The telephone in pop music

We can probably all agree on one thing: the main theme that pop music almost always revolves around is love. In all its forms – lust, burden, suffering and whatever else is associated with it. But technical devices also find their way into the lyrics of pop music. Cars are popular, whether the new Cadillac – which even appears in several different songs – or the Corvette, motorcycles have also been the subject of songs. The Percolator, a practical device for making coffee, also played a role in the songs of both Randy Randolph and Billy Joe & The Checkmates. Even a cement mixer was sung about and covered several times. A concrete mixer? Rudimentary English will mislead you. A cement mixer is not a technical device but a shot drink made from Irish cream and lime juice.

But what struck us in particular was that a technical device, the telephone, appears directly or indirectly in many of the songs. The ringing of a telephone in 1973 marked the beginning of the playful career of the Swedish band ABBA, who were still called Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Frida at the time. They performed the song on February 10, 1973 at the Swedish Melodifestivalen, the pre-selection for the ESC, but only came third. They made the leap to the ESC a year later with Waterloo.

The song “Ring ring (Bara du slog en signal)” recorded on January 10, 1973 and released in advance of their debut album on February 14, 1973, was a great success. The Swedish version reached number 1 in the domestic charts, the English version number 2. By the end of March, a total of around 100,000 copies of both singles had been sold, something that few artists in Sweden had managed to do before. The lyrics are about a woman begging her boyfriend to finally call her, otherwise it would be over and done with.

The telephone is a 19th century invention and, like the sound recording reported on in the previous blog article, it has several fathers. If you want to know more about it, you can find detailed and comprehensive information here. The British band Sweet even dedicated a song to one of the inventors, “Alexander Graham Bell”. And of course the lyrics are about how his desire to talk to his beloved girl led him to invent the telephone.

But who first came up with the idea of mentioning this invention in a song? It's difficult to find out exactly. At least we probably know the first song in which the telephone plays a role. Joseph E. Howard and Ida Emerson wrote the ragtime number “Hello! Ma Baby”. The lyric line “Hello! Ma Baby, Hel-lo! Ma Honey, Hello! Ma Ragtime Gal” refers directly to the telephone and the new possibility of communicating over distance. Arthur Collins recorded the song in the same year and you can listen to it here.

At the end of the 19th century, telephoning was still a privilege for the few. The first Berlin telephone directory (a thin booklet), published in 1881 by the “Fernsprecheinrichtung” of the Deutsche Reichspost, contained just 48 subscribers. Mostly business people, doctors and institutions, because the telephone was a luxury item.

Back then, telephoning worked like this: you picked up the handset (the microphone was permanently installed on the phone), turned a crank induktor and sent an electrical impulse to the operator. There, the flap with the subscriber's name on it fell on the telephone switchboard and the lady from the office (even at the beginning it was mostly women who worked at the other end of the line) answered. You said who you wanted to speak to and the cable connected to the caller's line was pulled up from the lower part of the cabinet and the jack plug was plugged into the socket of the person you wanted to speak to. The caller then turned the crank inductor again – it rang at the other end of the line and when the caller picked up the handset, they could talk. At the end of the call, the crank was turned again, signaling to the operator that the call was over. The operator pulled the jack plug out of the socket and disconnected the call.

But back to the music. A well-known older song in which the telephone plays a role is “Long Distance Moan” by Blind Lemon Jefferson from November 1929. In the lyrics, he asks the operator for a “credit call” (collect call), i.e. that the person called will pay for the call, because he absolutely has to talk to his “baby” so that she doesn't leave him. Once again, it's about love.

A similar story helped Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show become a worldwide hit in 1971. In “Sylvia's Mother”, the caller wants to speak to Sylvia, but only ever gets her mother on the phone. And then every few minutes the operator chats in between and wants 40 cents for the next three minutes. At this point, a more detailed explanation is needed for today's generation. Back in the 1970s, even in the USA, you couldn't just turn the rotary dial and call the next town or another state. You first dialed the operator and said which subscriber in which city you wanted to speak to. The operator then charged you for the first few minutes and you had to insert the appropriate coins into the telephone.

