#83: They came from 2004
Panic! at the Disco; Portugal. The Man; Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly; Test Icicles; Clap Your Hands Say Yeah; A Place to Bury Strangers; Gay for Johnny Depp
The year is 2004.
And, to continue the 2003 theme, things still suck. There are horrendous terror attacks in Spain and Russia, and still-intense post-9/11 paranoia in the U.S. The day after Christmas, a 9.3 earthquake—Earth’s most powerful in 40 years—triggers a tsunami that kills an astonishing 200,000 people. Over in Iraq, the Bush administration continues fucking things up, as a bunch of photos from Abu Ghraib show. Season one of The Apprentice comes out, elevating Donald Trump from has-been to primetime TV star (and directly setting the stage for 2016). Paris Hilton is everywhere. A site called thefacebook.com launches. A fantastically terrible idea for a nipple climax to the Super Bowl Halftime Show derails Janet Jackson’s career (but not Justin Timberlake’s). The seemingly worst president ever wins re-election.
Looking back on it now, shit was dire.
I mean, 2004 was also the year Massachusetts legalized marriage equality (and set it in motion for the rest of the country), the Red Sox overcame their storied World Series drought, and a slew of great albums came out.
And lots of musicians decided it was time to start a band and not to play it safe with a moniker. Here are some of them.
Panic! at the Disco
Some high school friends in suburban Las Vegas formed Panic! at the Disco in 2004, the same year California emo band Name Taken released their album Hold On, which featured a song called “Panic”:
panic at the disco
sat back and took it so slow
are you nervous? are you shaking?
Name selected, they set up a page on the nascent music-discovery site PureVolume. As he was adding the band’s info, guitarist Ryan Ross added an exclamation point to the name on a whim. (Short-sighted whims are the lifeblood of Band Name Bureau.)
The problem? “It wasn’t actually supposed to be part of the name,” according to drummer Spencer Smith, and Panic! at the Disco’s members disliked it. In January 2008, when they announced their new album, Pretty. Odd., they also excised the exclamation point. (Yet the album title had two unnecessary periods, for a +1 net on the weird-punctuation front.)
It didn’t go well. Fans got mad and, perhaps worse, interviews got more annoying, said Smith.
“It’s amazing because we never necessarily got asked about it that much when it was in there. And then all of a sudden, we decided to take it away for Pretty. Odd., and we were asked about that in, I think, every interview for a couple months.”
These were the things people used to care about. By the summer of 2009, the exclamation point was back, and it remained until 2023, when Panic! at the Disco called it quits. I hear the exclamation point is looking for a new band to join, maybe something heavy this time?
Portugal. The Man
Speaking of errant periods, Portugal. The Man has a whole, convoluted explanation for how they wound up with one. An entire 123-word paragraph on the band’s Wikipedia explains its origins, but this quote from a 2011 interview is slightly more succinct:
The idea was that we wanted to back somebody up. I guess in choosing Portugal, it was just kind of a random choice. We really wanted a country to be the name of our person because a country is a group of people. The man just states that Portugal is a person. So really Portugal is the band’s name and the man is just stating that he is the man.
Or as the band put it in another 2011 interview:
It is kind of an alter ego like Ziggy Stardust and Sgt. Pepper. It’s our character to represent us as a band. In picking a country’s name, it was one name that represents a group of people. It made sense for a while, but we have regretted it ever since that day.
That last line should be Band Name Bureau’s motto.
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly
Let’s keep the awkward-period train chugging with Sam Duckworth, who began performing as Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly in 2004. The oft-repeated origin story is that Duckworth took the name from a headline in Retro Gamer magazine about superhero games, though I can find no proof of this, not even a quote where he said it. Wikipedia also references a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, though that, too, is empty speculation.
Duckworth told The Guardian in 2006 that it came from “an old ZX spectrum game,” the ZX Spectrum being an early home computer released in Duckworth’s native UK. This is also likely bullshit.
