How did The B-52s get their name?
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet,” says Juliet to a lovesick Romeo as the two battle against a world that won’t let them be together because of their surnames. Now, you might think choosing a band name doesn’t carry quite the same weight as all that life-or-death drama – and you’d be right. It’s far more important.
There are countless ways to approach the tough decision. Take pop-punk band Neck Deep, who lifted the phrase out of another line in a pop-punk song, ‘Boom, Roasted’ by Crucial Dudes. Or Paramore, who lifted the name from the maiden name of the mother of one of their early bass players. Or Fall Out Boy, even, who got their idea from a Simpsons character, Fallout Boy, Radioactive Man’s sidekick. It was actually yelled at the band from the crowd during an early show in Chicago, but perfectly fit their tongue-in-cheek style, so they ran with it.
Get it wrong, and you’ll forever spend the rest of your career trying to remind fans that, no, come on now, you’ve moved past all that. Take the band Soft Play, who chose to move away from their previous name Slaves due to comments that it was culturally insensitive; it even took me a few years to realise they were the same group. Because of this change, I underestimated them, even though they’d already proved to most of the industry that they could slam-dunk a hardcore tune should they wish to. The weight behind the right nomenclature couldn’t be greater.
So what’s the story for The B-52s? Well, first and foremost, they hop and skipped around a few different names. For a short while, they tried out the Tina-Trons, as well as Fellini’s Children.
They formed in 1976, when Cindy Wilson, Ricky Wilson (her elder brother), Pierson, Strickland, and Schneider held an impromptu jam session after sharing an aptly-named flaming volcano drink at a Chinese restaurant in Athens, Georgia.
So, how did they decide on The B-52s?
It quickly became apparent that the group wouldn’t get far without a name. Speaking on The Howard Stern Show, Schneider reminisced: “We just started jamming, and friends of mine were having a Valentine’s Day party. I said, ‘I’m in a band, you know, do you want us to play for you?’ and they said, ‘Sure.’ So I went back to the others and said ‘Do y’all want to do a show?’ and they said, ‘Sure!’, and then we realised we didn’t have a name… So Keith came up with The B-52s.”
This wasn’t some allusion to a specific code for a KIKO lipstick line, though my guess was relatively close to the source material. Instead, Schneider revealed, it was a reference to the hairdo, which “looked like nose cones and jets and stuff.”
Though he didn’t reference it in the interview, other sources reveal that Schneider suggested the name after he heard it whispered in a dream, whereby he was watching a lounge band, with that very namesake, play an impressive set.
The high, bump-shaped, bouffant hairstyle would come to define that era. It was developed in 1960 by hair stylist Margaret Vinci Heldt and peaked in popularity throughout the 1960s. In this way, the adoption of the term meant the band were both forward and backwards-looking, sitting on the bridge between futurism and nostalgia, lifting from the water of the Lynchian chambers of a dream.
The particulars of their name were also written down to the level of punctuation. Originally, the name was presented with an errant apostrophe, as in ‘The B-52’s’, up until 2008, due to a friend’s blunder. A friend of the band included it in an early logo and, not wanting to deal with all of the hassle of changing a decision that was set in stone, the band ran with the mistake until their 2008 album, Funplex, when they were presented with another opportunity to remove it. Funny the way things happen.