Each coin size had its own slot and fell on a bell. The operator could hear from the different bell tones whether enough money had been inserted. This did not work with trouser buttons, there was a coin validator in the machine. If you put 10 cents into the 25-cent slot, the dime came out at the bottom immediately. The “long distance” manual switch was not replaced in the USA until the 1970s. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the “self-dialing service” was introduced nationwide in 1972. But back to the song. In “Sylvia's Mother”, Shel Silverstein deals with his own personal experiences. He had tried to reach his former girlfriend Sylvia, but was turned away by her mother because Sylvia was about to leave home to get married.

The lines between the cities available to the operator were not unlimited and so it could happen that you could call the operator but he didn't have a free line. The Dutch band Long Tall Ernie & The Shakers describe precisely this problem in “Operator, Operator (Get Me A Line)”. And again, the lyrics are about not losing the girl you love and describing your great love for her on the phone. Annett Louisan connected in “Drück die 1” her phone to the computer in 2008 and says “Press 1”. The text sounds like the annoying selection in a telephone hotline. In the video, you can see her plugging away at a classic flap cabinet and get an impression of how the manual switchboard worked in the early days of the telephone.

Let's continue with the telephone songs. Graham Bonney had a huge hit in Germany in 1969 with “Wähle 3-3-3 auf dem Telefon”, which stayed in the charts for 15 weeks. Wilson Pickett also wants his girl to call him and so he calls his number “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)” in the song. In “Skandal im Sperrbezirk”, the Spider Murphy Gang give a phone number for completely different reasons: “Rosie's got a phone, I've got her number too. 32 16 8 is busy all night long”. Of course, this number existed in various cities and so there were “jokers” who called the number and played or sang the song on the phone. The song was boycotted by public radio stations in Bavaria for a long time because of the lyric “And outside the big city, the hookers are standing on their feet”.

“Call Me” by Blondie is the intro to the movie “American Gigolo” and the lyrics already sum up the content of the movie. At first glance, the song of the same name, which Petula Clark released 15 years before Blondie's hit, seems to be about a similar topic. But maybe she just wants to use the lyrics to encourage her boyfriend to call her when he's not feeling well. After Blondie, another movie song: “I Just Called To Say I Love You” from the movie “The Woman In Red”, but here too Stevie Wonder only confesses his love to his partner on the phone.

And because we can't stop ourselves, here's another movie song. In the US thriller “Drive”, a nameless driver offers his services to escape after thefts and robberies. He finds out the time and place of the planned crime via a “night call” and waits there for exactly 5 minutes to help the actors escape. Kavinsky a.k.a. Vincent Belorgey has achieved international recognition with the film's title song (sung by the Brazilian Lovefoxx). Kavinsky performed together with Angèle and Phoenix at the closing ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Paris on August 11, 2024.

With “Call Me Maybe”, Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen reached the top of the Canadian TOP 100 in 2012. In the song, she intensely asks a man she has just met to call her. And once again “Call Me” in the song title, but this time “Call Me Baby”. The song brings K-pop into the article. The Korean-Chinese boy band Exo had sold over 1.2 million copies of the song in South Korea by September 2016. For once, we are not including the Korean and Chinese lyrics here (the song was released in both languages). It is also about begging the girlfriend to call quickly. Spagna also begs in “Call Me” for her boyfriend to finally call her. In the song, she fears that he will lose her phone number and that he should call now.

As there is hardly anything that the Muppets don't do in real life, the telephone – in this case a telephone box – also plays a role in one of their songs. Little Jerry and The Monotones have wedged themselves into a phone booth and sing their “Telephone Rock” into the operator's ear until they are picked up along with the telephone box. Placido Flamingo from the Muppets ensemble also sings about his old-fashioned telephone in “Telephone Opera” to the tune of “Funiculi Funicula”.

In Russian, “Call me” means “Позвони мне (Pozvoni mne)” and even more insistently “Позвони мне, позвони”. With these words, Zhanna Rozhdestvenskaya asks her father to call her as soon as possible in the 1981 film “Карнавал (Carnival)”. She has maneuvered herself into a personal emergency situation and urgently needs his help. In the opening scene of the video, you can see a row of telephone booths with the coin-operated telephones that were common in the Soviet Union at the time.

