When did popular-music band names become, well, band names?

Cafe Society
1

Popular music ensembles have for decades adopted names that are allusive in a far-fetched way, punning or (not infrequently) deliberately meaningless. Wikipedia list of band name etymologies

My impression is that this custom was adopted some time in the 20th century, and that before that bands chose names that were more descriptive (of style, geography, their founders etc.), much in the way that classical music ensembles still are.

Are there articles on the background of that shift available online? Were there any Band Name Style Paradigm Shift Manifestos at the time?

2

To illustrate my conception of how band names changed:

Ficticious early-20th-century band name: Frank Smith’s Rutabagaville Jazz Band
Ficticious late-20-th-century band name: The Unmatched Shoelaces

3

Whimsical band names are at least as old as rock ‘n’ roll itself, right from Billy Haley and the Comets (pun) and Buddy Holly and the Crickets (nonsequitor). I think it really took off when rock bands started thinking of themselves as cohesive units rather than a frontman plus backing band. (But even the Beatles were Long John and the Silver Beetles for a time.)

4

The Ink Spots were popular even before Rock and Roll, but I’m not sure they were the first.

5

In the 90s this band would be Unmatched Shoelace; now, perhaps Shoe.

I’m trying to come up with the first band that didn’t follow the formula of either The Somethings or The Something Band. By 1966 or so, it seems to have become common (Jefferson Airplane, Cream, Love, the Chocolate Watchband). I can’t think of any that predate that. The Who, maybe?

6

It seems to me that the trend is toward longer names these days. Now it might be Unmatched Shoelaces On Sad Feet.

7

I think the distinction I would draw is between the time when pretty much all band names were collective nouns–The Whoevers–and when they no longer had to be. They could be singular nouns, proper or otherwise (Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, The Who, The The, Poison, Earth Wind and Fire) or, eventually, not even nouns (And You Will Know Us By the Trail of the Dead, They Might Be Giants, The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud, [In]Sync, Take That, OK Go, Yes, Wham, Aha, No Doubt, Life Without Buildings, Can, etc.).

For me, the whole “band name!” thing is an exercise in taking a phrase completely out of context and imagining it on its own, as a purely aural artifact, divorced entirely from its original meaning. Some phrases that I’ve come across, embedded in perfectly reasonable context, but that sound "band name"y when removed from context, include Good Quality Frogs, In a Box and Walking . . . and a bunch more I can’t remember at the moment. They’re jotted here and there in journals and, um, receipts and napkins.

Then, of course, there’s the naming tradition that’s older than any of these bands, and continues strongly today: the pun, or other silly wordplay. The Beatles (and the meta-pun take off on The Beatles: The Bangles).The Ink Spots, as mentioned above, while not strictly a pun, is a good example. Das Booty. My favorites in the silly wordplay genre are the celebrity-name mashups: Star of David Brinkley, Elephant Gerald, Rubber DeNiro, Bobbed Illin.

Then there are the literary references: Quiet Riot, Aerosmith, Veruca Salt, etc. etc. etc.

I doubt if it’s possible to compile a complete, organized, categorized catalog of band names, even if there weren’t more of them every day.

8

We did this in another thread. I think Them was about the earliest, although there were others around that point.

It was part of the culture them to be different from everything that came before. Not surprisingly, this was applied to band names as well.

If you want to be really serious about popular culture, though, you have to trace this breaking with the past through a variety of movements, all the way back to the Modernist movement in literature and the Dada and Fauvist movements in art. It’s as old as the 20th century. Some people draw a dividing line with Max Planck’s announcement of a quantized universe in 1900, although I think this is pure hindsight.

It just shows how conservative an artform that popular music was that it took until the 1960s for this trend to take hold, when the break had hit most other arts decades earlier.

9

From what I’ve read, the name Aerosmith is not a literary reference. I know there’s a novel called Arrowsmith, but I remember reading a Rolling Stone article years ago where they denied that was where they got their name.

A different cite.

10

Same for Quiet Riot:

11

Right. He just made it up out of thin air, never having heard the book title before. It was not lodged in his subconscious somewhere from a booklist in highschool English class, or an “Other Books By” page when his sophomore class read Babbit. Sorry, not buyin it. Still, that’s just my cynical opinion, so I’m not proposing a hijack to nail it down or anything.

12

“Gatopescado’s All-Girl Jug Band and Inner-Thigh Experience”

13

Various sources claim the Crickets were named when a cricket hid in the padded-garage studio, and was heard on an early demo. Maybe this still qualifies as a non sequitur, or maybe it doesn’t.

14

Now, you also have to have the juxtaposition of the horrible with the cute or beautiful.

Unmatched Shoelaces On Courtney’s Necrotic Feet

15

Nitpick: They were the Silver Beetles, briefly, when Sutcliffe was still alive and long before Starr joined, but Lennon flatly refused to be Long John. And all of them were resistant to the Whatsisname and the Whatevers trend of the time.

AskNott: No, the Crickets chose their name because Bill Haley and the Comets were a big draw at the time, and they thought a hard “C” in their name would have the same ring to it. There is, in fact, the sound of a cricket on one of their recordings, but they were well established by the time that happened.

Also, it’s not a band name, but Ernest Evans became Chubby Checker when Dick Clark’s wife heard Evans sing and commented that he was like a young Fats Domino.

16

No, all bands have to have “wolf” in their names. This band would call itself Wolf Shoelace.

17

This should actually be a requirement. I would definitely listen to And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead Wolves.