Moby Grape

Columbia Records promotional photo, 1967.
L-R: Skip Spence, Jerry Miller, Bob Mosley, Peter Lewis, Don Stevenson

Moby Grape is an American rock band founded in 1966 as part of San Francisco's psychedelic music scene. The band actually had elements of rock, folk music, pop, blues, and country music.

Their name came from a joke that played off Herman Melville's Moby Dick: What's big and purple and lives in the sea? Moby Grape. member Don Stevenson says that it was a time of rather silly, nonsensical band names like Strawberry Alarm Clock, Electric Prunes, and 13th Floor Elevator.

They were one of the few groups in which all members were lead vocalists and songwriters. Before they had recorded, they had played many club gigs with all original songs. 

A trivia bit about the 1967 debut album is that the band photo has Don Stevenson making a middle finger gesture over a washboard. It is airbrushed off later cover and poster photos making the original album quite collectible.

There are several collections of their "best of" songs and reissues of their original albums.

In 2018 a detailed biography - What's Big And Purple And Lives In The Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story by Cam Cobb was published.

In the podcast below, host Mike Stax talks to drummer/songwriter Don Stevenson and Moby Grape biographer Cam Cobb about the band’s formation, name and the making of their 967 debut album.

Motley Crue

Mötley Crüe playing at a Sweden rock festival in 2012.

MÖTLEY CRÜE seems like a good band name for an origin story. You may have heard the expression a "motley-looking crew" not referring to the band. In fact, there were motley crews on board ships a long time before there was a band with that name. 

Mötley Crüe is an American heavy metal band formed in Los Angeles in 1981 by bassist Nikki Sixx, drummer Tommy Lee, lead guitarist Mick Mars and lead singer Vince Neil. 

Mötley Crüe has sold over 100 million albums worldwide with seven platinum or multi-platinum certifications, nine Top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 chart, 22 Top 40 mainstream rock hits, and six Top 20 pop singles. 1989's Dr. Feelgood is Mötley Crüe's only album to reach number one.

The band experienced several short-term lineup changes in the 1990s and 2000s, including Lee's departure in 1999 and return in 2004. Their current lineup has been the same as the original since then.

 

The band members maintained and advertised hedonistic lifestyles and androgynous personae. Considered to be hard rock and heavy metal on their first two albums, Too Fast for Love (1981) and Shout at the Devil (1983), with their third album, Theatre of Pain (1985), they were part of the early glam metal category.

"Motley" means "of great variety." It was once used to describe the appearance of a court jester for the many-colored outfits. A "motley crew" of sailors would be one with great diversity in ages, experiences, races or nationalities.

Guitarist Mick Mars suggested the name based on some referring to a previous band he had played with called White Horse as being "a motley looking crew." He wrote it as "Mottley Cru" but the band changed it to cure avoiding the standard spelling. Neil suggested adding two umlauts (those pronunciation dots over the letters) just to be different and wanted them to be shown in metal to suggest the metal nature of their music. He was inspired by the use of the umlauts on the label and caps of the German beer Löwenbräu which they were drinking at the time.    

Studio Albums

1. Too Fast for Love (1981)
2. Shout at the Devil (1983)
3. Theatre of Pain (1985)
4. Girls, Girls, Girls (1987)
5. Dr. Feelgood (1989)
6. Mötley Crüe (1994)
7. Generation Swine (1997)
8. New Tattoo (2000)
9. Saints of Los Angeles (2008)

Official website www.motley.com

MGMT

"Me & Michael" from MGMT's 2018 album Little Dark Age

MGMT is an American rock band formed in 2002. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden formed the band while attending Wesleyan University during their freshman year.

They experimented with noise rock and electronica before settling on what has been called shape-shifting psychedelic pop.

The band formed under the name The Management, and two demo albums -We (Don't) Care and Climbing to New Lows - were unofficially released under the name, but since the name was already being used by another band, they later changed it to the abbreviated version MGMT.

         

Mott the Hoople

                     

Mott the Hoople were an English rock band with strong R&B roots, popular in the glam rock era of the early to mid-1970s. They are best known for the song "All the Young Dudes", written for them by David Bowie.

Gut Stevens of Island Records decided to sign the band, Silence, an early incarnation of Mott (minus lead singer Ian Hunter). While in prison on a drug offense, Stevens had read the novel Mott the Hoople about an eccentric who works in a circus freak show and decided to use it as a band name. Silence reluctantly agreed to the odd name change following their early 1969 audition for Stevens.

Mott the Hoople is a 1966 novel by Willard Manus. According to Wikipedia, the plot involves Norman Mott a misfit, lazy rebel without a cause who dislikes work. Mott believes life is a "bad comic opera." In order to avoid real work, he engages in various scams and gambles.

According to a review of the novel, "Hooples, to clear this up right at the beginning, 'make the whole game possible, Christmas Clubs especially, politics, advertising agencies, pay toilets, even popes and mystery novels.' Obviously, they're squares and Mott, Norman Mott, is certainly not..."

On the Ian Hunter/ Mott website, the book is "very much a book of the '60s, and so in some regards has dated somewhat. In the context of this website, it is an interesting read, since it was this book that inspired the name to Guy Stevens. In a wider context, I'm not so sure, and if I hadn't been a fan of the band I probably wouldn't have bothered. But if you grew up in 60's America it might be enough to bring back a few memories..."