Alla Pugacheva complains in “Делу время... (Delu vremya... / It's time)” about “those up there”, the neighbors who get on her nerves. Finally she picks up the (very old) phone and calls upstairs. In 1985, when the song was written, many things were interpreted ambiguously and so “those up there” could also mean the government or the Communist Party.

With “Chantilly Lace”, you wouldn't immediately think that the telephone could play a role here, because Chantilly Lace is a special type of bobbin lace from France. But in the song we hear Big Bopper whispering to the person he is talking to on the phone about all the things he likes. Seven months after the song was released, on Feb. 3, 1959, Buddy Holly, Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens boarded a four-seater Beechcraft Bonanza in Clear Lake near Mason City, Iowa, which took off in a snowstorm and crashed just five miles later, presumably due to pilot error. No one survived the crash. Don McLean memorialized this crash in 1971 with the lyric “The Day The Music Died” in his song “American Pie”.

One of the best-known songs in which the telephone operator (Long distance information) is mentioned is “Memphis Tennessee” by Chuck Berry. In the first lines of the lyrics, you still believe that he wants to know his girlfriend's phone number. It is only in the last two lines that we learn that Marie is the narrator's six-year-old daughter, whose mother – presumably the ex-wife – “...tore apart our happy home.” We currently have 159 cover versions of this song in our database, but there are probably over 200.

“Kein Schwein ruft mich an” (No one calls me) – that's tragic, but this song was Max Raabe's big breakthrough in 1992. With his outfit and singing style adapted to the 1920s and 30s and with his Palast Orchester, he hit a nerve with the public and is still successful today. During “Teleromeo”, the three Belgian ladies from K3 pined for their telephone counterparts in Dutch and French to hear them after all. Despite the lively discofox rhythm, the song was a rather moderate success.

A song in which the phone and not love plays the main role is “Mein neues Handy” (My new cellphone) by the Cologne band Wise Guys. The lyrics describe with a lot of irony how much this device determines our lives. However, the band, which usually impresses with a-cappella singing, has released another song about cell phones. The lyrics of “Oh Handy” (sung to the melody of Barry Manilow's “Mandy”) describe the appearance of the first cell phone owners, for whom the device primarily served as proof of their importance. It's been a long, long time.

“Weird Al” Yankovic was so annoyed by the ringing of cell phones around him that he wrote a song about it – “Ringtone“. This was at a time when you could buy all kinds of unusual ringtones from Jamba and similar providers and drive those around you crazy with them. Four years earlier, Yankovic had already made fun of the fact that everyone had a cell phone at a concert. As far as we know, however, the song never made it onto a recording. Unfortunately, you won't find the lyrics online either, but fortunately they are short and easy to understand.

Most pop songs featuring a telephone date from the 1960s and 70s, when landline telephones were widespread but not yet commonplace. Bill Ramsey was happy to receive a call from Paris in 1960. Then there are the songs in which the telephone only appears in passing. In Al Bano & Romina Power's “Felicità”, an unexpected call (“È una telefonata non aspettata”) is described as luck. In “The Ballad Of Lucy Jordon”, the bored and dissatisfied suburban housewife lets the phone ring unheeded. In Mario Jordan's (Mario Lehner) “Welch ein Tag” (What a day), it is “A few digits scribbled on a piece of paper” that make him reach for the phone. In “Frag Maria” (Ask Maria) by Roy Black there is the lyric “Your heart is the best phone for Maria”. ABBA sing “One of us is lonely, one of us is only waiting for a call” in the chorus of “One Of Us”. We could continue this series with many more songs.

In conclusion, we can say that the telephone has played a significant role in music as a means of transporting emotions and will certainly continue to do so in the future.

To conclude our reflections on the telephone in pop music, however, we would like to remind you of a species that colonized urban living spaces in their thousands just a few decades ago – the telephone box. Together with its symbiotic life partner, the payphone, it offered itself to people as a means of communication. But with the massive invasion of the invasive cell phone, booths have become extinct. Only a few have survived as empty shells with the function of an exchange box for books or household goods.

We would like to end our blog article with this obituary, wish you lots of fun clicking on the many links and would of course be delighted to receive comments again.

