The True Meaning Of Rock And Roll Band Names

The names of Rock & Roll bands are often quite cryptic. John Lennon said The Beatles were named after Buddy Holly’s Crickets but in his book former drummer Pete Best claimed The Beatles were named after the Beat bands and Beat music of the time period. Named after The Beat Generation, a term coined by Jack Kerouac to describe the returning World War Two vets’ disenfranchisement, The Beatles name had the same basic meaning that Metallica had to Metal Music years later. According to Best this was found to be presumptuous and pretentious by the other Merseyside bands.

Rock band names can be shrouded in myth and mystery so luckily for you, we know the real inside poop on how and why your favorite bands have the names they have. Some examples are:


Linkin Park - A public park where young lovers “link in” (have sex) in the restroom.

The Strawberry Alarm Clock - The surprise of a young girl’s first menstruation.

Lothar And The Hand People - Hand lotion used to masturbate with.

Nine Inch Nails - A nine inch part of the male anatomy used to “nail” females.

The Offspring - The “spring” of fluid that follows “getting off”.

Pearl Jam - Ejaculate

Pink Floyd - A pale Englishman’s pet name for his member.

Radiohead - What a young guy gets from his girlfriend while listening to the radio in his car.

The Rolling Stones - The action of a man’s testicles while having sex.

The Kinks - Sexual kinks.

Steely Dan - A dildo.

Ten CC - The weight of a spoonful of male ejaculate.

Van Halen - The practice of sniffing the fumes from the exhaust pipe of a Chevy van.

The Moody Blues - A painful medical condition of the testicles.

Led Zeppelin - A particularly weighty male organ.

Husker Du - A guy who likes heavy women.

Bad Finger - The middle finger of a male’s hand.

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The Strawberry Alarmclock And Other Rock And Roll Strawberries

Fellow Tooner and Rock & Roll Rehab blog contributor, Buzz Brissette, recently wrote a blog post about his experience as a young keyboardist / song writer and playing with Lee Freeman of the Strawberry Alarm Clock.

Growing up in Woodland Hills, CA, my next door neighbor was George Bunnell, the bass player for the Alarmclock. I thought of him recently when an episode of AMC’s Mad Men had Jaguar automobiles as a client of the show’s ad agency. Teenage George had a beautiful Jag XKE which spent most of the time up on blocks in the Bunnell’s driveway as George was away on tour with the band and I guess they didn’t want to pay to insure the car if it wasn’t being used.

Late one night I turned onto my street to go home and George in the Jag was right in front of me. He peeled up the hill screeching his tires all the way up. I followed him and arrived at my house a few seconds after he pulled into his driveway. When I walked in my door my mother was standing there super pissed off that I had sped up the hill. I explained to her that it wasn’t me but George, who then sheepishly waved and proved my story. I drove a Plymouth Duster which really couldn’t have made such a racket anyway.

My only other memories of living next door to a rock star was asking him for the sheet music to Incense and Peppermints, their big hit and getting from his mother an old envelope from the Electric Company which had a half dozen chords scribbled on it. I was hoping for an authentic arraignment but it wasn’t even autographed. Big disappointment.

There is something strangely funny about the name strawberry and rock and roll. George has said in an interview that their record company recommended they incorporate the word into their title as a way of associating themselves with the Beatles whose recent and first psychedelic hit was Strawberry Fields Forever. That song was named for a Salvation Army camp called Strawberry Fields where John Lennon attended dances as a kid. There is also an English Prog Rock band called The Stawbs which was short for strawberry.

There is probably more references to strawberries in rock than any other fruit, or even food. What is interesting is that the botanical genome project, the plant equivalent of the Human Genome Project discovered that Strawberries are closely related to the marijuana plant. Just a coincidence? I think not.

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The Legend Of Lo Fon - Paid To Die

 Today, May 30, is the birthday of my late brother, Dwayne Earl Warner.

My late brother, Dwayne Warner, was a biker who worked as a bouncer at the Topanga Corral and the Sundance Saloon. It was working at these bars that he met the managers of the various bands that played there and through them eventually got hired as a bodyguard for the Sex Pistols’ 1978 tour of America.

