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What’s in a name?
If “Starsky and Hutch” had been called “Dave and Kenny” I doubt the pilot would have been green-lighted. It took a while, but “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda” was wisely renamed “7-Up”. If George Lucas had stuck with “Luke Starkiller” for the name of his young protagonist the whole Star Wars franchise would feel notably different.
When I started seriously playing music I thought stage names were stupid. I saw little or no value in any non-musical creative advances an artist might make. Gimmicks like makeup, torn clothes and silly names were antithetical to everything I cared about and curiously it was a Miles Davis recording from the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival that changed my mind. On it, the announcer introduces the astounding musicians on stage starting with drummer Jimmy Cobb, bass player Paul Chambers, and piano legend Bill Evans. Each name receives only the meekest smattering of applause from the festival crowd. Heck, when the announcer introduces Bill Evans he gets no reaction at all until he starts the clapping himself.
Then the announcer gets to the sax players, first introducing the great, legendary, almost-Biblical John Coltrane – who garners a tidy little clap-clap-clap and nothing more – followed by “…Julius “Cannonball” Adderley…” who gets a rousing ovation that eclipses that of all the others. Amazingly, bandleader Miles Davis’s name barely gets as much response. Now don’t get me wrong, Adderley is a highly respected musician who would be in the annals of jazz even if he was named Dave Kenny, but I soon realized that it was his name recognition that was exciting the audience so much. And when an audience is excited about someone they instinctially want them to do well and will ply them with attention, which in turn will encourage that musician and will egg them on to higher plateaus. Which makes the music better. My stage name is “Velvet”.
Hopefully, this sort of brings me to June 22nd, 2015 at the Ottawa jazz festival* when I saw War opening up for Tower of Power.
Aside from a thousand historical reasons to recoil from their name, It still jars me to associate the band War with their music. While the name is so bland, flat, dark, and violent, War’s songs are all pretty uplifting. They are certainly bouncy. Take Low Rider and Why Can’t We Be Friends? for a couple of examples. Can you word-associate either of those tunes with anything war-like? I mean, war is such a downer, but War is a super-fun band to see. Almost surprisingly so, which might be the only up-side to their name: They just don’t sound like they will be any good and when they are they seem better.
They were really good though. They always are.
(You’d almost think a metal band would be called War but as ugly as it is it’s still boring all by itself. A metal band would spice it up; Bloodwar or War War War or something like that. But really, “War” is just an all-around bad name for a band. Good name for a conflict though, I’ll give it that.)
Next up on the main stage was ’70’s soul horn funksters Tower of Power, a band I first heard of when Huey Lewis introduced them to back up his song Hip to be Square at the Moncton Coliseum back in the mid-’80’s. I had only seen about a dozen concerts up to that point and I think it was my first time experiencing a “sit-in” or even a horn section but what really got me out of my seat was the name. What oomph! I mean, the Tower of Power! How could I not be enthralled?
(I just looked it up and when they first got together in the late ’60’s Tower of Power called themselves The Motowns. Not only was it pandering, but good luck getting signed to [almost] any label on planet Earth. Whoever came up with “Tower of Power” deserves most of the money they’ve made over the years.)
Tower of Power has played and recorded with a vast array of worldwide musical superstars. Elton John, Otis Redding, Grateful Dead, Rod Stewart, Santana, Eric Clapton, Stevie Nicks, and yes, they even appeared on a couple of songs on Phish’s fifth album, Hoist. It’s a good thing too because when I think of the band I can only think of them making someone else sound awesome, which they obviously excel at. But their own show? Not so memorable. I’m sure they were great but this was the only time I saw them on their own and I remember nothing. I had to google them just to see if they had a singer. They do; it’s a guy named Mike.
But man, what a name! (“Tower of Power”, not “Mike”) No wonder they were headlining over such a fantastic opening act.
I’ll never understand the music business.
*Speaking of names, you may have noticed that I don’t capitalize the “J” or “F” in “Ottawa jazz festival”, and not only that, I sometimes refer to it as the “Ottawa jazzfest” or “Ottawa’s jazz festival” or some other generic term. What’s in a name? While I try to be meticulous about proper titling in these posts the anti-corporatist in me just couldn’t bear to type “TD Ottawa Jazz Festival” every time. Same goes for the room where the Ottawa Senators play. When it was first built they called it “The Palladium” (which I still prefer) before morphing through nearly a half-dozen corporate re-namings. Is it really up to me to keep up with the latest corporate sponsorship deal of an arena built in a cow pasture in Kanata?
(And still speaking of names, as a Second-Nation Canadian I’ve always found “Kanata” a weird word to look at.)
Todd Man Out 