/AME

Sound & record

In this blog article, we would like to give you a few facts and stories about the sound carrier that is present in large quantities in our database – the disk. We’re sure that some of you know a lot about it and you can also read about it in various Wiki articles, but we would like to present it here for you, bundled together and enriched with a few stories.

The Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was the first to succeed in recording sound. He applied for a patent for the principle of the phonograph in 1857. However, the implementation took some time, as he only succeeded in recording the French children's song “Au clair de la lune” on April 9, 1860. With the help of a large funnel and a membrane attached to a pig's bristle, he was able to transmit the vibrations of the sound to a roller blackened with soot.

Of course, he was unable to play back the recorded sounds, he could only see them. It was not until 2008 that it was possible to make the sounds recorded by Martinville audible. A phonograph autograph from 1860 had been found in the archives of the Académie des sciences, which could be reconstructed and made audible in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And so, 148 years after the recording, the voice of Scott de Martin singing “Au clair de la lune” could be heard.

It was not until 1877 that Thomas Alva Edison succeeded in reproducing sound recordings with his phonograph. Edinson was a brilliant inventor and businessman to whom the world of technology owes a great deal. However, he always resisted the term 'genius'; in his words, genius was 1% inspiration and 99% transpiration. The phongraph he designed and patented was built by his long-time partner John Kruesi. The tones were engraved in treble writing, corresponding to the vibration of the membrane at the end of the sound funnel, by a stylus in a cylinder covered with tin foil. Here too, the first recording was a children's song, “Mary Had A Little Lamb”. However, the sounds that could then be reproduced were imprecise and had a lot of background noise. Edison himself – otherwise a clever businessman – initially saw no great economic advantage in his invention and turned his attention to other areas. However, he later realized this mistake and dedicated himself to this field after all.

In France, Charles Cros (who was actually a poet and author) submitted a paper to the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1877 in which he vividly described Edison's principle of sound recording using a pen on a membrane, engraving it on a metal foil and then reproducing it – without knowing Edison's work. However, this idea was never realized; Cros called the device he conceived the 'Paléophone'. As with so many other inventions that were born in parallel in different parts of the world, the time was simply ripe – just think of the telephone, which also has several fathers.

As Edinson did not develop his invention any further for economic reasons, Chichester Alexander Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter took on the invention in the Volta laboratories and developed the phonograph cylinder with a wax coating. Although Edison refused to cooperate with the two inventors, he then began to improve his invention himself using this principle. However, he was primarily interested in reproducing the sound recordings. In the early days, several phonographs were set up next to each other and started simultaneously. The artists then had to play the piece many times in succession in order to produce a sufficient number of rolls for sale. A truly effective copying process for producing phonograph cylinders was not developed until 1902.

In the meantime, however, another player had emerged in the field of sound recording who was to revolutionize the entire system and is the actual inventor of the record. In 1887, Emil Berliner (a German born in Hanover who emigrated to the USA in 1870) applied for a patent for a disk-shaped sound carrier on which a spiral groove was carved from the outside to the inside, containing the sound vibrations in lateral writing. The great advantage of the record was that it could be produced industrially right from the start and did not have to be recorded individually. Initially, Berliner's records were made of hard rubber, later a mixture of cotton flakes, slate powder, carbon black and shellac was used – a very inexpensive raw material at the time.

In addition to easy reproducibility, the record also had the advantage over the Edison cylinder that it could be produced on two sides from 1904, i.e. it contained a piece of music on each side. From 1911, Edinson also presented records, the Edison-Diamond-Disc. Like his phonograph reels, the sound was recorded in deep writing, in contrast to Emil Berliner's records, which recorded the sound in side writing. Diamond discs could not be played on the gramophone, which was already in widespread use at the time, as this would have destroyed the records immediately.

The beginning of the 20th century was characterized by a multitude of competing systems in the field of sound recording, all of which were incompatible with each other. The French company Pathé also produced deep-writing records that were not compatible with either Berliner's or Edinson's records. By the mid-1920s, however, the record developed by Emil Berliner had established itself and all other systems gradually disappeared from the market. The last phonograph cylinders (Edinson Blue Amberol) went on sale in 1929.

