All Hail the Gaylords!

As I've mentioned before, I'm absolutely in the soup at work these days (minestrone, as it happens, with an extra ladleful of High Executive Anxiety) and involved in a Super-Double-Secret Humor Project in what little remains of my evenings -- I'll be able to tell you about it at some point in the future, but not now.

I'm forced to let the blog go relatively fallow for the next week or two. But I don't want the japes and hijinkery to cease completely; mavens of Blogtopia suggest that when stuck for time it's a good idea to stand aside and invite the Two or Three Assembled to pony up the yucks. I think "Web 2.0" is the operating buzzword.

On this mornining's commute I was thinking about a book I've been browsing lately, a wonderful encyclopedic tome about British beat bands from the Sixties called British Beat: Then, Now and Rare, 1960-1969. It lists and describes hundreds and hundreds of the British bands that followed the Beatles' rise -- some certainly qualifiable as British Invasion bands, but many also who toiled in utter, and who knows, perhaps deserved, obscurity. One group in particular came to mind, a combo with the mystifying monicker The Gaylords. My goodness, I thought, now that's a really, really self-sabotaging name to give yourself, innit? Who knows if "gaylord" had the same snickering impact in 1964 that it has now, but it's impossible to believe it passed completely unnoticed.

That set me thinking about how often recently commenters here have picked out phrases here and there and observed that they'd make really good names for rock bands. All very well, and please don't stop -- but what about really bad names for rock bands? Why should that side of the equasion be made to go begging?

So that's your assignment, Dear Readers. While I'm lost in the bowels of my professional hell (and bowels is, believe me, exactly the word I want), I challenge you to list some of the truly awful band-names you've stored up. I welcome both real names and ones that spring freshly minted from your fertile crania.

I'll start the ball rolling: I was once in a very rotten jazz-fusion (!) band called "Ethlyn Rash," the name the brainchild of the drummer, perhaps under the influence of a few too many Tolkien novels. I'm not sure it occurred to him that the name sounded rather like something you'd turn up at the Emergency Room with after spraying your dandelions with the deadly carcinogens I have been chastened for using in recent comments. (Folks: objections duly noted. Thanks for your input.)

On a more contentious front, I've always been slightly mystified by "The Beatles," which is a really labored pun, n'est-ce pas? I think if they'd known they would go as far as they did they'd have thought a little harder about it.

In the Ineffable O'Reilly's immortal phrase, What say you?