Over the course of fifteen years I’d hear Dwayne tell his stories of being on the road and every time he’d tell someone new the stories would get more exaggerated, more exciting and a whole lot funnier. “You should write a book,” I’d repeatedly tell him. But Dwayne rarely read books and had no interest in writing one. He suggested I write it.

Dwayne would often nag me to draw pictures for him. Not just any picture but pictures depicting him in some fantasy pose such as a pirate or a western outlaw or a Roaring Twenties era gangster and always engaged in some tasteless and nefarious activity. The problem is that Dwayne would change his interests as often as he’d change his socks and I wouldn’t even have finished one picture before he wasn’t interested in that subject matter anymore and would insist I do a another, different drawing. Dwayne was also a terrible nag and I soon found that refusing to do any drawings was the best idea if I didn’t want to be nagged all the time. He also loved giving and receiving gifts but was not a gracious gift receiver and would let you know if he thought what you gave him wasn’t on par with a gift he had given you. It was more like doing a job for a boss than giving a gift to a friend.

One Christmas, I had since given up buying him birthday presents due to his ungrateful attitude, I decided to give him something unique and personal. Originality was always something by which he judged his gifts. He was almost never fully dressed when at home and would wear a black robe, his version of Hugh Hefner’s famous silk pajamas. I bought a very nice, very plush black robe and using fabric paint designed a logo incorporating his face and his monogram on it. This gift he actually seemed to appreciate although he never wore it as he didn’t want to fade out the image by having to wash it.

Because of the design on the robe he decided he wanted me to do a drawing of him in the style of the high contrast woodblock print illustrations used in Old West dime novels. This got me thinking. I wasn’t interested in doing another drawing for him but if I could write a short story starring him as an Old West character I could do some drawings to illustrated it and at least that might be fun for me. I wrote the a short story that took place at the Sundance Saloon in Calabasas where he was the bouncer but wrote it in the flowery and exaggerated language of a dime novel. I decided to have him read it before I bother illustrating it as knowing him, he might just threaten to sue me for using his name and stories. But he actually loved it, although he didn’t want to read it and made me read it to him. He said that’s how his whole story should be written and insisted I expand the short story into a whole book.

Over the course of that summer I would go jogging on the walking trails around my home and while there I would imagine the stories I’d heard him tell over and over through the years as if a movie playing in my head. Each day when I finished my jog I’d write down the next chapter. I would read the previous one or two chapters, rewriting as I went, then I’d write the next one. This way I would rewrite and rewrite and every few weeks I’d read the entire story from the start and rewrite again until I no longer found anything to change, add or subtract. What was the most surprising and delightful aspect of this process was the many surprises I had while ‘watching’ this movie in my mind. After all, I’m the one making it all up based on stories I already knew yet there were so many things in this version of the story that I just could not see coming. Even the very end took me by surprise and saddened me that it was over because it had been such a fun adventure.

The biggest surprise was that having written a novel ( I Googled NOVEL and the description is a work of fiction, in prose and at least 60,000 words and what I had written was over 78,000 words ), that I thought of as a personal gift to my brother and something no one else would ever read, he refused to read it. I had actually written it as one big, rude joke. As a former ‘underground’ cartoonist I had a pretty nasty imagination and a sick sense of humor but I always censored myself if I thought there was a chance my work could get published but for this project I not only did not censor myself, I pushed the envelop, in fact, I shredded the envelop. Dwayne had a very dark and twisted sense of humor himself and a huge ego and I wanted to write something about him that he would find shocking, even disturbing, as a joke. But the joke was on me when he refused to read it on the grounds that if someone mentioned in the book (names were changed but still obvious) took offense he couldn’t be sued and could claim ‘plausible deniability’. All he did was tell me to sell it and give him the money. So much for my brotherly gift and my big tasteless joke.