The shellac record was available in a variety of sizes before the 10″ and 12″ disks, which were common until the 1960s, became established. In addition to the usual formats, you will also find 6″, 7″, 8″ and 9″ records in our database, even if there are not many of them. There has also been a lot of experimentation with speed. From 50 RPM to 100 RPM, there were all kinds of different speeds until the speed of 78 RPM finally became generally accepted.

During the Second World War, shellac became scarce and expensive, so in the 1940s a new material was developed for record production - polyvinyl chloride - commonly known as vinyl. It is astonishing that the first vinyl record from RCA Victor was launched in 1930 – it had a diameter of 30 cm (12″) and was played at 33 ¹⁄₃ RPM. Does that sound familiar? However, this development was not successful, it simply came too early and the lack of suitable playback equipment was the main reason for this. At the end of the 1930s, radio programs and commercials began to be recorded and sent to other broadcasters on vinyl, as these records were virtually unbreakable and could withstand the rustic transport of the time. The market for children was then also discovered and as shellac records were not really suitable for children due to their fragility, the first vinyl records were marketed here. They were not only available in the usual 10″ size, smaller formats were also produced. They were played at 78 RPM with the normal steel gramophone needles.

Vinyl records were first used on a larger scale by the US Army in 1942 as the so-called V-Disc (Victory Disc) to provide the GIs with entertainment and classical music. During the recording strike by US musicians (August 1942 to November 1944), V-Discs were the only recordings with instrumental musicians permitted in the USA. V-Discs usually had a diameter of 12″ and ran at 78 RPM, more rarely at 33 ¹⁄₃ RPM. But the classic steel needle was taboo for these vinyl records; they were played with the smaller microsapphire.

For the time being, vinyl records were not commercially successful, although the advantages of better sound quality, longer life and durability were well known. The main reason for this was probably the need for new players, which were still expensive and not widely available. This changed fundamentally in 1948 when Columbia Records launched the 12″ long-playing record (LP) with a playback speed of 33 ¹⁄₃ RPM. It was developed by Peter Carl Goldmark, a US engineer born in Budapest, who was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. This was not his only significant development. Goldmark became even more famous when he presented the first functioning color television system in 1940.

And in 1949, RCA Victor launched the medium that was to become the fire accelerator of rock 'n' roll a few years later. As a competitor to the Columbia LP, RCA Victor developed the 7″ (17.5 cm) single with a large center hole, which was played at 45 RPM. This format was chosen because almost all pieces of music could be divided into 5-minute takes. In order to keep up with the playback length of the Columbia LP, RCA-Victor offered automatic record changers for their format. Both formats were initially marketed as competitors, and the record players on offer initially only had one speed each and you had to choose between 33 ¹⁄₃ RPM or 45 RPM. There was already a “format war” of this kind with shellac records and also a few years later with audio cassettes and video cassette systems. It wasn't until the mid-1950s that record players were available that could play all three common speeds at the time (33 ¹⁄₃, 45 and 78 RPM).

The LP was preferred by the parents' generation, but the kids loved the 7″ vinyl! It only cost a few cents, was easy to transport to play at friends' houses and, above all, the battery-powered record players that came onto the market at the time were a hit with teenagers. You could use them outside where no father or mother would yell at you to turn the music down. Portable gramophones had been around for a long time, but they were big and bulky. And don't forget that a 10″ shellac record was quite heavy (150 to 200 grams) and if you took 20 - 30 records with you, you had to lug around a few kilos. The lightweight 7″ was a real advantage.

We'll go out on a limb and say that without the 7″ single, the rapid success of pop music and rock 'n' roll would never have happened. The jukebox, for which the 7″ single was now the ideal medium, promoted the development of pop music even further. Machines that played music by inserting a coin had been around for a long time, but the popularity of jukeboxes increased with the almost unbreakable vinyl single and its ease of use. Every self-respecting pub installed a Wurlitzer, Seeburg or Rock-Ola. The music industry quickly recognized this and produced lots of singles in addition to LPs, often as a pre-release of an LP or album.

