Rockers Explain Band Name Meanings In New Book
ROCKERS EXPLAIN BAND NAME MEANINGS IN NEW BOOK
October 5, 2009
‘A Heavy Metal Salute to Heavy Metal Band Name Origins’, by author Blair E. Gibson, contains the origins of 500 heavy metal band names. This little book covers every genre of heavy metal ever created from stoner rock to hard rock to black metal to hair metal and every other sub-genre in between. These are the band name origins as told by the band members themselves.
This recently released 128 page book is available for purchase as a digital download or in a paper back edition at stores.lulu.com/heavymetalsalute. Below are some excerpts:
BRITNY FOX – Our first singer claimed he had someone in a Welsh family tree from the 16-1700s named Britny Fox. I,along with the others, always had my doubts. He always left tickets for “family” in different parts of theU.K., but no one ever came. He was a strange guy, and I think my original suspicions of bullshit werecorrect. Just a cool name he thought of, think people told me he had it since high school when I didn’tknow him.
CRAZY LIXX – When I was a kid I got a plastic Japanese toy guitar for Christmas one year. It played rockin’ riffs whenyou pushed different buttons on it. The guitar was my first instrument and looking back on it thatguitar was what started my interest in music. The name of the toy was Hot Lixx! Problem is that theguitar itself was thrown away along with all my other junk when I stopped playing with toys andbecame a cool teenager and I didn’t think about it for many years, until I started to think up names for anew hard rock band in the beginning of the millennium. The one I came up with was what I thoughtwas the name of my old rock n’ roll toy: Crazy Lixx, and it wasn’t until years later that I came across aHot Lixx-guitar and realized my error.
LILLIAN AXE – I came up with the name in a quick flash as I was driving down Veterans Blvd. in Metairie one nightafter seeing the movie Creepshow. I wanted to invoke the feelings of the mysteries of the unknownwith a tongue in cheek craziness. The name actually just popped into my thoughts. There was nointense deliberation or discussion. It just appeared. There was a scene in the movie where a bridesmaidskeleton was floating in a little boy’s window at least that was my interpretation. This inspired the nameLillian, which came across as a perhaps senile, sinister elderly woman with an axe to grind.
RHINO BUCKET – The name doesn’t really have any meaning to me but I’ll tell you how we came up with it. We had justformed and we were offered a gig at a club called the Metro back in 1987 (I think). The club owner hadto submit his ads for the weekly music paper that day and gave us only about three hours to come upwith a name. Well, first things first, we went out and got quite a bit of beer. The original drummer,Rick Kubach, had grown up in Hawaii and wanted to call the band “Rhino Chaser”, which is apparentlya type long board used for surfing. And then, the original guitar player, Greg Fields, suggested we callthe band “Bucket or Lard”, or was it “Bucket of Shit”? I forget which one it was he wanted. Ever theeternal optimist, that Greg. For a nano-second we considered “Tee-Pee of Ill Repute”, but even we hadsome standards. After a few more beers, we reached a compromise and named the band, “RhinoBucket”. It was only supposed to be for one gig and yet here I am, 21 years later, still in band thatshould have taken the time to sober up before deciding on a name.
TYKETTO – I think, unless there is a serious bolt of inspiration, all bands go through the blues of trying to come upwith a name that represents them decently. Back then, it felt like all of the cool names were taken. Infact, so were all of the nonsensical names (I never could figure out what a Def Leppard was). If youwere a thrash or death metal band, the world was your oyster because up to that point, nobody hadstretched the limits to how outrageous you could get with your name. Cannibal Corpse. Cradle Of Filth.These were names that told you exactly what you were getting. What was a poor rock band to do? Afterwork one day, our guitarist, Brooke St. James, came home and mentioned, a little sheepishly, that hesaw a word spray painted on a wall in a pretty rough area of Brooklyn. It was TYKETTO. He didn’tknow what it was, but he liked it. And so did we. It sounded like it could be Japanese or perhapsanother foreign language. And, like ourselves, it didn’t have a deeper meaning. So we took it and itstuck. The funny thing is, later on we got it into our heads to take some photos in front of the graffitothat gave us our name and we went back to that neighborhood only to find that Brooke had misread it!It actually read “TYKETFO”. I, for one, am glad that his eyesight was blurry!
Courtesy of www.sleazeroxx.com and stores.lulu.com/heavymetalsalute