Everybody likes crazy band names, and they have certainly enjoyed an exponential growth spurt throughout the past few decades. Join me now for a trip down Memory Lane (or at least down Crazy Street), and we will tour the wackiness from its incipience up through its blossoming and on to the wild rainforest it is today!
Back in the 50s, band names weren’t that crazy. Many bands were named after animals (The Spaniels, The Penguins), birds (The Crows), insects (The Crickets), or cars (The Impalas, The Fleetwoods), and that’s about as nutty as it got. There were a couple of glimmers of zaniness (Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns, The Dell-Vikings), but most record company execs came from the Big Band era and favored “smooth” over “creative”.
The 60s saw rock and roll proving itself to be no flash in the pan but the music of a new generation. The Powers that Be recognized this new medium for its potential, and there was a rush to sign bands with slightly stranger monikers that reflected a fun-loving, youthful spirit: The Hollywood Argyles, The Zodiacs, The Tokens, The Marcels, The Jive Five, Little Caesar and the Romans, Shep and the Limelites, The Essex, The Surfaris, The Jaynetts, The Exciters, The Chantays, The Shondelles, The Ronettes.
In the late 60s and the 70s, the “youth counter-culture” and the drug experimentation that went with it ushered in the Psychedelic Era. Acid-fueled band names like Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge and Strawberry Alarm Clock began to push the envelope of band-name wackiness, but it was not until the 80s, during which the music video phenomenon, spearheaded by MTV, that the trend for crazy band names blew up, as the kids say.
The visual medium of music television, combined with the amazing range of sounds that could be produced by the recently-developed synthesizers and electronic drum kits, served to make the 80s a veritable explosion of music nuttiness, and of course crazy band names went right along for the ride: Haysi Fantayzee, Echo and the Bunnymen, The The, Icicle Works, Living in a Box, Tones on Tail, Wall of Voodoo, Kajagoogoo, EBN-OZN, The Blow Monkeys, Rubber Rodeo, 10,000 Maniacs, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, A Flock of Seagulls, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Total Coelo, Psychedelic Furs, Strawberry Switchblade, Bananarama, Beastie Boys, Haircut 100, Porno for Pyros, Bizarre, Inc., Romeo Void, Oingo Boingo, Violent Femmes and Throwing Muses all enjoyed their debuts, and some of them even had more than one hit song.
Even the grunge movement of the 90s, which arrived as a backlash to the slick, ultra-packaged bands of the prior decade, could not stem the tide of crazy band names once the floodgates of wackiness had been opened. Despite the flannel and brooding lyrics, we still were treated to the likes of Stone Temple Pilots, Soul Coughing, Blind Melon, Crash Test Dummies, Echobelly, and Meat Puppets. Pop groups were getting less creative, strangely enough, with NSync and Ace of Base about as weird as it got (which is to say, not very), but the 90s also saw a great rise in indie rock fueled by college radio, and totally bazoo band names kind of went with the territory: They Might be Giants, Coyote Shivers, Monster Magnet, Butthole Surfers, Gigolo Aunts, The Trash Can Sinatras, An Emotional Fish, The Soup Dragons, Concrete Blonde, Sunny Day Real Estate, The Flaming Lips, Dishwalla, Mary’s Danish, Furslide, The Lightning Seeds, Smoking Popes, Supergrass and Ethyl Meatplow were just a few of the more creative ones. Even the urban community started to get into the crazy-name bandwagon: Sporty Thievz, Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., Bomb the Bass, Naughty by Nature, Insane Clown Posse, and Me Phi Me were all some of the weirdly creative ensemble names to come from the era of grande mocha lattes and floral dresses with combat boots.
Although the personal computer, invented in the 80s and made widespread in the 90s, affected the culture greatly in those decades, it is the internet explosion of the current decade, coupled with the widespread use of digital music devices like the iPod, that has enabled the music of thousands of talented performers with a dream and a MySpace page to reach potential listeners all over the globe in the current decade. With no record executives to put the kibosh on unmarketable-sounding names and no limit on how many bands may be competing to be heard, a particularly crazy name may help a band stand out enough to get noticed among the unsigned hordes. So, in the 2000s, we get wonderfully crazy stuff like Rocket from the Crypt, Panic! at the Disco, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Further Seems Forever, Matchbook Romance, Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, Bedouin Soundclash, The Dandy Warhols, Dashboard Prophets, Funky Green Dogs, Throbbing Gristle, Thievery Corporation, Scapegoat Wax, Skunk Anansie, Bowling for Soup, Fountains of Wayne, Toothpaste 2000, Groove Armada, Gym Class Heroes, Titsofrenix, Dem Franchise Boyz, Frenzal Rhomb, Hoobastank, and many more that make my Spell Check threaten to explode.
So, what does the future hold? Since the trend has been toward diversification and multiplicity of choice, I don’t see any reason for that not to continue. There are likely to be occasional retro moments yielding names in kind, such as the swing boom in the 90s that gave us such bands as The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and The Cherry-Poppin’ Daddies, but in general I forecast more of the same, which is to say more of the really, really different.
