I also don’t know which fan club Bowie presided, but Morrissey was the president of the British New York Dolls fan club in his youth.
I think it may have been James Jamerson, the bass player for Motown’s Funk Brothers.
Ah, Bowie always has been a musical expert and a connaisseur.
David Johannsen, who had a modest success as songwriter and singer for the New York Dolls, started billing himself as Buster Poindexter after he went solo.
In a way. BP was the moniker he used when not doing stuff as David Johansen (one n, died earlier this year).
Buster Poindexter is to David Johansen what Honeydrippers is to LZ.
Hence the opening line of “The Only Living Boy in New York”:
Tom, get your plane right on time
There’s the similar case of the American band called The Beat and the British band also called The Beat. The former is known in the UK as Paul Collins’ Beat and the latter is known in the US as The English Beat
The Mamas & The Papas briefly considered Magic Cyrcle as the band’s name.
One early name for Van Halen was Mammoth. Quite an original name, KWIM, just like an early iteration of Queen was known as Smile.
I also remember an Australian band in the late 1970s called the Angels who changed their name to Angel City after they found out about a marginally more popular glam-rock band called Angel.
They even had their own version of the “Fish cheer” that spelled out “Jelly,” ending with:
— Gimme a Y!
— Y!
— Because they sued our asses!
Distant memory of telling my boss the country guy changed his name from George Gay to George Straight. “Oh, really?”
The same happens to The Squeeze, who became known as The UK Squeeze for similar reasons.
AFAIK only in the US; here they were and are just The Angels.
Charlotte Caffey, Belinda_Carlisle, and Jane Wiedlin formed The Misfits in LA in 1978. I’m not sure if they became aware of Glenn Danzig’s new band on the East Coast or if they just thought The Go-Go’s was a cooler name.
Having just watched a documentary about the band: their name change more-or-less coincided with their sound evolving. They had started out as a punk band, and as time went on, they moved to more of a pop sound.
Marvin Gay was a bit classier - he just added an “e” at the end.
During the height of their success they still used the name Soft White Underbelly when they wanted to play in small venues. Even when they were playing stadiums they still played clubs using their original name. I think they stopped doing that when it became too widely known it was them. When some dumb high school kid like me knew they were playing in a club in Brooklyn then the secret is out.
Former (dethroned) Miss America Vanessa Williams, who went on to have a very successful musical career, later dubbed herself Vanessa L. Williams when another Vanessa Williams entered the musical picture.
Michael J. Fox’s real name and middle initial is Michael A. Fox, but he changed the initial because he didn’t want teen mags dubbing him “Michael, A Fox.” (One time, I was in a hotel, and realized I’d picked the wrong channel when I saw the beginning of a movie with an actor named Michael J. Cox. I told the front desk about the signal slippage, or whatever it’s called, and they blocked it. I didn’t care, but the next people to stay there might have.)
I must be missing something. Why would the people staying in a hotel room after you know what you had been watching?
I think the idea is that Michael J. Cox movies are of a type that hotel management would very much want to prevent accidental access to, if you know what I mean. I looked him up on imdb.com, and yeah. He’s been quite active. Talk Dirty to Me 13, Trailer Trash Nurses 2, Viagra Falls, and so on.
Oh, good, I didn’t know that the unresolved relationships in the original Trailer Trash Nurses were finally addressed! Now, where’s this hotel?
Back on track, I think a sidenote to this thread would be “Musical groups for whom a FURTHER name change would be a good idea”…
… I’ve never like the name Beatles.
“Look, it’s like a bug, which is pretty rock and roll, right? But didja notice it’s got the word Beat in there, knowhatImean, eh? Pretty hip, no?”
Pretty hip, no.
Hard to take them seriously, especially when they started breaking new ground musically.