Naming rites

Brendon Urie, left, and his band, Panic! at the Disco, perform in Long Beach, California. (Karl Walter/Getty Images)

In 1964, a Winnipeg band named Chad Allan and the Expressions released a version of Shakin’ All Over, a hit first popularized by the U.K. group Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Because of the song’s British origins and flavour, the band’s label, Quality Records, sought to capitalize on the popularity of British Invasion bands like the Beatles and the Who. To build some mystery around the identity and nationality of the group, earlier known as Chad Allan and the Reflections, the record company released the 45 single under the name Guess Who? The strategy worked. The song was a hit in Canada and the U.S. The band kept the gimmicky name and the rest is rock and roll history.

The story of the Guess Who’s christening is an early example of how the name of a rock group is its first and possibly most powerful marketing tool. In spite of the many random band-name generators available online, many bands anguish over the right handle. Like the fretful parents of a newborn child, ambitious musicians want their band to have a name that’s distinctive yet still fashionable and appropriate — a name that will help them get ahead in the world. As a consequence, trends have emerged in rock music as bands look for ways to channel the zeitgeist pique critical interest and, ultimately, attract an audience.

“A great, catchy name will definitely help you,” says Naben Ruthnum, guitarist for Vancouver’s Bend Sinister. “That’s why actors change their names. And a shitty name is a real cross to bear.” Bend Sinister, a group that’s been compared to Queen and Yes, took their name from a Vladimir Nabokov novel, which also happened to be the title of an album by the Fall. “It was sort of a committee decision,” says Ruthnum.

Band names often say more about the era in which an act emerged than the music itself. For the first few years of rock and roll, bands were almost entirely named like sports teams: “the” followed by a plural noun (the Kinks, the Turtles). As rock and roll entered the era of Flower Power, bands dropped the definite article and allowed themselves more evocative, conceptual names like Love, Cream and Iron Butterfly; Led Zeppelin would later exploit the same “heavy-light” naming formula. The 1970s gave rise to drug references (the Doobie Brothers, Dexys Midnight Runners, Blue Cheer) and places (Chicago, Chilliwack, Boston); one of the innovations of the 1980s was full-sentence band names (Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Pop Will Eat Itself). In the 1990s, the need to find unique names led to inventive coinages (Propagandhi) and pop-culture mash-ups (Marilyn Manson, Brian Jonestown Massacre).

Swedish rock band The Hives perform at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards in New York. (Scott Gries/ImageDirect)

The new century has seen the return of the definite article (The Strokes, The Hives, The Kills, The Dears) and creature names (Animal Collective, Wolf Parade, Grizzly Bear), as well as a predilection for certain buzzwords like “my,” “bright” and “eyes” (My Morning Jacket, My Brightest Diamond, Bright Eyes, Frog Eyes, Wolf Eyes). Ruthnum rails against what he terms the “exclamation-mark problem” with bands like Panic! At the Disco, Oh No! Oh My! and !!! (pronounced “chick, chick, chick”). “The most obnoxious punctuation mark in the English language,” Ruthnum complains, “now guarantees you some attention from Pitchfork.” Bands like Sunn0))) and (həd) pe take band-naming to typographical extremes.

If some groups choose names without considering their marketing potential, music fans inevitably use them as clues to a band’s sound. A casual browser at a record store, for example, likely won’t expect a band with an appellation like Sepultura to play confessional chamber-pop songs about childhood asthma. In fact, a band that ignores naming conventions can lose potential listeners.

“One of my all-time favourite bands is Unrest, which is an unfortunate name for a pop band,” says Chris Storrow, leader of the organ-driven Vancouver pop group Bossanova. “I’m sure some pop fans assumed that they were a hardcore group and never took the time to listen.” Bossanova doesn’t actually play the cool jazz style it’s named after, which Storrow admits could be equally misleading. “Perhaps it is vaguely suitable, however,” he adds, “since we have some easy listening in us, as well as some new wave, which is how the name translates.” According to Storrow, a good band name should be “something evocative, iconic, [with] a nice rhythmic cadence, perhaps — like Public Image Limited.”

Unlike the Guess Who, most bands don’t have their noms de rock thrust upon them by record companies. Even so, musicians have always used brand association when choosing a moniker (even if it is unwitting). The Rolling Stones took their name from the Muddy Waters tune Rollin’ Stone. The Beatles famously chose their name as a tribute to Buddy Holly’s group, the Crickets. (The Fab Four, who originally favoured boots and leather jackets onstage, would later suggest they derived their name from a group of biker molls mentioned in the 1953 Marlon Brando film The Wild One. This explanation has been disputed.)

Over the decades, bands’ names have broadcast their influences. In the 1980s, synth bands inspired by Depeche Mode began taking French names: Blancmange, Visage, Fromage. Hard-rock bands of that period, like Mötley Crüe and Queensrÿche, misused umlauts in tribute to earlier headbangers Motörhead and Blue Öyster Cult. The 1990s saw a number of “number” bands, like matchbox 20 and Seven Mary Three; Canada’s Sum41 followed in the footsteps of Blink-182, another platinum-selling pop-punk act with a fondness for digits.

Singer Vince Neil of Motley Crue performs at Madison Square Garden in New York. (Peter Kramer/Getty Images)

A band name can also tell you something about a band’s non-musical tastes. The Simpsons continue to be an inspiration for band names (see: Fall Out Boy, Malibu Stacy). A name like Steely Dan, which originates from a specific sex toy in William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch, conveys the jazzy-pop band’s literate, prankish attitude. Belle and Sebastian’s sensitive, precocious pop befits a group who adopted the title of a French children’s book.

Usually, what similarly monikered bands have in common is not a style or sound but an overlapping group of potential listeners. The 1990s, for instance, saw a number of bands with the word “head” in them: Radiohead, the Lemonheads, Bedhead and hHead. It would be hard to confuse any of these groups; at the same time, one could easily conceive of a type of arts-degree holder who listened to all these acts in their heydey. Current bands with animal names, while stylistically distinct from one another, seem to draw from the same pool of Pitchfork readers.

Of course, the drawback of an au courant band name is that fads shift suddenly. One could argue that great bands make iconic band names, not the other way around. Some critics, for instance, have suggested that the Beatles’s name, with its laboured, punning allusion to the short-lived “beat” music phenomenon, is pretty terrible unto itself.

“It had never occurred to me before,” says Ruthnum, when presented with this notion, “because the music is just so good that it legitimizes almost anything about the band itself. And it was a good name at the time, right?”

Kevin Chong is a Vancouver writer.

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