In 1989, following the release of In The Dark, Grateful Dead concerts were starting to get inundated with hordes of ticket-less people who would show up and try to gate-crash or just hang out in the parking lot, sometimes overwhelming the local infrastructure. The band made an attempt to avoid this problem at two shows in Hampton, Virginia which were billed merely as “Formerly The Warlocks”, no mention of the Grateful Dead name. They hoped that only dedicated fans who knew the band’s history would show up.
My point is that the next people might really, really not have wanted to see pornography on their TV.
How well did it work?
While it might have worked out for him, it’s usually a bad idea for a well-known performer to suddenly take on a persona/pseudonym. Other examples include Chris Gaines (Garth Brooks) and Dee Dee King (Dee Dee Ramone).
I’ve often reflected on how absurd “The Beatles” sounded to me the first time I heard it (when my older brother came home one day gushing that they were going to be on the Ed Sullivan Show), yet how quickly the awkwardness became utterly inconspicuous to me.
Same here. But then a whole lot of groups started following suit and it became the new normal.
And fleas from Spain.
Right. This became clear to me when I was ten, and my friend gave me the Let It Be album. The liner notes claimed this was a “new phase Beatles album,” and I thought, “the name Beatles is so much more appropriate to their ‘She Loves You’ phase.”
(At the time of its early 1970 release, it was already clear that the “new phase” was akin to death being just another stage of existence, but that’s another story…)
I’d heard somewhere that someone at The Black Crowes record company tried to get them to call themselves “Kob Kounty Krows” but that was even too Assholerly for Chris Robinson.
Steve Hogarth once said in an interview that he wishes Marillion had chosen a new name after he replaced Fish as vocalist in order to enjoy a clean break between the two eras.
I’m not sure if they have this joke in the US, but this is a term for violent Diarrhea, ie:
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Abdab Abdab Abdab.
The UK band Gypsy recorded an album and discovered the was a US band with the same name. They changed their name to English Gypsy to avoid confusion in the US.
The US band was originally the Underbeats. In retrospect, that wasn’t a good idea.
To me they are two bands. One band that I love and will listen to forever and a band that I don’t like at all.
How about an accidental name change? When the group Chad Allan and the Expressions released their first single, their label Quality Records disguised the single by crediting it to Guess Who?, as a publicity stunt to generate speculation that it was by a more famous British Invasion band working incognito. After Quality Records revealed the band to be Chad Allan and the Expressions, disc jockeys continued to announce the group as Guess Who?, effectively forcing the band to accept the new name. The question mark would be dropped later.