Mel Gibson and the Pants

The seed of what follows was planted yesterday, when I blogged, in passing, about the band Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. Pretty cool name for a band, huh? And there’s more where that came from in today’s concert listings: Mel Gibson and the Pants. The latter of these plays the Nomad this eve. But what I’m more interested in, at this moment, is plumbing the depths of my (our?) fascination with band names that reference famous peeps? Reiner Maria is a favorite example, of course, if only because the band refers back to a poet I obsessed over in my younger years. And I bet more than one of us is thinking of the Dead Kennedys. Then there’s this other thing: On the way into work yesterday my mind wandered, for whatever reason, to an old bluesy local band called Wallace Hartley (named after the dude who rocked the Titanic). A stranger example: my buddy Matt Foust (better known as one-quarter of the Love-Cars) was once in a Beloit College band called Willis Smoked a Guy–an obvious reference to Diff’rent Strokes star-gone-wrong Todd Bridges. What to make of this? In cases such as Reiner Maria, the band name means reverence. In others–Mel Gibson and the Pants–it’s something of a gag. But, can an unknown band ride the wave of someone else’s name recognition? And what of the bands who took their names from famous somebodies who later faded from the consciousness or went out of fashion? Smart or dumb move? Hmmmmm.