When I hear names of old-timey music groups they would be descriptive: So-and-so’s Big Band, or the Something Street Quartet. For rock bands, maybe back to the beginning, that isn’t true; they can be named with practically any word or phrase the members or promoters come up with. I’m wondering when this really got started. Does it pre-date the rock era? Was this a gradual shift or more like a phase-change? Was there maybe some famous first example, a group with a bizarre name that others imitated?
We’ve done this before, and the consensus is that it all depends on what you personally define as a nonsense name.
My candidate is Them, from 1964.
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Moving thread from General Questions to Cafe Society.
The Who also dates from 1964.
There’s Screaming Lord Sutch, 3rd Earl of Harrow from about 1962 but his name was a homage to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and he was a solo act.
Pink Floyd (initially The Pink Floyd Sound) was first used by the group in 1965.
The Ink Spots were recording in 1935.
Of course it pre-dates the rock era. Except for rock itself, damn near everything predates the rock era. Among others, I found:
Lawrence Welk and the Hotsy Totsy Boys (ca. 1927)
Percolating Puppies, later known as the Ink Spots (1928)
Woody Herman and the Herd (ca. 1936)
Pied Pipers (1938)
Spike Jones and his City Slickers (1941)
The Moonglows (1954)
That wasn’t nonsensical so much as very vaguely racist.
Vaguely?
Yeah, not really that vague, true.
Seriously, the first group that made me sit up and say, “Huh?” was The Lovin’ Spoonful, and I don’t recall the year.
Red Hot Peppers, founded 1926.
You don’t think racism is nonsensical?
The point is that it’s not a person’s name alone or simply followed by “trio” or “orchestra”. In the absence of a definition of “nonsense name” or “bizarre” from the OP, and looking at the context used, I figured that anything that was “practically any word or phrase the members or promoters come up with” would fit the criteria.
Nonsensical would mean there is no apparent explanation. If you can explain it as racism, then you’ve rendered it non-nonsensical.
But I think the name fits the spirit of the OP’s question.
The Wolverines, 1924.
The Comedian Harmonists from 1928. They were not comedians (and their history is certainly not funny). I think this may be earliest example where the name wasn’t something that actually existed.
There was also The Revelers, from 1925, who influenced the Harmonists.
Somehow these pre-60s names just don’t cut it as “nonsense.” The Amphibious Monkeyrabbits is nonsense. But not The Savannah Syncopators or The Versatile Four.
Things got, perhaps, just a little psychedelic in 1929 with Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy.
On SNL, Linda Richman gave us the discussion topic that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is neither Mormon nor a tabernacle nor a choir, but I’m not sure that’s entirely defensible.
Nonsense band names go back much further than the ones noted here. Heck, groups like The 4 Insects and Oscar and the Orangutans were active during the Flinstone era.
Thanks for the examples; very interesting. As “nonsense” I was thinking of non-descriptive names, which might mean something to the musicians themselves or maybe convey some emotion, but don’t say anything about who the group are, where they’re from, or what they do. Personally, I associate this with the '60s, maybe back into the '50s but I don’t know the history of the trend. I assume it was part a practical thing, a way to get attention amongst a proliferation of new groups, and partly a way just to seem cool and anti-establishment.
Yeah, I checked and they beat Them by a couple of months. I thought they changed their name a bit later than that.