I felt sure the Chili Peps were gonna be Tony Flow and the FlowTones.
I was really wondering how the Butthole Surfers were left off this list. They used to travel with different names for different gigs, before settling on “BS”.
Among my favourites, “The Vodka Family Winstons”, which I immortalized on a slab of lower Haight concrete, in the mid-eighties.
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Finger Eleven used to call themselves Rainbow Butt Monkeys. That’s one of the more… interesting band names I’ve heard.
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According to Nigel Tufnel, Spinal Tap was originally called The Originals, but then they got in trouble with an existing band called that, so they became The New Originals. The Originals eventually became The Regulars, and so The New Originals thought about taking the now available name The Originals, but they thought, “what’s the point”? They later of course played as The Thamesmen, The Dutchmen, Waffles, Hot Waffles, and The Tufnel-St. Hubbins Group before finally settling on Spinal Tap.
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This still makes me grin like a goon.
blur were originally Seymour. One of the conditions of them being signed to Food Records was that they change their name.
I remember seeing Pink Floyd live bootleg albums labelled as “The Screaming Abdabs”, back in the pre-CD days.
Hank Shocklee and the Bomb Squad (the production team for Public Enemy) were developing talent on their division of the MCA label. So, they had a board where they worked up a bunch of names and logos. For the name Leaders Of The New School, they wanted to develop a crew of white rappers and set about recruiting. Later, they brought on Charlie Brown, Dinco D, and Busta Rhymes to be Young Black Teenagers, a name they had also previously come up with. But that group saw the LOTNS name on the board and wanted it. So the producers had the crews battle for the name. Busta, Dinco, and Charlie won and were officially The Leaders of the New School. Perplexingly, the Bomb Squad thought it would be a good idea for the white kids to take the name leftover, which is how five white guys were marketed as Young Black Teenagers.
Nobody outside of hiphop really knows either group, but obviously Busta Rhymes went on to much solo acclaim. LONS was the better known of the two, having hits with PTA and their collab on A Tribe Called Quest’s Scenario. When YBT came out, I never heard any of the music, just heaps of derision (which I agreed with, although it was never mentioned that they were given the name by P.E., of all people.) They did later score a minor hit with Tap the Bottle which was actually a pretty good jam:
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I didn’t read the article. Did they mention that Public Image Ltd were supposedly going to call themselves Carnivorous Buttock Flies?
(EDIT: I had (mis)typed all that on my phone)
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just finished reading it. no, that was not mentioned. ten-to-one CBF was Lydon’s idea, though.
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