I’ve mentioned a few times that band names, no matter how preposterous, eventually lose their impact. To rewrite an old saying, familiarity doesn’t so much breed contempt as apathy. My go-to example for this phenomenon has been Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, but I’d argue even that name takes a knee in the presence of Screeching Weasel. It’s a name so patently ridiculous that a Best Buy commercial in the early ’90s even singled it out to show the comprehensiveness of their CD selection: “We have everything—even Screeching Weasel!”
(This is where I’d link that commercial if it it were on YouTube, but somehow it is not.)
If you’re unfamiliar, Screeching Weasel is pop-punk band originally from the Chicago suburbs. The band formed in 1986 and has carried on—albeit with several break-ups—ever since under the tight-fisted grip of frontman (and sole original member) Ben Weasel. For aficionados of pop punk, Screeching Weasel is up there with the greats, despite—and because of—the personality of its mercurial frontman.
Only the Gallagher brothers can match Ben Weasel in the shit-talking department—and he would probably leave even them at a loss. Negative energy seems to be his life force, and he wears his contrarianism as a proof of his punk rock bona fides.
That goes back to the name Screeching Weasel. The band originally formed under the name All Night Garage Sale, but the group’s bassist suggested changing it to Screaming Otter after a friend saw a shirt that said, “I’ve got a screaming otter in my pants!”
As Weasel told me in 2010:
I said, “I don’t like that.” I think I knew I wanted to do a band with the name “Weasel” in it, because it was one of my favorite words and one of my favorite insults for people. I was really into pro wrestling at the time, and Bobby “The Brain” Heenan was one of the great heel managers, and one of the derogatory nicknames that people used for him was “The Weasel.” It was just kind of a cool name. So I said, “Well, instead of ‘Screaming Otter,’ let’s do ‘Weasel,’ and let’s change ‘Screaming’ to ‘Screeching’” because I thought “Screaming” sounded too metal. And we stuck with that name. It came down to that or Suburban Vermin. I kind of wish we had gone with the other name sometimes, but oh well.
BNB FACT CHECK: Suburban Vermin would’ve been a pretty perfect name.
Popular wisdom says that bands with terrible names can never be truly successful, because some names can’t be overcome—even if Mike Dirnt of Green Day wears your T-shirt during their breakthrough performance at Woodstock ’94. But that all depends on how you measure success. Not everyone dreams of stardom—plenty of artists would just like to make a living playing music. If that’s your goal, and not, say, selling out stadiums, then you can get away with some pretty ridiculous shit.
For a long time, that was part of the charm of Screeching Weasel, a band that played rudimentary, Ramones-style pop punk fronted by a man who considered most other bands garbage—especially the greats. (See “I Hate Led Zeppelin.”)
But it can get old, especially when that signature contrarianism veered into right-wing politics and devout Catholicism. Ben Weasel embraced both midlife, and while it turned off plenty of fans, it also felt a little like the latest heel turn from a guy who literally made his name Weasel.
Then at SXSW 2011, Screeching Weasel played a party for Fat Wreck Chords, who was releasing the band’s new album. During their performance, Ben Weasel punched a woman who was allegedly antagonizing him, then he hit another woman who pulled him away. The whole thing was captured on video, and it understandably erupted into a scandal that turned Weasel into a pariah and caused his bandmates to quit en masse. It was a sad, and maybe inevitable, conclusion of 25 years of assholery.
It wouldn’t be the end. Ten years later, Weasel is slightly less persona non grata, and his band carries on with still more new members and new music. While the moniker Screeching Weasel didn’t do the band any favors when it came to big-time success, it wasn’t the name that held them back.
POST-SCRIPTS
While I couldn’t find the Screeching Weasel commercial, I did find this gem:
Somehow, I worked at Onion Inc. for a dozen years without realizing Joe Garden—one of The Onion’s greats—interviewed Ben Weasel at a hockey game during the early days of The A.V. Club. He asked about that Best Buy commercial, which had been a big deal during the Punk Sellout Witch Hunts of the Early ’90s. (See my 2000 cover story for Punk Planet, “The Crash.”) “Whoever directed that commercial must have been a fan of the band. I later heard that some of the guys in that commercial were in the band the Quincy Punx. It was shot in Minneapolis. We heard about the thing, and I kept scanning the TV trying to find it. Everybody’s going, ‘Oh, it’s on all the time.’ Finally, I saw it, but I had to call and pay $30 to get it on videotape. We didn’t have anything to do with it. They just did it. It was neat, but everybody was like, ‘Sellout!’”