How the Bands Got Their Names: Pt. 2

“Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?” — Steven Wright

Photo byWarner Bros.

“Rock Lobster” by the B-52’s

The beehive was a popular hairstyle of the 1960s; see Priscilla Presley or Marge Simpson for examples. The hairdo was also called the B-52, a reference to the conical nosecone of the military’s Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson wore wigs in the hairstyle that inspired the name of their new wave band, the B-52’s.

The B-52’s “Rock Lobster” was released in 1978. Vocalist Fred Schneider and guitarist Ricky Wilson wrote the surf rock spoof about the discovery of a rock lobster at a beach party. At the song’s end, Pierson and Cindy Wilson provide the imagined sounds of a litany of sea creatures: dogfish, jellyfish, piranha and more. Wilson’s high-pitched sound effects were inspired by Yoko Ono.

“All of us really loved her, so it was definitely an inspiration when Cindy did her vocal part and some of the background parts,” Pierson told A.V. Club. “Those were definitely Yoko-inspired. And we truly loved her as an artist. It wasn’t, like, a joke or anything. We just thought she was a genius. I still think she’s a genius.”

“Rock Lobster” in turn inspired John Lennon to return to the studio with Ono to record Double Fantasy after a five-year hiatus from the music industry. “I was at a dance club one night in Bermuda,” Lennon said in Rolling Stone.

“Upstairs, they were playing disco, and downstairs I suddenly heard ‘Rock Lobster’ by the B-52’s for the first time. Do you know it? It sounds just like Yoko’s music, so I said to meself, ‘It’s time to get out the old ax and wake the wife up!’”

“Rock Lobster” by the B-52’s

“The Letter” by the Box Tops

When the Box Tops recorded “The Letter” in 1967, they were named the DeVilles. The band was fronted by 16-year-old Alex Chilton. The song’s hit potential and another band’s use of the name DeVilles mandated a name change. Producer Dan Penn organized a meeting with the band and songwriter Wayne Carson Thompson.

Thompson recalled, “One of the guys joked, ‘Well, let’s have a contest and everybody can send in 50 cents and a box top.’”

Penn recalled in Guitar Towns: A Journey to the Crossroads of Rock ’n’ Roll that despite his age, Chilton didn’t require much guidance delivering the lead vocals. “He was a little timid. I gave him a couple of small lessons in screaming. I said, ‘Now, don’t say airplane. Say aer-o-plane.’ It just came to me.

“Anyway, from that moment on, he picked it up, exactly as I had in mind, maybe even better. I hadn’t even paid any attention to how good he sang because I was busy trying to put the band together. I had a bunch of greenhorns who’d never cut a record, including me.”

After four weeks on top of the charts, “The Letter” became the №1 hit of 1967. Joe Cocker reached the Top 10 with his bluesy version in 1970; it would be the most successful of more than 200 covers of the song.

“It Came Out of the Sky” by Creedence Clearwater Revival

Creedence Clearwater Revival was named the Blue Velvets, then the Golliwogs, before their famous name was coined. “Creedence” is from the name of Tom Fogerty’s friend from South Africa, Credence Newball. “Clearwater” was inspired by an ad for Olympia Beer, “the clear water brew.” “Revival” marked the band’s commitment to each other after John Fogerty returned from military service.

CCR poked fun at the country’s UFO frenzy in 1969 when it released “It Came Out of the Sky” on the Willy and the Poor Boys album. John Fogerty salted the rockabilly tune with reactions by the day’s pop culture icons with lyrics like “Ronnie the Popular said it was a communist plot” and “Walter and Eric said they’d put him on a network TV show.”

Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid were CBS Evening News reporters; Ronnie the Popular was not yet President Reagan, just the right-wing governor of California. A reference to Spiro Agnew came after the Vice President supported the idea of a space flight to Mars, but was told there was no money in the budget for such a project.

“Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads

New wave band Talking Heads, fronted by David Byrne, got its name from an issue of TV Guide. In the liner notes of Popular Favorites 1976–1972: Sand in the Vaseline, bassist Tina Weymouth said the magazine “explained the term used by TV studios to describe a head-and-shoulder shot of a person talking as ‘all content, no action’. It fit.”

“Psycho Killer” was released in December 1977. It was the first song written by Byrne, who told Mix that his inspiration was shock rock’s Alice Cooper. “I had been listening to Alice Cooper — Billion Dollar Babies, I think — and I thought it was really funny stuff. I thought, ‘Hey, I can do this!’ It was sort of an experiment to see if I could write something.

“Rather than making it theatrical the way Alice Cooper would, I’d go for what’s going on inside the killer’s mind, what I imagined he might be thinking . . . describe it all as a series of sensations. I think that sometimes has more power and affects people a little stronger. It seemed a natural delusion that a psychotic killer would imagine himself as very refined and use a foreign language to talk to himself.”

“Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads

“For Your Love” by the Yardbirds

When the Yardbirds formed in 1963 they called themselves Blue-Sounds; their repertoire was American blues and R&B. The Yardbirds name was inspired by Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road. Kerouac described people he met as he traveled across the US, including those who hung around rail yards. He called them “rail yard hobos.”

