Links

Links to all kinds of interesting and fun band-name-related stuff. Feel free to post suggestions for other links.

 

Websites

Blogs

  • How to ruin your band name Nice blogpost from vice.com, though its central premise – “if a band can’t come up with a good name for themselves, it’s a pretty good indicator that they can’t make music worth a damn either” – is questionable; regular And And! And readers will know there’s little correlation between a good name and a good band.
  • What rock band name would you choose? Mathematicians offer their suggestions at the Computational Complexity site.

Books

  • Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia Lillian Roxon (1942-73) was a US-based Australian journalist who loved the music of the 60s and knew many of the musicians. She captures the freshness and excitement of the time with energy and charm and it’s a lovely read with some memorable phrases (The Association sang “like a rugged heavenly choir”). The original (1969) edition of the book is now hard to come by, but widely available as an ebook. Avoid the 1978 update by another author.
  • Rock Names by Adam Dolgins (Citadel Press, 1993) Subtitled “From Abba to ZZ Top: how rock groups got their names”. This book’s USP is that the author tracked down and interviewed band members about the origins of their names; some of the results are overlong, and rarely as “hilarious” as claimed on the book’s jacket, but there are plenty of insights and anecdotes (I didn’t know, for example, that Poco had to change their name from Pogo because the creator of a comic character called Pogo sued them). Good on American bands, less sure on British ones, and a bit sloppy over who should have a “The” and who shouldn’t. The 3rd edition of Rock Names, published in 1998, is available fairly easily online.

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