How 7 Famous Bands Got Their Strange Names

Before they were the Beatles, the Liverpool lads cycled through a few names — the Quarrymen, Johnny and the Moondogs, the Silver Beetles. The spelling was the clever bit: John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe were fond of Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets, and liked the idea of naming themselves after a bug too.

So they took “beetles” and bent it into “Beatles” — a nod to the beat music they were playing. Lennon later told the tale of a man on a flaming pie who anointed them, which was pure Lennon nonsense. The pun is the real story.

In 1962 a promoter rang up and needed a name for the young blues band on the phone, right then. Brian Jones glanced down at a Muddy Waters record lying on the floor, spotted the track “Rollin’ Stone,” and blurted it out. Done.

It was a fitting theft, given how much the band worshipped American blues. That one Muddy Waters song went on to seed an awful lot — the band’s name, a Bob Dylan classic, and even a certain magazine. Not bad for a snap decision made over the telephone.

The name started as a put-down. When Jimmy Page was floating the idea of a supergroup, the story goes that the Who’s Keith Moon or John Entwistle scoffed that it would go over like a “lead balloon” — old slang for a flop. That grim joke somehow stuck as a name.

Manager Peter Grant dropped the “a” from “lead” so nobody would say “leed,” and swapped balloon for the grander “zeppelin.” Who exactly cracked the original line is still argued over — Moon and Entwistle both get the credit, depending on who’s telling it — but everyone agrees it began as a jinx that backfired beautifully.

This one’s a small act of homage. Syd Barrett was reading the liner notes on a blues record and spotted two Carolina musicians credited there: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. He stitched their first names together, and for a while the band was even called the Pink Floyd Sound.

There’s something lovely about it. Two Piedmont bluesmen most people had never heard of ended up lending their names to one of the biggest bands on the planet — and getting remembered, a little, because of it.

They were called the Warlocks first, until they learned another band had the name. So, as Jerry Garcia told it, he opened a dictionary at random, and his eye fell on the phrase “grateful dead” — an old folklore motif about a traveler who pays for a stranger’s burial and is repaid by that grateful spirit.

Garcia said it hit him like a bolt. The exact book gets remembered differently in different tellings, but the gist holds: a spooky old phrase, found by accident, that fit the band better than anything they could have dreamed up on purpose.

The Florida boys had a high-school gym teacher named Leonard Skinner who was a stickler about the school’s ban on long hair — and gave more than a few future rock stars grief over it. When the band needed a name, they turned his into a mock-serious tribute: Lynyrd Skynyrd.

There were no hard feelings in the end. Skinner later introduced the band onstage, and years afterward he ran a bar in Jacksonville. Not every teacher can say his crackdown on shaggy hair got him immortalized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were college pals with a taste for oddball Beat literature. They pulled their band’s name straight from William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel Naked Lunch — a book so bizarre and boundary-pushing it once ended up in an obscenity trial.

Where in the book, exactly? Let’s just say “Steely Dan” is a rather personal contraption described in one of its wilder scenes — not something you’d have found in the family encyclopedia. It was a sly little in-joke, and most fans humming their hits never knew a thing about it.