Another influence was jazz great Charlie Parker, often nicknamed “Yardbird” or “Bird.”

Seeing the success of groups like the Beatles and the Dave Clark 5, the Yardbirds became desperate for a pop hit. Graham Gouldman wrote “For Your Love” for his struggling group the Mockingbirds, but it was turned down by their record company.

Gouldman manager, Harvey Lisberg, was convinced the song was a hit and offered the song to the Yardbirds. Gouldman, who later wrote “I’m Not in Love” for his group 10cc, as well as “Bus Stop” and “Look Through Any Window” for the Hollies, gave the Yardbirds a №6 hit in 1965. Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty told Songfacts why the song clicked with the group.

“‘For Your Love’ was an interesting song, it had an interesting chord sequence, very moody, very powerful. And the fact that it stopped in the middle and went into a different time signature, we liked that, that was interesting.

“To try and get a hit song in those days was quite a difficult thing to do for us. We could come up with ideas, but our first hit song was very important for us. And with ‘For Your Love’ we heard it and had the demo of it and it sounded like a hit song to all of us.

“Yeah, there wasn’t a problem doing that. It was the sort of thing that you relied on to get into that other echelon, to have a hit song. All our contemporaries were having hit songs: the Beatles and the Stones and the Moody Blues and Animals, they were all having №1 hits and we were really trying to keep up.”

“Red Red Wine” by UB40

British band UB40 took its name from the attendance card issued to people claiming unemployment benefits from Britain’s Department of Employment. The UB40 form stood for Unemployment Benefit, Form 40.

When UB40 recorded “Red Red Wine” in 1983, they were unaware that the song was written and first recorded in 1967 by Neil Diamond. The band’s inspiration was a version cut by Jamaican reggae singer Tony Tribe.

“That was a ska number I heard when I was about 7 or 8 years old,” singer Ali Campbell told Digital Trends. “When we did the Labour of Love series, the three albums of covers — those were the songs that got us into reggae in the first place: ’Red Red Wine,’ ’Cherry Oh Baby,’ ’Kingston Town,’ ’Many Rivers to Cross’ — those were all songs we grew up listening to and loved.”

“The funny thing about the song is we only knew it as a reggae song,” Campbell recounted in 1000 UK Number One Hits. “Even when we saw the writing credit, which said N. Diamond,” added singer Astro, “we thought it was a Jamaican artist called Negus Diamond or something.”

“Light My Fire” by the Doors

Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Robby Krieger were members of Rick and the Ravens before Manzarek’s brothers Rick and Jim left the band. A name change was in order and Morrison suggested the Doors. His inspiration was The Doors of Perception, a book by Aldous Huxley about mescaline.

Huxley took its title from a quote in a book written by William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Krieger wrote the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” Shortened from the album version, it became a №1 hit in 1967. “When we started playing it in person, everybody just would go nuts every time we played it,” Krieger told Rock Cellar. “Just amazing. So we knew right from the beginning it was the strongest on the album.

“We all wanted them to put it out as it was, six minutes, because Bob Dylan had just done it with ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ They thought a six-minute song would be just too hard to get on the AM radio, which is true. There was no FM yet, it was just starting. So it was better to have a three-minute song than a six-minute song.

“There was this one guy who had the first FM station in LA. It was in the Valley and it was KBLA. So this guy, Dave Diamond, Dave Diamond and the Diamond Mine. He would play all kinds of stuff, that’s what FM used to do before, playing the deep cuts. So he told us that every time he’d play that song he would get hundreds of calls. Cut it down. So we finally did.”

“Come and Get It” by Badfinger

In 1968, the Iveys — itself a take on the Hollies — were a struggling British band with a lot of promise thanks to the songwriting of lead guitarist Pete Ham and bassist Tom Evans. Paul Du Noyer writes that the Iveys’ big break came when they were signed by the Beatles’ Apple Records.

The first order of business was a name change. “Bad Finger Boogie” had been the working title of the Sgt. Pepper track “With a Little Help From My Friends.” Badfinger became the new name for a band that looked and sounded uncannily like the Beatles.

By 1969, Badfinger had yet to have a hit. Paul McCartney decided to give the group a song he once considered including in Abbey Road, then for the movie The Magic Christian. McCartney described in Anthology how “Come And Get It” came about.

“I’d written the song ‘Come And Get It,’ and I’d made a fairly decent demo. Because I lived locally, I could get in half an hour before a Beatles session at Abbey Road — knowing it would be empty and all the stuff would be set up — and I’d use Ringo’s equipment to put a drum track down, put some piano down, quickly put some bass down, do the vocal, and double-track it.”

The demo, recorded July 24, 1969, sounds remarkably polished considering it was recorded in less than an hour with McCartney playing all the instruments. McCartney used the demo as a template for Badfinger’s version.