New formats were also tried out, such as the 7″ EP in the early 1950s, which usually contained four, but sometimes six or eight songs on both sides. EPs initially ran at 45 RPM, but soon EPs were also produced that played at 33 ¹⁄₃, RPM. The resulting reduction in sound quality was accepted, as the pop music on them was not considered to be of any great artistic value anyway. And the singles became colorful! Not only the boring black was on the turntable, they were soon available in all colors, including crystal clear and transparent. All of these are often coveted collector's items today, but you shouldn't play them too often, they were noisier and wore themselves and the cartridge out.

At the end of the 1960s, the first picture discs came onto the market. Singles (later also LPs) that were not monochrome but showed a picture. Today, these are also coveted collector's items with similar weaknesses in sound quality. And another collector's item came onto the market: the shape disk. It was only round at the point required to play the music. Beyond that, any shape was possible that would fit on the turntable. You could use the band logo in cut-out form, a motif of the song or whatever the band or the marketing department could think of. It's impossible to say how many pickup needles this single shape killed, but the things were not harmless. You had to be damn careful where you lowered the tonearm, because the groove was often close to the angular or serrated edge. Shape discs were even continued today as shape CDs.

Flexi-Discs, records made from a flexible material or plastic-coated, thin cardboard, came onto the market as early as the 1950s. They were popular as sounding vacation greetings in postcard format or as inserts in fan magazines. In the Soviet Union, “Кругозор”, a youth magazine that contained up to ten of these flexible music foils, which could even be played on both sides, was published for several years. Of course, the sound quality of these flexis could not be compared with vinyl records, but they were a popular medium for a while.

A particularly delicate form of flexi-discs were the ‘ribs’ (рёбра), also known as ‘music on the ribs’ (Музыка на рёбрах) or ‘jazz on bones’ (Джаз на костях), which were illegally cut onto X-ray films in the Soviet Union. X-ray films could be fished out of hospital garbage or bought cheaply there. The films were cut to 7″ size, the center hole was simply burned in with a cigarette and the music was cut into the film at 78 RPM. The quality was of course atrocious, but this is how music that was banned in the Soviet Union was able to spread in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1989, the number of CDs produced in Germany (56.9 million units) exceeded the number of vinyl LPs produced (48.3 million units) for the first time. This had already happened in the USA the previous year. And now a line from Hildegard Knef could be quoted: “From now on, things went downhill”. The low point was in 2001, when 0.6 million LPs were produced in Germany compared to 133.7 million CDs. But as is often the case – the dead live longer! After only a few die-hard fans remained loyal to vinyl during the hunger years of the first decade of the 21st century, 4.3 million LPs were produced again in 2022 and vinyl also experienced a renaissance worldwide. Not only that, many artists even found it chic again to press their songs onto a 7″ single. New pressing plants were even built and more modern presses developed, meaning that more LPs than CDs were sold in the USA again for the first time in 2022. Well, but thanks to streaming services, CDs aren't doing so well these days either.

We could write much, much more about vinyl records: When the first stereo records were sold and which systems were used. Why the MiniDisc (MD) from Sony was not able to establish itself as the successor to the compact cassette and which other systems tried to compete with the CD in the 1990s. However, we would like to leave it at that for now – there are enough links in the text so that every curious user can read and browse the web for themselves.

In any case, there is something special about a vinyl record that a CD (and certainly not a streamed song) cannot compete with. You take it out of its decorative sleeve, place it carefully on the turntable, remove the dust with a soft brush, then gently place the tonearm in the starting groove, lean back and enjoy the music – a little ritual. And the cover sleeves of the LPs were very often real little works of art (sometimes scandalous ones, but that's another topic). If you are interested in the effort that went into the design and production of cover sleeves in the 1970s and 80s (and how much money the record companies were prepared to pay for them), we recommend the documentary “Squaring the circle”, the story of the “Hipgnosis” company.

Then have fun browsing the net on the subject of “vinyl records” and of course we look forward to your comments.

/AME

"Nomen est omen" or where do bands get their names from?

When you read the name of a band, you often wonder how the musicians came up with it. With "Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich" it's easy, the band members simply took their names or nicknames.

