WHAT IS A LED ZEPPELIN?

What are the Dead Grateful about? 10 unusual band names explained

Image: Graydon Driver

Due to constant repetition, the names of successful bands become household names. But, when we stop to think about them, some of those names are downright strange or, at the very least, curious. What is an Aerosmith? Or a Supertramp? Find the answers to these and a few other existential questions by scrolling through the following stories.

Image: JC Gellidon

In case anyone wondered, The Ramones were not a band of brothers named Ramone. The name of the band was first suggested by Dee Dee, after learning that Paul McCartney would check into hotels under the fake name 'Paul Ramon'. He convinced the other members to adopt the last name, and The Ramones came to be.

Image: Desi Mendoza

There are two versions of the origin of Alice Cooper’s name. In the early days, the story was that Alice Cooper was a spirit the band contacted via an Ouija board.

But in later years, the frontman himself has said that they came up with a name that could be someone’s grandmother – which made it a perfectly unorthodox match for a bunch of cross-dressing shock rockers.

Image: The National Library of Norway

If the rumors are correct, Jimmy Page (guitarist and frontman for what would become Led Zeppelin), Jeff Beck (guitarist for The Yardbirds, a band Page had been part of), Keith Moon (drummer for The Who), and John Entwistle (bass player for The Who) came up with the idea of forming a supergroup, but Moon suggested this would "go over like a lead balloon".

Sometime later, Page remembered this expression and, after swapping "balloon" for "zeppelin", decided to drop the "a" in "lead" to make it clear how the word should be pronounced: Led Zeppelin.

Image: Adrian Ordonez

Billy Gibbons, the guitar player for ZZ Top came up with the band’s name thanks to his obsession with blues music. He thought of combining the names of two bluesmen: Z.Z. Hill and B.B. King. But when ZZ King didn’t sound all that great, Gibbons made the slight shift to ZZ Top.

Image: Brands&People

There are many bands whose names are literary references to authors and their works. Uriah Heep got their name from a character in Charles Dickens’ 'David Copperfield.' Uriah Heep was a man untrustworthy and unlikable in the extreme.

As guitarist Mick Box said "We were formed on the 100th anniversary of Charles Dickens. There was publicity all over London to celebrate his birthday."

Image: Cody Board

Being the American answer to The Beatles, the Monkees needed a moniker similar to that of the Fab Four. Accordingly, they mispronounced the name of a creature from the natural world just as the Beatles had done in the first place.

Image: Tim Toomey

Another legendary group that got its name from a book is Supertramp. The British art-rockers got their name from W. H. Davies’ 1908 memoir 'The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp,' in which the Welsh writer details his wandering early days.

Image: Sisi

The fact that the Grateful Dead came up with their band name while under the influence surprises no one. Perusing a folklore dictionary, Jerry Garcia discovered the term, which related to the soul of an unburied dead person expressing karmic gratitude to someone who arranged for their eventual burial.

Image: Wayne Hollman

Not many bands are named after the drummer and the bass player. But Fleetwood Mac is. The outfit was christened after the names of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. This was a ploy devised by guitarist Peter Green to keep them in the band. And it worked; 5 decades and countless lineups later, the pair is the only remaining members from the ‘60s.

Image: Daniel Ebersole

The curious name of this legendary hard rock outfit originated, according to drummer Joey Kramer, while he and his girlfriend were listening to Harry Nilsson’s "Aerial Ballet" and the couple began toying with cool band names that had the word "aero" in them.

He liked how "Aerosmith" sounded, but the band he was in at the time didn’t. So it was shelved until Kramer joined Joe Perry and Steven Tyler’s group. The convincing was done and the rest is history.

Naming oddities

10 oddly named US towns and cities and their surprising stories

America is home to over 19,000 incorporated cities and towns. While many have familiar names, others sound so unusual that they often force credibility. However, behind these atypical names, there are stories rooted in America's past, from the Gold Rush and the westward expansion to local legends that have endured for generations. Let's walk through some of the most peculiar city names out there and discover their surprising origins.