Muse

Muse is an English rock band from Teignmouth, Devon, formed in 1994. They are known for their energetic and extravagant live performances. They blend many music genres, including space rock, progressive rock, alternative rock, symphonic rock and electronica.

The band consists of Matthew Bellamy (lead vocals, lead guitar, piano, keyboards, keytar), Christopher Wolstenholme (bass, vocals, keyboards, Misa Kitara, harmonica) and Dominic Howard (drums, percussion, synthesisers) and since 2006, keyboardist and percussionist Morgan Nicholls has performed live with the band.

Bellamy and Howard's first band name was Gothic Plague, later changed to Fixed Penalty and then to Rocket Baby Dolls. They decided to quit university and their jobs and go full time with music.



The name "Muse" was chosen for the new musical effort. According to the Muse Wiki, the band liked that it was short and thought that it looked good on a poster.

In classical mythology, the muses were goddesses with the power to inspire poets, artists.

Most Greek and Roman epics begin with an "invocation to the muse."   "Sing oh muse of the rage of Achilles..." is the opening of Homer's Iliad. "Muse" comes from the Greek mousa, the word entered Middle English in the 1300s. In modern usage, "to muse" on a subject is "to meditate" or think on it deeply.

Muse have released six studio albums and four live albums.

My Morning Jacket

My Morning Jacket is an American rock band formed in 1998 in Louisville, Kentucky. They are known for their psychedelic hippie rock. The band is comprised of Jim James (singer-songwriter, guitarist), Tom 'Two-Tone Tommy' Blankenship (bassist), Patrick Hallahan (drummer), Carl Broemel (guitarist, pedal steel guitarist, saxophonist, vocalist), and Bo Koster (keyboardist, percussionist, vocalist).

They are a great example of a band that doesn't really want to explain their band name origin. I might even guess that the name My Morning Jacket has no real origin, hence the mystery.

Circuital

One explanation found in several places is that Jim James was visiting his old student-hangout bar (Boot's Bar in Lexington) which had been razed by a fire. Amongst the charred remains, he came upon a jacket (or robe, I've seen both described) which had stitched "MMJ", which he took to mean "My Morning Jacket."

I also found the explanation that it is slang for when a man wakes up in the morning with an erection, but an erection with a condom on it.

One online post collects a number of origins:

Interviewer: Where did the name My Morning Jacket come from?
Jim James: I have no idea

"There are just some things that are meant for us and there are other things that are meant to be shared with the public. Our name and the name of the studio is for us; the music is for the public." - Jim James, Neumu interview, September 2003

Perhaps more believable in its simplicity is when Jim James told Magnet Magazine that the name is just something he remembers scrawling down in a middle-school notebook. Or when he said "I was just lying on my bed, writing songs in a notebook, and I put 'my morning jacket' at the top of the page, it doesn't mean anything. A lot of things happen for me that way - things pop into my head when I'm riding down the highway or at inopportune moments, like when I'm falling off to sleep." (The Age interview, March 2004)

Studio albums
Tennessee Fire (1999)
At Dawn (2001)
It Still Moves [Vinyl] (2003)
Z (2005)
Evil Urges (2008)
Circuital (2011)

Marcy Playground

 

I received two emails the past month about Marcy Playground, so here is some origin talk on them.

They are an American alternative rock band that emerged in the 1990s. It has three members: John Wozniak (lead vocals, guitar), Dylan Keefe (bass), and Shlomi Lavie (drums). The band is probably best known for their 1997 hit "Sex and Candy".

On their own website, they have said that the band is named after the Marcy Open grade school in Minneapolis. That is an alternative school that John Wozniak attended, and he chose the name because many of his songs were inspired by his childhood.

Some of their recordings include:
Mp3
Indaba Remixes From Wonderland
Marcy Playground
Saint Joe On The School Bus
Shapeshifter
Sex & Candy (Phantom)
Download songs by Marcy Playground

The Mothers of Invention

    

The Mothers of Invention was a highly experimental American band active from 1964 to 1975.

Most of their music was composed by the founder and guitarist Frank Zappa (1940–1993. The band's first album, in 1966, was a double LP named Freak Out!.

The group started as "The Soul Giants" and consisted of drummer Jimmy Carl Black, bass player Roy Estrada, saxophonist Davy Coronado, guitarist Ray Hunt, and vocalist Ray Collins.

They changed their name to "The Mothers" on Mothers' Day in 1964, but the legend has always been that it was short for the obscenity "motherf***ers".

Record producer Tom Wilson offered them a contract and at the insistence of their record company, MGM Records, the group changed their name again, this time to "The Mothers of Invention" to avoid any claims of obscenity. Adding "of Invention" made a kind of sense since "Necessity is the mother of invention."

That now idiomatic expression is rather esoteric being based on the line "Necessity, who is the mother of invention" from The Republic written by Plato, the Greek author and philosopher, 427-347BC.

Their debut was released in 1966, and The Mothers of Invention subsequently went on tour. In 1969, Zappa disbanded the original group and the following year he created a new group under the same name. That year, Zappa did an ambitious concept film and album project called 200 Motels. That group disbanded in late 1971 after Zappa was attacked onstage during a London concert.

During the 70s, Zappa released albums both as "Zappa/Mothers" and as "Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention" but he permanently dropped the "Mothers of Invention" name in 1976.



Freak Out!
We're Only in It for the Money
Absolutely Free
Uncle Meat
Weasels Ripped My Flesh
Burnt Weeny Sandwich
Just Another Band from L.A.