It is also easy for the Klaus Renft Combo. Klaus Jentzsch (his grandmother's name was Renft and he adopted this stage name) as the band's founder and leader chose it. The Puhdys also made it easy for themselves, using the first letters of their first names and first adding a 'y' ("Puhdy-Quartett") and then an 's'.

With the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the naming process is basically known, but how do you come up with the idea of calling yourself "Death Cab For Cutie" or "10cc" or „Acht Eimer Hühnerherzen" (Eight Buckets of Chicken Hearts)?

Let's start with the simple things. John Lennon named his first band The Quarrymen after the school he and other band members attended. As Lennon greatly admired Buddy Holly, it became the "Beatals" after a suggestion by Stuart Sutcliffe and later "The Silver Beetles" as a tribute to his band "The Crickets" – according to the relevant sources. But what "The Crickets" has to do with beetles is not really clear, except that both are insects. The name The Beatles probably originated in Germany when the band (then still with Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best) performed in the Hamburg strip club "Indra". The story that – after Astrid Kirchherr had given the band members the mushroom head hairstyle (invented by photographer Jürgen Vollmer) – Paul McCartney said: "Hey, we look like beetles!" and the band name was derived from this must be relegated to the realm of legend.

For the Rolling Stones, the story goes that Brian Jones called a newspaper editorial office to place an advertisement for a concert by the band. When he was asked what the band would be called, he replied: "Rollin' Stone". He allegedly had this record lying on the floor in front of him. The story is not really verified, but Muddy Waters played an important role in the band name, whether with the lyric line "I'm a rollin' stone" or with the song title "Rollin' Stone". After all, one of his records brought Jagger and Richards together at Dartford station.

The Who were initially called "The Detours", later "The High Numbers". Their new manager Peter Meaden advised the band, who were known for dismantling their instruments while performing, to choose a different name that would be shorter and more rebellious. In Pete Townshend's opinion, "The Who" would be aggressive and energetic enough – whatever led him to this view.

There are several legends about the choice of name for The Animals. One is that the band members discussed it in a pub in Newcastle upon Tyne and were inspired to choose the name by a poster about an upcoming "Animalism" event. On the other hand, the band would have heard the phrase "They look like animals!" several times from visitors at their gigs as the "Alan Price Combo". In his biography, however, Eric Burdon mentions "Animal" Hogg, the member of "The Squatters", a local band, as the origin of the name.

Ronnie Van Zant and his friends from high school in Jacksonville (Florida) had formed a band called "The Noble Five". Their school's sports teacher, Leonard Skinner, had often warned and reprimanded the five for violating the dress code (which also regulated hair length). When the boys gave up school, they changed the band name to "Leonard Skinner". However, as they were afraid of getting into trouble for this, they exchanged all the vowels for 'y'. And so Lynyrd Skynyrd was born. Skinner died in 2010 and maybe he was the most influential sports teacher in pop culture. Would he have taken that as praise?

Death Cab for Cutie – how do you come up with such a weird name? Ben Gibbard from Bellingham, Washington, had a pretty decent success with his solo project "All-Time Quarterback" in 1997 and then decided to turn it into a band. He quickly found the name – the "Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band" (a group of British art school students who became famous for their appearances in the Beatles film "Magical Mystery Tour") had a song with this title on their 1967 album "Gorilla". And as Gibbard thought it suited the sometimes somewhat dark and mysterious style of his music, it became the name of the band. It did them no harm, they are still successful and were even nominated several times for a Grammy in 2006.

Band names also change, and sometimes not voluntarily. The GDR band Klosterbrüder (Monastery Brothers) also had to make this experience. It is not really clear why they called themselves that. Since their hometown of Magdeburg had its origins in the Mauritius monastery founded in 937, it stands to reason that the band found this fitting and thus chose their name. The history of the "Klosterbrüder", who were considered the hardest rock band in the GDR (famous for their live performances), is somewhat obscure and it is not really clear whether they were founded in 1963 or 1967. However, the fact that they became famous and even appeared on GDR television also had disadvantages. Because of their informal live performances and their "church-related" band name, they were repeatedly targeted by the GDR cultural authorities, which also led to tensions within the band. At the end of 1975, they gave in to state pressure and changed their name to Magdeburg (with a few new members). The band made a comeback under this name in 1992. Since January 14, 2000, however, they have been called "Klosterbrüder" again.

