Beech Tree News Network

Last week I found a list of worst original band names.  This week, I’ll continue the list.  At #16 is Sweet Children.  When this band took the stage at Cleveland’s House Of Blues days before their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, everyone but their most hardcore fans were confused by the name on their drum riser: Sweet Children.  The faithful knew that it was the original moniker of Green Day.  They used it for that one night in celebration of their early days.  Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt started playing local shows around the Bay Area in 1986 as Sweet Children when they were just 14 years old.  They got signed and changed their name to Green Day to avoid confusion with local California outfit Sweet Baby.  I’d say they’ve done well with their new name.

 The Georgia rock band led by battling brothers Chris and Rich Robinson played a ragged mixture of garage rock and alt-country for about five years under the name Mr. Crowe's Garden – reportedly inspired by Johnny Crow's Garden, an early 20th century children's book by Leonard Leslie Brookes – before changing it to something a little more in sync with their newfound Humble Pie/Faces obsession. As limp as their original moniker was, though, it could have been much, much worse: According to Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman, Def American head honcho Rick Rubin once told them, "'I think you should be the Kobb Kounty Krows and spell it [like] the KKK.' And we all laughed, and he goes, 'No, I'm serious. . . I think that'd be marketable.' We told him to go f--- himself. I mean, it was completely insulting on every level."

Before the Beastie Boys were reciting regrettable rhymes about objectifying women (and apologizing for it), teenagers Michael Diamond and Adam Yauch were misappropriating other cultures with the name of their early hardcore group called the Young Aborigines. "We came up with the idea that the music should be primitive in some way, which is how we came up with the Young Aborigines as the name of the band," bassist Jeremy Shatan explained. "I even bought a record of Australian Aborigine music for inspiration." Eventually, Shatan moved away for a summer and the group adopted the name Beastie Boys. "It was the stupidest name we could come up with," the rechristened Mike D told Rolling Stone of the new name. Not quite.

Two years before they formed Kiss, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley played in a rather generic New York rock band bearing the certainly not generic, if totally ridiculous, name Wicked Lester. "There were all these three-part harmonies that sounded like Doobie Brothers," Simmons wrote in his memoir Kiss and Make-Up. "And there wasn't nearly enough guitar." Determined to create a more unique and bombastic band, Simmons and Stanley split from their bandmates and looked in the Rolling Stones classified ads to find new drummer, which is where they found Peter Criss. He mentioned he was once in a band called Lips, inspiring Stanley to propose they start calling themselves Kiss. "Get the f--- out of here," Criss complained. "That's a terrible p---- name." As would happenmany times in the future of the group, things did not go the way the drummer wanted, though he learned to live with Kiss. "Good kissing makes for good laying," he wrote in his memoir Makeup to Breakup. "It's sexual, it's cool." And it's infinitely better than Wicked Lester.

"Screaming abdabs" (also spelled "habdabs") is old-timey British slang for a mystery ailment along the lines of the heebie-jeebies and possibly tied to the idea of delirium tremens. It's also the goofy-sounding and internationally inscrutable name of an early version of Pink Floyd. Examples of usage of the term include: "Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright were architecture students at London Polytechnic when they joined a band called Sigma 6, which later became the Screaming Abdabs," and "The thought of spending one more second as a member of Pink Floyd gave Waters a case of the screaming abdabs."

While Blue Öyster Cult may not be the world's greatest band name, it's still a lot  better than Soft White Underbelly, the moniker that founding BÖC members Buck Dharma, Albert Bouchard and Allen Lanier performed and recorded under during the late Sixties. It took the exit of original lead singer Les Braunstein – who was replaced by Eric Bloom – and a particularly scathing review of one of their shows at the Fillmore East to convince band manager Sandy Pearlman that Soft White Underbelly needed a new name. After initially recasting them as Oaxaca and then the Stalk-Forrest Group, Pearlman came up with Blue Öyster Cult. . . and the rest is cowbell-clanking history.

Earth, Wind & Fire leader Maurice White cut his teeth as a session drummer in Chicago during the Sixties, for everyone from Betty Everett ("You're No Good") to Etta James to the Ramsey Lewis Trio ("Wade in the Water"). In 1969 he formed his own trio, and its name was pure Sixties cheese: the Salty Peppers. "I was still in a jazz state at that time," White told Vibe in 1999. A move to L.A. and seven more bandmates later, White turned to astrology for a bigger, better name: as a Sagittarius, his elements were earth, air and fire.

Introduced to each other by psych-rock icon Skip Spence, guitarist Tom Johnston and drummer John Hartman formed Pud in San Jose. They slowly picked up the other two Doobs and changed their name from a childish weiner reference to a slightly-less-childish pot reference. They pulled Pud and released their Doobie debut in 1971. https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/25-worst-original-names-of-famous-bands/ar-AAGzHL7?ocid=spartandhp

Next week, we delve into the top 5.  One of them, you probably already know.  I’ll leave you with a hint: There’s a lot of Creedence as to the legendary status of this one band.