Band Names

I've now been in several bands over the last several years...

Wyrd Tuesday
The Motor Primitives
Pants del Fwego
The Sea Turtles (not our real name, we didn't have a name, this is just what I called it in conversations with myself)
The Lollards
Another Mistake
Shanghai Party Boss
Seven Stone Weaklings
Crackity Jones

As well as some other unnamed short-lived projects.

Of all of those bands, I had very little say in most of the names. Another Mistake was totally my name...but I'm not sure that the rest of the band even knew I was calling it that. The rest were proposed by someone else or evolved organically. I had veto power, I guess, but I didn't much participate in a name selection process. If there was any kind of process at all, it lasted like ten minutes.

I'm playing drums in a band currently that is just starting to think about playing out. We've come to the point where we need a name.

For the first few months of our existance, we've played "grunge" type music...but when we first got together we'd discussed being a classic rock group...or playing Green Day type stuff. I'm not sure how the grunge thing happened, and I'm not sure if it is meant to be permanent or if we will expand into other genres. Not knowing what the final type of music we intend to play is kind of makes it hard for me to think of a name.

I also don't know these guys well. We met over Craig's List, with only two of the five members knowing each other before our first rehearsal. I don't have a strong feeling for their personalities (unlike Shanghai Party Boss, where I knew from the moment I met them that they were total goofballs...or that a couple of the members of Wyrd Tuesday were into medievil things).

There's no one who has taken the mantle of "band leader." We aren't working for one person, like in The Lollards, where it was JA's band (he wrote all the songs and sang lead) or The Motor Primitives (where it was PB's band) and and so we deferred to them on the band name for the most part.

Seven Stone Weaklings started as a band name and became a real band. Crackity Jones was the only logical Pixies song title that hadn't already been swiped by another Pixies tribute band. Pants del Fwego just evolved, no one really ever proposed it. Shanghai Party Boss came out of a five minute conversation..."We need something random, like internet spam...once got an email about the Shanghai Party Boss...done!"

I guess that we have to spend some time together and talk it out. Or start throwing things and see if they stick. Or settle on a genre and go from there. For some reason, the process doesn't seem like as much fun as I always thought it would be. Maybe I'm not invested enough in the group because I'm too busy with other things. I'm really at a loss as to where to even begin.