The New York band Steely Dan claimed for a long time that the name of their band came from an old porn movie in which a steel dildo played a major role. However, the name comes from the novel "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs, which was published in 1959. In it, there is a character called Steely Dan III who has a steel dildo (or penis?). Walter Becker and Donald Fagen found this interesting and named their band after it.

Let's go into the somewhat lesser-known realms of music. Country singer Bill Anderson (James William Anderson III – The Wispering Bill) had a backing band in the 1950s and 60s called the Po' Boys. A radio presenter (unfortunately it is not known who it was) introduced the boys, who were actually only generally referred to as Bill Anderson's band, as "The Po' Boys" during a radio program in 1959. Anderson and the band liked the name so much that they kept it and later changed it to "The Po' Folks". By the way – a po' boy in Louisiana is a sandwich filled with meat and fried seafood.

Speaking of the letter P – the Pet Shop Boys called themselves that because Chris Lowe actually found pet shops interesting and thought that nobody would actually think of naming a pop band after that. Neil Tennant then suggested putting "Boys" after Pet Shop to create a link to other bands that also had "Boys" in their name. The story that they took the name from friends who worked in a pet shop and called themselves that is probably a legend.

The story behind the naming of 10cc is not entirely innocent. The band's manager had read that the largest amount of sperm ever measured in a human ejaculation was 9 cubic centimetres. And that he had had a dream in which he was standing in front of the Hammersmith Odeon in London and a plaque there read: "10cc The Best Band in the World". Graham Gouldman thought that this was appropriate for their potency and so it became the band name.

Allegedly, the Berlin band Die höchste Eisenbahn (The highest railroad) got their name from a record featuring Hans Albers. They discovered this song in the record store "Bis aufs Messer" in Berlin's Marchlewski Street. We would like to believe that if we had ever found a record by the great blond Hans with this title online. It seems to be like all good stories – if it's not true, it's a good invention.

Fury in the Slaughterhouse have better proof of the origin of their name. It comes from a song by "Madness". On their album "The Rise & Fall" from 1982 is the song "Rain" with the lyric "Fury in the slaughterhouse and the rain". Kai and Thorsten Wingenfelder, and their musical comrades-in-arms, found the name interesting and suitable for the style of their band and that's how it stayed.

The band Counting Crows got their name from the British nursery rhyme "One for Sorrow" in which the superstitious counting of magpies – which belong to the crow family – from one to ten is practiced, each with a different meaning. Adam Duritz, the band's singer, was friends with Marie-Luise Parker, who made her screen debut in the 1989 film "Signs of Life". In the movie (which also became known as "One for Sorrow, Two for Joy"), this nursery rhyme appears. Duritz was fascinated not only by his girlfriend, but also by this nursery rhyme, and decided to name the band after the crows to be counted. The entire verse was also incorporated into the song "A Murder of One" on their debut album "August and Everything After".

Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell were looking for a name for their band and read in a newspaper article about the slow movement of people who were in an LSD trip. The article used the term "slow dive" to describe this slow, conscious awareness. Halstead and Goswell found that this term fit perfectly with their music, which is often characterized by dreamy, slow and atmospheric sounds. And so, from then on, there was the band Slow Dive in the shoegaze genre.

Finally, we want to explain the history of Acht Eimer Hühnerherzen. This is a Berlin punk band that has made a name for itself in the scene with its energetic live performances and idiosyncratic, humorous lyrics. Their name comes from a poem by Erich Mühsam, a writer and poet of the Weimar Republic who was killed by the Nazis in the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934. The poem is called "Bubenmädchenlied" and contains the line "Eight buckets of chicken hearts, if only you could find them." The band rightly felt that this was the right band name for them.

We'll leave it at that for now, maybe we'll continue the article later. We have researched to the best of our knowledge and belief how the band names came about, but as there is a lot written on the net when the day is long, it is quite possible that we have been taken in by one or two legends. Maybe you can send us your stories about strange or unusual band names and how they came about and we'll make a new blog article out of it.

/AME