I mailed some query letters to literary agents and eventually one asked to read the manuscript. He then told me to call another agent he knew at another agency because she ‘”liked dark stuff”. She was one of the agents that didn’t respond to my original query letter but now I called with a referral. “Is it dark, cause he knows I like dark?” she said when I told her who gave me her name. She later told me she ‘howled’ while reading it by a pool while on vacation with people staring at her for laughing so hard. She also has a very sick sense of humor. She offered me a literary agent contract and wanted to meet Dwayne.

We went down to the very impressive lit agency office in Hollywood where the receptionist gushed over Dwayne wanting to know if his adventures were really like in the book. Our meeting with the agent was in the agency’s library which had high wood paneled walls covered with book shelves with one wall that was a huge aquarium. I had to laugh when both the receptionist and our new agent kept drilling Dwayne for details knowing that he had never read the book and had no idea what they were talking about. That meeting was September 4, 2001. A week later the world changed and my little book got lost in the debris. After Dwayne died suddenly in 2006 the joke ceased to be funny anyway.


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Rock Of Ages Movie

As someone who was a part of the L.A. music scene of the 1980s and as someone involved in Rock and Roll Theater and the illustrating of rock music I feel compelled to go see the new movie based on the hit Broadway show, Rock Of Ages.

It features the hit music of the 80s and is about the Sunset Strip “Hairspray Metal” club scene. This would have included clubs such as Gazzarris, the Whisky, the Starwood, Filthy McNasty’s, The Central and, few blocks away from Sunset, The Troubadour. My band, Womanizer, was the house band for KWST nights at the Troub and we regularly played Filthy’s and The Central. The Whiskey was actually punk rock back then and we played at Gazzarris as an audition but didn’t get the gig.

I feel I need to see this movie but my wife has a real problem with Tom Cruise and won’t go with me. I never let my personal opinion of an actor keep me from enjoying a film, in fact, I rarely have a personal opinion about an actor. My wife refuses to watch John Wayne movies because of his politics but I couldn’t care less. I’m watching a cowboy up on the screen, not a yacht sailing right wing Republican.

I feel a bit funny going to a movie musical by myself so if anyone wants to go see this film let me know. It portrays a part of my life and times and I’m interested in knowing how we now look to the new generation. Yes, I’m a little surprised by the casting of Tom Cruise but I wouldn’t have thought he would have made a very good Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder either so I’ll give him a change.

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The Story Of The Band That Died In Nam

 I heard a story back in the Sixties about an unknown rock and roll band that had traveled to Viet Nam as part of a USO show to entertain the troops. This band was packed into the back of a supply truck to be driven to their gig out in the country someplace. Along the way the Viet Cong ambushed the truck and sprayed the back with machine gun fire. At least some of the band members were killed.

I don’t remember the name of the band except as I recall they had the word “bubble” in the title such as The Bubble Machine or something like that. I can’t find any reference to them on the Internet either so if anyone out there remembers any details about this story please add them in the COMMENTS section below.

It’s possible that story was just a rumor but on this Memorial Day I thought I’d remember some noncombatants who were in a war zone on behalf of our armed services and died along with our fighting men.

There have been rock and rollers who actually served the country as soldiers. Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash and Jerry Garcia are some of the more famous ones. And let’s not forget ACDC were honorary members of the US Military when our troops used their music as psychological warfare against General Manuel Noriega of Panama.

Below is a follow up left as a comment by one of our readers for those of you too lazy to click on the COMMENTS.

I found this on the internet in German and used Google Translate to come up with this:

On July 5, 1968, the bus gets the band "Brandi Perry & The Bubble Machine", which is carelessly traveling without military protection, in South Vietnam on the way to Vung Tau in an ambush, either by troops of the Viet Cong or the South Vietnamese army. The drummer and keyboard player Phil Willis + Kurt Pill, both only 17 years old, are killed, the bassist and vocalist Jack Bone + Paula "Brandi Perry," Levine are injured more or less difficult.

"Brandi Perry & The Bubble Machine" are also the subject of the documentary "Entertaining Vietnam" by Mara Wallis about musicians who attended the American troops in Vietnam.


