One of the axioms of Band Name Bureau dictates that the longer a strange-named band exists, the less weird their name seems. It’s a simple matter of exposure vs. impact, which I’d illustrate with a formula if I knew anything about that.
Even if you’ve never heard of an oddly named group before, but a lot of other people have, the impact is lessened. You may say something like, “The Flying Burrito Brothers? What the hell is that?” and the wizened old-timer next to you will just shrug and say, “You’ve never heard of ’em?”
Less wizened, but getting plenty old are the folks who were around in 1997 when Death Cab for Cutie released the cassette-only You Can Play These Songs with Chords. The debut LP Something About Airplanes followed the next year, and Death Cab has been at it ever since, with leader Ben Gibbard most recently curating a Yoko Ono tribute album.
In a roundabout way, that Ono tribute ties to Death Cab’s name. For better or worse, Ono’s personal history is inextricably linked to the Beatles, and the Beatles are the reason Ben Gibbard named his band Death Cab for Cutie.
It comes from a song called “Death Cab for Cutie” by the ’60s art-rock pranksters the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. In the mid-’60s, the band had gained notoriety in its native England and picked up some famous fans. One of them was Paul McCartney, who would later ask the Bonzos to appear in the Beatles’ 1967 made-for-TV move, Magical Mystery Tour.
“Paul McCartney had come to some of our gigs, and I think he persuaded Lennon that it’d be a good idea to put us in that film. And that kind of put the Good Housekeeping seal of approval on us,” recalled Bonzos frontman Vivian Stanshall in an interview cited in The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – Jollity Farm: The Official Story of the Bonzos in Their Own Words.
In the film, the group performs “Death Cab for Cutie” at a strip club. This British being public television in the ’60s, it was all very tame, but a racier version of the performance is available on YouTube. Why, it’s got a bird in her knickers, it does!
“Death Cab for Cutie” parodies teen-tragedy songs of the era—like the Shangri-Las “Leader of the Pack,” released three years prior—with Stanshall clearly imitating Elvis Presley as he sings about a young girl dying in a cab crash:
The cab was racing through the night
Baby don’t do it
His eyes in the mirror, keeping Cutie in sight
Baby don’t do it
When he saw Cutie it gave him a thrill
Don’t you know Baby, curves can kill
Why they chose that song for Magical Mystery Tour has been lost to the ages. Stanshall died in 1995, and the group’s remaining members don’t have much of an answer. “I don’t know what made them choose ‘Death Cab for Cutie,’” says guitarist Neil Innes in Jollity Farm. “Maybe it was the only thing at that time that would remotely fit the kind of groove of a Beatles film because it had a kind of Elvis sort of tinge to it.”
Innes also notes that the Bonzos didn’t originate the title, either. “We found this sort of true-crime magazine and one of the stories was ‘Death Cab for Cutie,’ so we just fantasized on that.” That story dates to at least the 1950s, as it’s cited in a 1957 book called The Uses of Literacy by British academic Richard Hoggart in a chapter about pulp novels.
The film Magical Mystery Tour flopped in the UK and was barely seen in the United States. It had a limited theater run in 1974, followed by VHS version in the ’80s. Presumably that’s how Ben Gibbard came across it while attending Western Washington University in the mid-’90s.
“[Ben] was in a Magical Mystery Tour all-the-time kind of phase,” former bandmate Chris Walla told CNN in 2009. “He made a grand proclamation from the couch at one point that if he ever had another band, he was going to call it Death Cab for Cutie.”
A couple of years later, Gibbard told Time Out Chicago, “The name was never supposed to be something that someone was going to reference 15 years on. So yeah, I would absolutely go back and give it a more obvious name. But thank God for Wikipedia. At least now, people don’t have to ask me where the fucking name came from every interview.”
That’s the curse of non-traditional name. Today’s “cool kids will get it” reference is tomorrow’s “ugh I can’t believe I’m still explaining this” millstone. The hassle is worth it, I think. The world would be boring if everyone went with a “more obvious name.”
POST-SCRIPTS
Magical Mystery Tour as a film flopped, but the soundtrack boasts classics like “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” and “Hello, Goodbye.” Not on it: “Death Cab for Cutie.” I mean, why would it be, right? It’s a Beatles movie. But the Bonzos were mad. “I think it was pretty blinking good,” Stanshall is quoted as saying in Jollity Farm. “What really profoundly pissed me off was that we didn’t get it on the LP. I thought that it was mean, that. I think it was Paul McCartney!” Paul giveth and Paul taketh away, Viv.
Speaking of McCartney, “Death Cab for Cutie” plays a role in the “Paul is dead” conspiracy. The story goes that McCartney, being “the cute one,” is the “cutie” who dies in the song—one of the many clues the Beatles supposedly left about his death. There’s also a theory that Vivian Stanshall replaced McCartney. My limited web searching has revealed that plenty of people still believe that McCartney died in the ’60s, with message-board comments chiding doubters with familiar phrases like, “You have to read the in-depth research.” They are certainly unvaccinated.
My favorite Death Cab song? Technically, it’s two, but they’re connected: “Company Calls” and “Company Calls Epilogue.”