Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?

Born James Newell Osterberg, he drummed for a band called the Iguanas in high school; a shortening of their name gave him the Iggy handle. When he was living with the rest of the Stooges in Ann Arbor, Michigan, experimenting with drugs and the sonic possibilities of vacuum cleaners, he was called Iggy Stooge and Iggy Osterberg. He didn’t acquire the last name Pop until he shaved off his eyebrows; the band had a friend named Jimmy Pop who had lost all his hair, including his eyebrows, so Iggy got tagged with his name. (Iggy said he picked it because it sounded good for show business.) When the Stooges played their first show for a paying crowd, on March 3, 1968, Iggy painted his face like a mime’s, wore an antique nightshirt, and built himself an Afro with aluminum foil. That night, he learned an answer to one of mankind’s imponderable questions: “What are eyebrows are good for?” The answer is “keeping sweat out of your eyes”; by the end of the gig, so much sweat and oil and glitter had dripped down Iggy’s forehead, his eyes had become severely swollen.

Bruce Springsteen had played in many bands, with names such as Steel Mill and Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, but when he signed his record contract, he did it as a solo artist. When he went on tour behind Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., he had just five guys backing him up, and they didn’t even have a name; on some 1974 posters, the act is billed as BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND BAND. A s original keyboardist David Sancious remembered it, “We needed a name.” On a long drive back from a show, the group brainstormed names for hours, without anything clicking. By the time they got back to the Jersey shore, it was daylight. They were headed for the house of Sancious’s family, where the band sometimes practiced. The address: 1105 E Street, Belmar, New Jersey. Springsteen saw a street sign and started saying it over and over: “E Street, E Street. E Street Band. Yeah.” That Belmar neighborhood had another name that Springsteen made famous. A nearby cross-street was Tenth Avenue—later to be known for its freeze-outs.

When it comes to the world of pseudo-lesbian Russian teenagers in schoolgirl outfits, nothing is as it seems. But in fact, Lena Katina and Julia Volkova, the girls who performed the hit single “All the Things She Said,” took their name from a shortened version of the Russian phrase pronounced “Ta lyhubit tu” (I’ll spare you the Cyrillic, but it translates as “This girl is loving that one”). There is also an organization called Teens Against Tobacco Use (TATU), who don’t sing, but rather offer up such statements as “I use my commitment to be tobacco-free to teach children to make the healthy choice not to smoke.” In contrast, the pop duo favors maxims such as “We are singing about our love. Love between girl and girl.”

There’s a lot of misinformation on this subject, most of it gleefully spread by the band. For example, despite Eddie Vedder’s repeated claims, he did not have a great-grandmother named Pearl who married a Native American and cooked up jam with peyote as an ingredient. And although the band was originally named Mookie Blaylock, after the star NBA point guard, “Pearl Jam” was not his nickname. (They changed their name to avoid legal problems, but the title of their debut album, Ten, was also Blaylock’s jersey number.) The band also doesn’t seem to have intended their name to refer to semen. So why did they pick it? They just liked the word pearl: It’s surfer slang for submerging the nose of your board, it’s the title of a good Janis Joplin record, it was the nickname of basketball great Earl Monroe, and Vedder did have a cool great-grandmother named Pearl. She didn’t wed a Native American, but she did marry a circus contortionist. So a Pearl Jam might be a Monroe slam-dunk or, as Vedder said he prefers to think of it, the creative conflict that turns the grain of sand in an oyster into a jewel.

At their very first show, they were known as Twisted Kites. Later, R.E.M. often employed pseudonyms for secret gigs, such as The Mystery Twins, It Crawled from the South, Bingo Hand Job, and Hornets Attack Victor Mature. The band’s members also have participated in dozens of other projects, ranging from the Hindu Love Gods (Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry playing drunken covers with Warren Zevon) to 1066 Gaggle O’ Sound (Michael Stipe doing a one-man show on a Farfisa organ—so dubbed because 1066 was Stipe’s “favorite year in history”).

A quick history of the names that Rivers Cuomo has used for his bands: His high-school metal act was called Avant Garde; they moved to Los Angeles and then changed their name to Zoom (rejecting the options Prong and Power Chicken). After they broke up, Cuomo joined Sixty Wrong Sausages, which in early 1992 evolved into a nameless quartet. While they wrote songs and rehearsed, this group considered Meathead, Outhouse, Hummingbird, The Big Jones, and This Niblet. Then came their break: Keanu Reeves’s band, Dogstar, decided to play an impromptu gig at Raji’s Bar and Rib Shack on Hollywood Boulevard. An opening band was needed that night; Cuomo’s group lucked into the show, but needed a real name. Cuomo nominated Weezer—a nickname given to him when he was a kid, by other children who were teasing him about his asthma. The band had a long meeting and kicked around many more names, but nobody could come up with anything better, and Cuomo stuck to his guns (or, rather, his inhaler).

Sadly, no; Dave Grohl chose the band’s name and recorded the debut album before playing any live shows. Foo fighters is actually an old term for UFOs; World War II pilots reported seeing odd balls of light that circled around their planes, and borrowed a catchphrase from the comic-strip character Smokey Stover (whose creator, Bill Holman, littered his strip with the nonsense word foo, in phrases like “A man’s foo is his castle” and “Foo-losophy”). Although Grohl has warned that “that UFO stuff is all overblown,” he is sufficiently interested in flying-saucer conspiracies to have named his label Roswell Records (after the site where the aliens allegedly landed) and to have taken a walk-on role on The X-Files. If Grohl had chosen another term for the same aerial phenomena, his band would have been called the Kraut Fireballs.

The band, also briefly known as Reloaded, didn’t decide on a name until the last possible moment. In fact, their songs in Hulk and The Italian Job are credited to “Scott Weiland, Slash, Duff McKagan, Matt Sorum and Dave Kushner,” which is a bit of a mouthful for a DJ back-announcing a single. “Coming up with a name was an eventuality we were dreading,” McKagan told me. “We were like, we have to come up with a Fuckin’ name.” After seeing a movie financed by Revolution Studios, Slash suggested Revolver, and the band liked it because of the Beatles reference. “But I did a Google search on revolver and there was like a thousand bands, so that was impossible,” McKagan said. They started toying with different versions, and Weiland came up with Black Velvet Revolver, which was deemed too close in cadence to Stone Temple Pilots. Truncated, however, it made everyone happy. McKagan swore that nobody involved with the band realized there was a firearm overlap in the names of Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver until it was too late.

Almost. Circa 1980, two pivotal figures in the Los Angeles underground music scene were roommates: Jeffrey Lee Pierce had a band called Creeping Ritual; sharing a bathroom with him was Keith Morris, lead singer for the legendary hardcore band Black Flag. Alongside acts such as the Cramps and X, Pierce was helping to define the roots-punk sound of the L.A. scene, performing gigs mostly at Chinese restaurants. But after one show, Pierce was worried that he had pissed off the club’s management sufficiently for the band to get blacklisted there. The easiest move was to change his group’s name. (This also had the advantage of shedding the goth connotations of Creeping Ritual.) The Gun Club, the band’s new name, was indeed suggested by his roommate Morris. But although Morris was leaving Black Flag and starting a new band of his own, Pierce didn’t suggest its name (the Circle Jerks). His half of the trade: the lyrics to the song “Group Sex,” which became the title track for the Circle Jerks’ debut album.