedys; The Grateful Dead; And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead; Suicidal Tendencies. Megadeth. Others are about awesomeness. It's not all death or cleverness, though. Jethro Tull, for instance, was named after an agriculturist.
But the question I'm asking is: Does the name tell the band's story? Can you HEAR the band's music in the name? The Beatles are, of course, the best-selling band ever. Is the Beatles a good name? I'd say in their case, the question is beside the point. It's like asking if Secretariat is a good name for a thoroughbred. There is no answer. Secretariat is a great name because Secretariat was a great horse. If Secretariat ran a claim race at Turfway Park … but our mind won't' even go there because Secretariat was such a great horse. The Beatles -- with its punny misspelling, its homage to Buddy Holly's Crickets, its replacing of the impossibly awful name "Johnny and the Moondogs" -- feels classic. But I'd say its the band that is classic, and the name just goes along for the ride.
The best selling bands of all-time include (obviously this is not an all-encompassing list):
ABBA: An acronym of first letters of the band members' names … a fairly good name, I suppose, though ABBA could also be a big-hair rock group.
Black Sabbath: Named after a Boris Karloff horror movie. There will never be another actor quite like Boris Karloff, right? He was in a bunch of movies, and just about ALL OF THEM were horror movies. The Walking Dead. The Black Room. The Black Cat. The Mummy. The Invisible Menace. Devil's Island. And so on. I love that there was a time when you could make a living just being a horror movie actor. Vincent Price did it too. Bela Lugosi. Lon Chaney. … Anyway, Black Sabbath is a great band name and definitely fits the music.
Coldplay: It's not a good name in my opinion. But it's better than "Starfish," which I guess was their other choice.
Death Cab For Cutie: I love Death Cab. And I think this is a dreadful band name. It goes all the way back to Richard Hoggart's 1957 book "The Uses of Literacy." I like that Ben Gibbard went back to that for a name; you can tell from his lyrics that he's definitely a guy who loves words. But I don't like the name at all. I much prefer "The Postal Service," Gibbard's other project.
Depeche Mode: It means "Fashion Dispatch," and was the name of a French Fashion magazine. I keep hoping for a cool band to just call themselves "Sports Illustrated."
The Doors: Names for the Aldous Huxley book "The Doors Of Perception." That figures. I am about to alienate you, so if you like The Doors please go on to Iron Maiden. Just go. It's OK. I respect you and your musical love of The Doors. Just go on. … OK. They're gone right? … The only people left here are ones who don't like The Doors. OK, get real close: I DESPISE every thing about The Doors. OK, thanks for listening.
Iron Maiden: Named for the torture cabinet that has sharp objects in it and … you have to admire a band that believes that an Iron Maiden torture box best describes the music they hope to create.
Led Zeppelin: Came from a remark about a form of the band going over like a "lead balloon." … A great name, I think, in exactly the way I judge great names. I think if you went to someone and said: "What do you think a band named Led Zeppelin would sound like?" they would probably imagine something reasonably close to what Led Zeppelin sounds like. Not the BEST name -- not yet -- but close.
Motley Crue: I'm not putting the metal umlauts on there that happened just because the band was drinking Lowenbrau at the time.
Nirvana: It has come to take on all sorts or ironic meaning because of how it ended for Kurt Cobain, but I do take him seriously when he told Rolling Stone he wanted a name that was "kind of beautiful or nice and pretty instead of a mean, raunchy punk rock name like the Angry Samoans." I think people are more complicated than we believe.
Pearl Jam: As you probably know, they were named "Mookie Blaylock" but changed it, apparently worrying that Mookie Blaylock would object. There has been some disagreement about how they came up with Pearl Jam, but realistically that seems like a pretty pointless argument: Great band, pedestrian name. Mookie Blaylock, however, was inspired.
Pink Floyd: Named for a couple of early century Southern blues artists -- Pink Anderson and Floyd Council -- I think it's a pretty good name, though you could imagine a band called Pink Floyd sounding very different.
Queen: Perfect name for that band, both for its regal splendor and, as Freddie Mercury himself said, its "gay connotations." I've always loved bands that went for glory in their names. The Supremes, for instance.
R.E.M.: This was not supposed to turn into a "how bands got their name" post, but you know how it goes here. I was searching and found that R.E.M. had three other name options: "Cans of Piss," "Negro Wives" and "Twisted Kites." They obviously took the right turn, but just the fact that those three were even considered just goes to show you that some musical geniuses should probably not be allowed to name themselves.
The Ramones: I love that Joey Ramone's name isn't Joey Ramone. He was Jeffrey Hyman. He and the other band members called themselves Ramone because Paul McCartney used to go the pseudonym Ramon.
The Rolling Stones: They pulled the name out of a Muddy Waters song, which is great, but the name Rolling Stones could easily be a folk group wearing flower power outfits.
U2: Kind of a pun, representing both the spy plane and the way U2 sounds like "You too!" I love U2, but I've never liked the name at all. I just don't like license plate type band names … I've always thought INXS is one of the worst band names ever. I don't like UB40 either. But maybe that's just me.
The Village People: Named for Greenwich Village and, uh, the people in it. … Is there anything more remarkable than how the song "Y.M.C.A." continues to be an American anthem?
The Who: There's a legendary story that they were really named The Who because very time they would talk to Pete Townshend's grandmother about a band, she would say: "The Who?" I suspect that story, like the one about Neil Armstrong's famous words on the moon, is not true. But I hope it's true and will believe it until someone authoritative says otherwise.
OK, enough of that. So now the question: What is the greatest band name ever … or more to the point, what does someone driving eight hours to State College to start work on a book think is the greatest band name? I went online and checked out what other people say. Mostly, they choose ultra clever names or like "The Nymphomercials" the bizarre like "Neutral Milk Hotel," or glaringly ironic names like "The Happy Mondays" or "The Sex Pistols." That's OK. But in my world, I want names that, if you mentioned them to a complete musical novice who knew nothing of the music, would in a weird way be able to hear the music just through the name. And so I decide the five best names ever are:
5. The Clash.
4. Black Sabbath
3. Led Zeppelin
2. Public Enemy
… and my No. 1 greatest band name ever: Metallica. I know, you're not seeing it. I told you that at the top. But I would argue that there is absolutely no way that the band Metallica could sound like anything except, well Metallica.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
