In the previous century, performing groups commonly had names that were sort of descriptive of the group, like The Dave Clark Five, The Glenn Miller Orchestra, or The Four Freshman. Then when rock & roll came along things started getting a little whimsical (the earliest one I can think of off the top off my head would be The Crickets). Then you had Iron Butterfly, Led Zeppelin and the name admittedly chosen at random from words in a dictionary, The Grateful Dead. And then things just went downhill from there.
Was there a watershed moment or was this just a gradual evolution? I wonder who was the first band to come up with a name “just because they liked the sound of it.”
Well, the 1920s had Lucille Hegamin and her Blue-Flame Syncopators, Barbecue Joe and his Hot Dogs, Blind Willie Dunn and his Gin Bottle Four, The Chicago Footwarmers, Feathers and Frogs, The Red Onion Jazz Babies (I bet *they *were little pips), The Melody Sheiks, Red Nichols and his Five Pennies . . .
The earliest rock bands usually had standards plural nouns as names (Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys, the Hollies, the Yardbirds, Young Rascals, Monkees, Rolling Stones, Kinks, et al.).
Things BEGAN to get weird when bands decided not to use standard plural names. The Who and Guess Who were among the earliest prominent bands to pick names that didn’t fit the mold. By 1966, you had Love, Cream, the Association, and Buffalo Springfield, all using unconventional names. Psychedelic bands were only building on names like those.
So, in historical order.
1964: Bands called theselves The Somethings, or Somebody & the Somethings.
1966: Bands started calling themselves The Something.
1967: Bands started calling themselves The Adjective Adjective Something.
I remember observing a pattern: the band names of generation N could be mistaken for (or were sometimes identical to) the song titles of generation (N - 1). Part of every generation’s need to distance itself from its parents, I guess.
Kid: “Have you heard Yadda Yadda?”
Parent: “I don’t know, how does it go?”
Kid: “No, dad, Yadda Yadda is a band!”
I’ll never forget my mother’s delight when she overheard me saying I liked Deep Purple, and her shock when she heard their records.
The obvious answer is that band names are a finite resource, and good ones are taken already.
That said, there are some noticable trends. About ten years ago, there was a resurgence in “The [Blank]s”. The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Killers, etc.
There was also a “Random Word, Random Number” trend going. Blink 182, Stroke 9, Finger 11, Maroon 5, SR 71, etc.
Then indie bands started just going by the members first names only, like Peter Bjorn and John, Tegan and Sarah, etc.
I know there’s more examples of that, but they aren’t coming to mind right now.
The number in SR71 isn’t random, like The Majestic 12 and Eve6, the name is taken from something else that already had a number in it: a type of aircraft, a secret UFO committee code name, and an X-Files cameo character respectively.
Looks like band names have always been a mix of ordinary names and odd ones. Even now you have bands with sedate names like The John Butler Trio.
Offhand I can’t think of any pre-1964 band that called themselves anything other than “The <blank>s” or “<leader name> and the <blank>s”. (On edit: Or names like “The Dave Clark Five” or “The Rooftop Singers” or something else indicative of a musical ensemble.) The Who got their name in February 1964; I would pick them as the first band to select a different kind of name. By the end of 1965, you had the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Velvet Underground, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and the Great Society, among others.
We’ve had a lot of threads like this, and my view is that there are few if any discernable trends. What looks like a trend to you is just based on whatever band names you remember from the past and whatever names you’ve noticed now. I’ve always felt the Jimi Hendrix Experience put the “band leader names without ‘Band’ in them” on the map, but I don’t know if that’s true. As an example of stuff that can be taken for a trend but really isn’t:
Those bands formed or were named anywhere from the late '80s to the early 2000s, so that’s not a trend. And few or none of the numbers were chosen at random.
There have been band names like that for at least 50 years. Chad and Jeremy, Peter, Paul and Mary, Delaney and Bonnie, etc.
While Jerry may have gotten the name from a dictionary, he found a definition of “grateful dead”, not by picking 2 random words. That definition was “the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial.”
There was a very popular band in the 30s called Kay Kaiser and his “Kollege of Musical Knowledge.”
But the thing that sticks in my mind is Steve Allen doing a bit when he was host of the Tonight Show (Yes, it was that long ago). He began with the standard, “I don’t know where these kids get these band names. They have to have a barrel with nouns and a barrel with adjectives and draw from each.” So he had half the audience write nouns and half write adjectives (apparently that was back when we knew the difference) and put them into two separate barrels.
He then drew one of each out…the first one out was Polish Sweat Socks. The next night he reported that he already had two bands requesting permission to use the name for their bands.
Herman’s Hermits always struck my fancy. Especially when you consider there was no Herman in the band. I was briefly in a band while in college. It’s name was Fine Upstanding College Kids, but we just put the initials on the bass drum. We didn’t last long under that name.
No one’s mentioned Radio Head? C’mon, that has to take the cake for strangest name ever…WTF is a radio head?
My dad and I wanted to start a band and call it the Yellow Bucket Heads (way back in the day), we were gonna’ literally wear yellow buckets on our heads and nobody would ever know what we looked like. Blue Man Group is also very strange, so is their performance, so maybe they win the contest overall.
The weird names seem to have crept in slowly, the Beatles were almost like a turning point it would seem, after that it almost became a contest to see who could come up with something even more bizarre than the last. Now we’ve got the Mummies and things like Nine Inch Nails (I still don’t know if they’re talking about fingernails or hammer and nails, but both work for album covers :D).
The band is Radiohead. They named themselves after a Talking Heads song called Radio Head. It’s on the True Stories album/soundtrack. This is the movie version.
The Beatles named themselves in tribute to Buddy Holly’s band, The Crickets.