Iron Butterfly Theme
Cooking with de Redbone (I think that’s right - it’s a jam on their live album)
Canned Heat Boogie, wasn’t there…
Chairman of the Board by Chairmen of the Board
1968 Band, October Country,their only hit, “October Country”
Village People
Adam Ant: “Antmusic” and “Ant Rap”
[shudders]
John Lennon wrote a few, with and without Yoko, with titles like “The Ballad of John and Yoko”.
The funniest thing about Talk Talk was that that was also the name of the album. One time they played the video on VH1 and the credit looked like:
Talk Talk
“Talk Talk”
Talk Talk
(name of record company)
Color Me Badd had a song called “Color Me Badd.” Off an album called C.M.B.
ELO- Ole ELO
White Town - White Town
Jeff Beck - Beckola
And, of course, ‘The March of the Black Queen’ and ‘White Queen’ off their second albums ‘Queen II’.
Dead Girls and other stories has a song called ‘Dead Girls’. Nice band that never went anywhere.
Cowboy Mouth has ‘The Ballad of Cowboy Mouth’ which delineates how the band formed.
For self-referential things I think their name is legion. 311 did it in ‘Down’. Counting Crows did it in ‘Murder of One’.
And so on and so forth.
Same for Black Sabbath.
The Flowers did it retrospectively by changing their name to be the same as their most previously successful track **Icehouse **.
If we’re also doing individuals, then Bo Diddley is the first (and best!) to qualify that I’m aware of.
Blue Oyster Cult finally did a song named after themselves on the *Imaginos *album, after references to “the oyster boys” and similar close calls on previous albums.
Whilst not adding hugely to the debate, Madness chose their name using what Suggs described as the ‘classic method’ of reading their set list and choosing a title as their name, implying that many bands do the same. Certainly I did this in once naming a band ‘Brilliant Mistake’, and if true of others the list could become very long.
The song “Madness” (which the band covered and took their name from) was originally by Jamaican ska star Prince Buster. There’ve gotta be other examples of bands taking their names from other artists’ songs, but I can’t think of any right now.
Local band **Powderfinger **took their name from a Neil Young song. Similarly with Silverchair, although I don’t recall offhand who did the original track - **Helmet **perhaps?
We could start with a little band called ‘The Rolling Stones’ who named themselves after a Muddy Waters track.
Old and In the Way performed a song called Old and In the Way on the album Old and In the Way.
The band Okkervil River has a song called Okkervil River.
Please, somebody listen to this band. Do it!
ZJ
“Slowdive”, by Slowdive, from the album Blue Day.
Anyone remember Icehouse? from the 80s.
Their first album had a song called Icehouse on it.
The interesting thing about this was that at the time of the album’s release, the band was called ‘Flowers’. Early Australian editions of the album have this name. By the time the album got picked up for US distribution, they band had renamed itself after the song (and possibly the album, IIRC).
Maybe they didn’t think ‘Flowers’ gave the right image.
Believe it or not, Fleetwood Mac (see track 7).
Another “close call”: The Who’s “Who Are You”, off the album of the same name.
A similar category might be bands that worked their name into their album titles. I haven’t noticed many contemporary bands doing this, but it seems to have been popular in the 1960s – The Who Sell Out, Something Else by The Kinks, etc.
Godsmack is an Alice in Chains song. I don’t know if the band’s ever played the AiC song before.
I meant to quote Thudlow. Oh well