Founded in 1879 by prospector Ed Schieffelin, Tombstone owes its notoriously bleak name to a sarcastic remark. While searching for silver in southeastern Arizona, Schieffelin was warned by soldiers that the only thing he would find in Apache territory was his own tombstone.

Instead, Schieffelin struck one of the richest silver deposits in the American West. He named his mining claim Tombstone, and the booming town that sprang up around it quickly became one of the frontier's most prosperous communities, best remembered today by Old West figures like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.

Originally known as Hot Springs, this community was founded in the late nineteenth century around a series of natural mineral springs that attracted visitors. By the middle of the twentieth century, it had become a well-known spa destination in the Southwest.

Everything changed in 1950, when radio personality Ralph Edwards announced that he would broadcast the anniversary episode of his wildly popular show Truth or Consequences from any town willing to adopt the show's name. In one of the most successful publicity campaigns in American history, the residents of Hot Springs voted in favor of the change, and the town still bears its unusual name more than 70 years later.

In 1944, minister and radio evangelist Curtis Howe Springer established a health resort in the Mojave Desert and deliberately named it Zzyzx. Springer claimed that he chose that specific name with the intention of making it the last word of the English dictionary.

Although the resort eventually closed and the federal government reclaimed the land, the name survived: today, Zzyzx is home to a desert studies center operated by California State University, and remains one of the most unusual names in America.

Founded during the colonial era, Accident traces its origins to a remarkable surveying mistake during the 1750s. Two surveyors, working independently, selected exactly the same 315-acre parcel while mapping western Maryland.

The overlapping claim became known as "The Accident", and when settlers established a community there, the name stuck. More than two centuries later, the town continues to embrace the name and its fortuitous history.

The community of Chicken was established during Alaska's gold rush around 1902. Prospectors frequently hunted the local ptarmigan for food and originally wanted to name the settlement after the bird.

The problem was that few of the miners could agree on how to spell ptarmigan. Rather than risk embarrassment, and because the two species share some similarities, they chose the much simpler name Chicken.

Founded in 1868, as the railroad expanded across western Missouri, the community encountered an unexpected problem when applying for a post office: Every proposed town name had already been claimed elsewhere in the state.

The story goes that the local postmaster, in frustration, wrote to Washington stating that he didn't care what the town was called as long as it was something "peculiar." More than 150 years later, Peculiar still bears the name with pride.

"Why" is a community located in the Sonoran Desert, whose unusual name is the product of an unexpected legal technicality. The settlement developed during the early twentieth century at the point where the State Routes 85 and 86 intersected in the shape of the letter "Y."

The community originally wanted to call itself "Y" in honor of that intersection, but because Arizona law required community names to contain at least three letters, they spelled it out. As a result, even after the intersection has since been redesigned, the town of Why still keeps one of the most curious and memorable names in America.

While the name "Boring" may sound unflattering, its story is a pretty common one. The town is named after William Harrison Boring, a Union Army veteran who moved into the area in the 1870s and became one of its earliest settlers.

Over time, the accidental double meaning of Boring turned it into a tourist curiosity. The community, rather than shy away from the jokes, embraced them, even forming a lighthearted partnership with the village of Dull, Scotland, to celebrate their similarly harsh names.

Hell began as a small milling community in southern Michigan during the 1830s, when pioneer George Reeves established it along nearby waterways. The exact origin of its name is shrouded in legend and local folklore.

One of the most popular stories claims that, when Reeves was asked what the settlement should be called, he jokingly replied: "Call it Hell for all I care." On the other hand, some historians believe that the name evolved from early German settlers using the word hell, meaning "bright".

While the true origin of the name may never be known, the town of Hell fully embraced its reputation, welcoming thousands of visitors each year with thematic attractions and souvenirs.

Unlike many Western towns that grew naturally around mines or railroads, Jackpot was created almost overnight in 1954 as a direct result of Idaho banning casino gambling. Entrepreneurs realized they could attract Idaho residents simply by building casinos just across the Nevada border.

The new community was aptly named Jackpot, and it quickly became a thriving destination. Few towns have a name that so perfectly matches the reason they came into existence.