WHO’S “THE BOSS”?

As if being adored by millions and being paid millions of dollars to make music for a living, pop and rock stars also get to have really cool nicknames. Here’s where they came from.

THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD: In the early 1950s, William B. Williams, a disc jockey at WNEW, a New York radio station, mused on air that Frank Sinatra, who also had a show at the station, should have a title, like Benny Goodman (the “King of Swing”) and Duke Ellington. So he started calling Sinatra the Chairman of the Board. The nickname caught on and Sinatra actually credited Williams with reviving his career. By 1960, Sinatra wanted more creative control. He left his longtime label, Capitol Records, and formed his own company, Reprise Records. Sinatra not only became Reprise’s biggest star, but also its president and CEO. In other words, he literally was the “chairman of the board.”

THE VELVET FOG: Like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, Mel Tormé was one of the great crooners, a polished singer who performed standards and the most romantic entries in the Great American Songbook in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. (He also had a big comeback in the 1980s with a number of appearances as himself on the TV sitcom Night Court.) Despite having one of the most colorful nicknames out there, Tormé didn’t much like being known as “the Velvet Fog”—he jokingly referred to himself as “the Velvet Frog.” But the moniker alludes to Tormé’s impossibly smooth and gentle singing voice, like a fog made of velvet. New York DJ Fred Robbins came up with it in 1947, and popularized it on the air.

THE FAB FOUR: Early in their career, the Beatles were famously rejected by Decca Records because an executive thought guitar groups were “on their way out.” But a Decca Records press agent named Tony Barrow, who had helped arrange the audition, wasn’t giving up on them. Barrow’s friend, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, hired him to write press releases to tout the band to concert promoters and record labels (including EMI, which signed them). Barrow came up with the term “fabulous foursome” to describe the group, but in one of his press releases, he casually referred to them as the “Fab Four”…and it stuck.

SLOWHAND: In 1964 Eric Clapton was beginning to build a name for himself as a talented blues-rock guitarist as a member of the Yardbirds. In order to play faster and bend notes, he used light-gauge guitar strings, and he’d break at least one per show. The concert would have to come to a halt while Clapton changed his string, during which the crowd would fill time with a slow, rhythmic clapping. The British term for that: slow handclap. Yardbirds manager Giorgio Gomelsky shortened the term and saddled Clapton with it as a nickname.

Before making it big, Hugh Jackman worked, as he puts it, as a “crappy birthday party clown.”

THE KING (OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL): It’s probably the most famous nickname in music, but before Elvis Presley became known as “the King,” or alternately “the King of Rock ’n’ Roll,” promoters billed him as “the Atomic Powered Singer.” The latter name came—and stuck—in 1956, the same year Elvis scored his first hit single. Elvis came of age and broke out in Memphis, and in May 1956, Memphis Press-Scimitar entertainment reporter Robert Johnson labeled Elvis “the fledgling king of rock n’ roll.” Some disc jockeys picked up on it, dropped the “fledgling” as the singer got more and more popular, and influential gossip columnist Hedda Hopper started using it too. Before long, Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, began demanding his client be referred to as “the King.”

THE BOSS: It’s more than a little ironic that Bruce Springsteen, whose songs about regular people from small towns made him the unofficial voice of the working class, was saddled with a nickname of a hated, spirit-crushing authority figure. The name actually predates his fame. While fronting one of his first bands, Earth, in the late 1960s, it was his job to negotiate payment with club owners, and make sure his fellow musicians got their cut. He was, in other words, the Boss.

THE KING OF POP: In the early 1990s, Michael Jackson was one of the biggest musical stars in the world, but he didn’t have what other superstars like Elvis Presley or Bruce Springsteen did: a superlative nickname like “the King” or “the Boss.” So, he hired a publicist named Bob Jones, who issued a press release to every major media outlet proclaiming that Jackson would henceforth be known as “the King of Pop.” Jones and Jackson even required MTV to refer to Jackson on the air as the King of Pop at least twice a week…or else they’d withhold access to his latest music video.

THE RED ROCKER: When singer David Lee Roth left his band, Van Halen, at the height of its popularity in 1985, the remaining members recruited Sammy Hagar to replace him. Hagar was already well known for his solo career, which included big hits like “I Can’t Drive 55” and “There’s Only One Way to Rock.” Hagar is also obsessed with the color red, which he says makes him “act different” and that it “gives [him] comfort.” While promoting his self-titled second solo record—often referred to as The Red Album—with a concert in Seattle in 1977, he took the stage wearing all red. A kid approached him for his autograph and asked Hagar to sign it “the Red Rocker.” Hagar adopted it as his nickname.

Makes sense: A citizen of the Ivory Coast (western Africa) is called an Ivorian.