Worse for an editor like myself, he’s never explained why there’s no period after “fly.”
I should stop looking for an explanation. In 2008, Duckworth said, “I just like the name. If there were a profound reason why I chose it, it would be cool ’cause I must have been asked 200 times now! I just didn’t want to be called Sam Duckworth, so GCWCF sounded good.”
Or it did for a while. In 2014, Duckworth announced he was retiring Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly to release music under his own name. But like many other artists who’ve done that, he came back to Get Cape in 2017. You can’t just abandon a moniker that inspired the title of an episode of One Tree Hill!
Test Icicles
We’re going back to the beginning with Test Icicles. My whole band-name mission began with my best albums of 2005 list for The A.V. Club. After laying out my top 10 (Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods rightfully took top honors), I wrote a separate list for “Worst Band Names Encountered This Year.” Although they weren’t in any order, Public Display of Funk was—again, rightfully—at the top of that list, with Test Icicles following closely behind.
They were a short-lived trio that broke up by 2006, which was apparently longer than frontman Sam Mehran ever intended. “We never intended to last for more than two weeks, so it’s kind of annoying and frustrating that it’s going on so long,” he said in an interview released a couple of months before the band split. “I just want to forget the whole thing as soon as possible.”
Mission accomplished. As Wikipedia puts it, “The group has since become notable due to the later success of its members.” That’s because Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes was a member, as was producer-composer Rory Attwell. Sadly, Mehran killed himself in 2018.
During the group’s brief time together, they and their label, Domino, tried to say Test Icicles was not an adolescent play on the word “testicles,” but a reference to the “alleged practice of early man of ‘testing’ icicles for strength and fitness for use as weapons.” This is, of course, bullshit. Supposedly an early incarnation of the band went by the name Balls, but it’s a challenge to untangle Test Icicles’ fact from fiction 20 years later. And that’s probably how Mehran would prefer it.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
The story of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah generated almost as much attention as their music. The group’s self-titled 2005 debut was recorded for $5,000 and self-released, which isn’t very noteworthy, until you realize they mailed about 40,000 copies of it themselves. I remember reading an interview with founder Alec Ounsworth around this time where he said the people at the post office hated him. No kidding. Ounsworth et al. finally had to enlist some outside help when they left for their first U.S. tour.
But back in 2004, Ounsworth needed a name for his new group, and he found it in some Brooklyn graffiti: CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH!! (which Gothamist later tracked down). Bucking the naming conventions of the time, Ounsworth opted not to include the two exclamation points.
As Clap Your Hands Say Yeah took off, Ounsworth seemed to grow bored with the truth when people asked him again and again about the origins of the name. Check out this interview from 2007:
Daze: Who came up with your name, and where did he get it?
Alec Ounsworth: Um, I don’t know. I think it was divine intervention.
Daze: That’s it?
A.O.: [chuckles] I think I remember reading something when I was taking Chinese history. Do you know what trepanation is?
Daze: I am not familiar.
A.O.: They drill into the back of someone’s head to relieve pressure.
Daze: Ah.
A.O.: And there are readings made, by virtue of just, ritual. I don’t recall exactly. But we had to do that. It was trepanation. And the reading was made by virtue of the bone structure. “Clap your hands say yeah” came from those readings.
In another interview from 2014, he answered the same question by saying, “I found it in a stream. At first, I thought it was dead but it came to life when I shook it.”
I get it, especially when someone’s asking you that question 10 years after the band formed. (Don’t ask basic questions whose answers are readily available elsewhere, interviewers.) But such is the burden of having an interesting name, which Ounsworth still uses as a solo artist to this day.
A Place to Bury Strangers
People can be forgiven for presuming A Place to Bury Strangers is goth. The name is macabre, and once you learn of its link to occult superstar Aleister Crowley, it’s basically CASE CLOSED.
