Your Rock n' Roll Lifestyle



Naming my rock band is a central preoccupation of my life. It doesn't matter that my musical talents were pretty much limited to playing the bassoon in high school and college band.

I tried to do more. I took guitar for about three months when I was thirteen, but then my teacher stopped teaching for personal reasons, and I never really came back to it. I can strum out a few chords, but that's about it.

But that doesn't stop me from naming my band and, sometimes, its albums. For years, my imaginary band has been called Seven Goats Named Otis. This comes from a story The Suz used to tell about the goats her father raised. Only one of them was actually named Otis, but all of the goats answered to Otis. There were seven goats total, hence Seven Goats Named Otis.

Yeah. It's not a great story.

Then on the road trip last fall I decided to start a funk band called Electric Balls.

Then K-Rock and I decided that you can make a cool band name by using the word electric in conjunction with nearly any noun that does not name something that runs on electricity. Obviously, the classic example of this is Electric Mayhem, which was and is one of the rock n'roll greats. But the theory works with more mundane household items as well. For example, Electric Ottoman is a passable band name, but Electric Toothbrush is just an appliance.

Thus was spent an hour or so sipping lemoncello and musing on this subject. "It disturbs me how much I can engage in a theoretical universe," said K-Rock.

When science people engage in a theoretical universe, they prove the existence of antimatter and wormholes and stuff. When humanities people engage in a theoretical universe, we come up with this:

Electric Ottoman-- smooth jazz
Electric Predator-- metal
Electric Gargoyle-- emo pop, e.g. Coldplay, but slightly edgier
Electric Balls-- funk
Electric Blunderbuss-- alt. country, e.g. Uncle Tupelo
Electric Ovary-- angry girl music
Electric Lemon-- happy girl music, e.g. Katy Perry
Electric Grass-- reggae
Electric X-- techno/ world music fusion
Electric Bratwurst-- oompa band/ polka/ Octoberfest
Electric Wiffle-- kids music, e.g. the Wiggles
Electric Spatula-- unplugged folk