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Degrees of Separation By Buzz B.

It’s always interesting to play that ‘degrees of separation' game. I recently read of the death of disco music queen Donna Summer, who grew up in Massachusetts, and it got me thinking.
As a young musician I signed a contract with a record producer in California as a singer/songwriter. Growing up in a home half in Rhode Island, half in Massachusetts, I  moved to California. The producer I had teamed up with had other writers and musicians under contract including Lee Freeman who had been with the Strawberry Alarm Clock of “Incense And Peppermints” fame in the 60’s. Now, many years later, Lee Freeman had teamed up with Lee (Leo) Gaffney to form the Gaffney-Freeman Band.  The record producer had gotten them a record deal with Columbia records, and they recorded an album.

  I ended up playing keyboards in the short lived band, at least for rehearsals. I found out that Lee Freeman’s girlfriend worked for Donna Summer. Summer had a stage show at that time that used “street people”, extras really, and Lee’s girl was one of these. I also think that Lee’s girl, whose name I can’t recall, did some wardrobe work for Summer as well. Lee also played one of the “street people” and spoke highly of Donna Summer as a person, although she was being marketed as some kind of sexual disco goddess at the time. When I asked Lee about his days in the Alarm Clock, he told me a few stories that basically pointed to lots of friction among the band members and giving me the impression that it was not always a pleasant experience. I guess that’s the nature of the business. That was years after he had left the band, although he later joined a re-formed version of the Alarm Clock. He left the reformed version of the band due to illness and passed away in 2010, from complications due to cancer. Donna Summer also lost her battle with cancer.

   The record producer in question was Rick Jarrard. He had produced the iconic “Surrealistic Pillow” album for the Jefferson Airplane, “Everybody’s Talking At Me” for Harry Nilsson from the film Midnight Cowboy, and also produced Jose Feliciano’s records “Light My Fire”, “Felix Navidad” and other records.

  The Gaffney-Freeman band was done in by broken promises by Columbia records to use the band to open for some of their premier acts (Billy Joel was talked about), and to spend money promoting the album and the band. They did neither. Columbia records at that time decided to spend their money on established acts. And so ended my short lived membership in the Gaffney-Freemen band, along with those degrees of separation.
Other connections awaited, but that’s another story.   Buzz B.

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Toys For Codgers

The Baby Boomer generation is unique in that they are really the first American generation to have a group identity. The term ‘teenager’ wasn’t coined until the 1950s. Until then children were thought of as small, underdeveloped future adults. The Victorian Era parents were the first to develop the concept of a ‘childhood’ as something that is suppose to be carefree and fun. Before then childhood was something to be survived. Parents dressed their children like little versions of themselves and children started work as soon as they physically could.

The Baby Boomer generation cherishes the memories of their childhood and many are accused of being stuck in a perpetual adolescence. If certain members of the Baby Boomers have never really ‘grown up’ then as they age they may retreat even further back emotionally and mentally.

The product lines of the near future may be geared to this physically aging but emotionally and perhaps even mentally digressing population. In other words; toys for the old. A product specifically designed to give hours of enjoyment to people of a certain frame of mind with shared likes, memories and attention span.

Toys For Codgers
(An old person. Derives from coffin dodger.)

* Dolls that look like your children

* Pre-soaked toilet sponges (instead of toilet paper so you wash your hand while you wipe your ass)

* Tricycle walkers

* iPod hearing aids

* Medicine flavored candy

* Bathing suit pajamas (water proof with built in external catheters)

* Flavored oxygen tanks

* Padded bathtubs

* Video camera glasses that enlarge the image

* Safe plastic power tools

* Life size model car engine kits (plastic)

* Wheelchairs with extended forks, sissy bars, banana seats and metal flack paint jobs

* Hoop skirt bumpers to protect hips against fall

* Inflatable belt with compressed air canister that pushes people who have fallen into an upright position.

Please contribute additional Toys For Codgers ideas in the COMMENTS section below. Thank you, you'll make someone's Gramps very happy this holiday season.



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