“I said to Badfinger, ‘OK, it’s got to be exactly like this demo,’ because it had a great feeling on it. They actually wanted to put their own variations on, but I said, ‘No, this really is the right way.’”

With Evans singing lead and McCartney producing, Badfinger’s “Come and Get It” reached №7 in 1970.

“Carrie Anne” by the Hollies

It is often said that the Hollies were named for rock legend Buddy Holly but that’s not completely true. Graham Nash told the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that early on, the band was asked how they would like to be introduced.

“It was Christmas and a very popular symbol in England is a holly leaf with red berries and stuff. And we all loved Buddy Holly. Obviously, we were doing a lot of Buddy Holly songs. And so we became the Hollies.”

“Carrie Anne” was a 1967 Top 10 hit for the Hollies. The tune was written by Nash, Allan Clarke and Tony Hicks. In his autobiography Wild Tales, Nash explains that the song was first titled “Hey Mr. Man.”

“We were rehearsing for a tour at Albert Hall. Marianne Faithfull was on the bill. We’d known her since she was 16, an insanely stunning woman. She was brilliant at image, a pretty good voice.

“The sight of her raised my blood pressure, and gradually ‘Hey Mr. Man’ morphed into ‘Hey, Marianne . . . what’s your game now, can anybody play?’ But we chickened out. We didn’t have the nerve to sing ‘Hey, Marianne,’ so we made up a name that we’d never heard before: Carrie Anne.

“We nailed that track in one session. You can hear the confidence in our voices in the way we pounced on those lyrics. The harmonies surge forward from the opening notes, building right to the crescendo that segues into the verse. It’s a nicely polished performance.

“And then we had the solo played by a steel-drum busker whom [producer] Ron Richards found on the street, that little calliope flourish that winks at the whole affair.”

“Pink Cadillac” by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

Former E Street Band keyboardist David Sancious lived at 1105 E Street in Belmar, NJ, where Bruce Springsteen and his group would often rehearse. In his book Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales, saxophonist Clarence Clemons wrote that Sancious was often late and the band was named because they spent so much time on E Street waiting for him.

“My recollection is we were on the bus one night trying to come up with a band name,” said The Boss in “A Conversation with Bruce Springsteen” at Monmouth University. “(E Street Band) seemed pretty easy — it just had a nice ring to it. I don’t remember David being particularly tardy. E Street. E Street. Well, David lives on E Street, David was a big, important part of the band at the time and it just came up.”

Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac” was recorded for the 1983’s Born in the U.S.A. but was dropped in favor of “I’m Goin’ Down.” It resurfaced in 1984 as the B-side of “Dancing in the Dark.”

Springsteen included references to the roots of rock and roll in the lyrics of “Pink Cadillac.” Elvis Presley used the line “You may have a pink Cadillac” in “Baby Let’s Play House.” When Springsteen sings, “My love is bigger than a Honda,” it recalls Buddy Holly’s “My love is bigger than a Cadillac” in “Not Fade Away.”

“Now, this is a song about conflict,” Springsteen has said in introducing the song in concert, “between worldly things and spiritual health — between desires of the flesh — and I’m talking about sexual desire and spiritual ecstasy. Now, where did it all begin? Well, it all began in the beginning in a place called the Garden of Eden.”

“Ride My See-Saw” by the Moody Blues

In early 1964 the Moody Blues called themselves the M&B Five after the local Mitchells & Butlers Brewery. The band hoped to win a sponsorship from the brewery, which owned several music clubs, but that never materialized. Keyboardist Mike Pinder told Classic Bands that a Duke Ellington classic led to the band’s final name.

“When I was very young I heard a piece of music by Duke Ellington called ‘Mood Indigo.’ I really liked the music, but I liked the name of it even better, and it just stuck with me.

“At that time I was very interested in the fact that music changed our moods. It had magical qualities to do things like that. We needed an M. So that was really easy to come up with the Moody, but actually I came up with the Blues part first, because at that time we were playing blues.

“People like Sonny Boy Williamson were touring England, a lot of American blues singers were touring, and we became a backup band for those guys. It was very easy to come up with Blues for that, and the Moody with an M because of my interest in the mood-affecting changes of music. That’s how the name Moody Blues kind of happened, tied in with the M&B beer.”

“Ride My See-Saw” is a 1968 single written by bassist John Lodge. “The relevance for me is stop negativity in your life,” Lodge told Rock Cellar. “If you’ve got a glass of water, if it’s half-full, say it’s half-full, not half-empty. The positive thing will get you through life. The negative thing will always hinder you.

“‘Ride My See-Saw’ is really saying one end of the see-saw you ride right up in the air and the next minute you’re down on the ground. Where are you in that? If you think you could be up there high all of the while, it doesn’t work.

“If it doesn’t work being high all of the while, it doesn’t work being low all of the while either. So you’ve got to get the balance and for me the balance is everything must be always half-full the least.”

This story appeared in Rock Cellar Feb. 12, 2024.

Frank Mastropolo is the author of 200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs and 200 Greatest 70s Rock Songs.