Crowley published Aceldama, A Place to Bury Strangers In in 1898, but Aceldama’s origins go back to when Judas snitched on JC. Here’s what Acts of the Apostles says in the bible:
With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out. Everyone in Jerusalem heard about this, so they called that field in their language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood.
Metal! (Or goth.) The Book of Matthew has a slightly different version of the story, saying temple elders bought the field with Judas’ money “as a burial place for foreigners,” per the New International Version.
“A Place to Bury Foreigners” would be a very different band, composed of dudes who have LET’S GO BRANDON flags.
So all of that said…A Place to Bury Strangers isn’t goth. They play an intense type of heavy, noisy shoegaze that is punishingly loud. Their Wikipedia entry makes it a scant 60 words before mentioning their reputation for volume. Even this Audiotree session just looks loud as shit.
Gay for Johnny Depp
Listen, 2004 was a different time. The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie had grossed $654 million the year before, and everybody—not just hateful internet trolls—loved Johnny Depp. We were a year away from the misbegotten Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and many years from the dispiriting Amber Heard trial and this absolutely unforgivable commercial:
Second, this was the “no homo” era. Guys would append “no homo” onto positive statements to or about other men to make their ironclad heterosexuality obvious. Say you liked your friend’s outfit and wanted to pay him a compliment. But obviously he’d think you wanted to blow him if you said, “Hey, cool shirt.” To keep everyone on the same page, you’d say, “Hey cool shirt,” and before he had a chance to take off his pants, you’d add, “No homo!” CLOSE CALL.
So in this context we can better understand the name Gay for Johnny Depp. Although it wasn’t just a name; it was a whole shtick. The lyrics and music were ostensibly inspired by Depp, and the press release for 2007’s The Politics of Cruelty included a press release “that resembled a made-up pornographic fan letter to Johnny Depp as opposed to band information,” according to their bio.
Guitarist Sid Jagger (a.k.a. Joseph Grillo) said in an interview that the name served a larger purpose as well.
The thing with being in an aggressive, heavy band and not calling yourself something heavy and aggressive—like Coffin Nail or something like that—is you immediately weed out a certain element that we don’t particularly want at our shows. I don’t want meatheads, and I don’t want morons, and I don’t think heavy music should be the proclivity of stupid people.
So the name Gay for Johnny Depp is like jazz, the Pet Shop Boys, and Seal on the jukebox in Talladega Nights.
And what does the actor himself think? The band said in an interview that their publicist asked him for a statement, and Depp said he was “flattered.” “He seems like a cool guy,” said singer Marty Leopard. Like I said, it was a different time.
POST-SCRIPTS
Some other notables from 2004: Bomb the Music Industry!, Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s, You Say Party! We Say Die!, Weekend Nachos.
The album I listened to the most in 2004 was Pilot to Gunner’s Get Saved. It still rules.
Don’t miss A Place to Bury Strangers if they come to your town, and definitely don’t forget earplugs. In one of the weirder pairings I’ve encountered, I saw them play with the Zombies at SXSW.
Joseph Grillo played in another Year in Band Names group, I Hate Our Freedom, which is also the title of a song on Gay for Johnny Depp’s first album: “I Hate Our Freedom (Fuck You Gladys I’m on Vacation).”
PureVolume now exists as a crappy entertainment site that’s “hyper-focused on delivering content that connects audiences to interesting facts, stories, and other content.” Content that connects to content, got it. “We scour the internet to find topics that people from various backgrounds, interests, and generations are engaging with on a daily basis.” The lead story on their homepage as of press time: “It’s All In The Genes: Stunning Celebrity Sisters.” Nailed it!
A word about Nazis. If you’re a chronically online media type, you’re undoubtedly aware that Substack has what The Atlantic calls “a Nazi problem.” The TL;DR version is that Substack’s hands-off approach to content moderation allows extremist newsletters on the platform, where they’re monetized by Substack. (Pornography, however, remains verboten.) It’s a whole big mess, with Substack standing firm in the face of fierce criticism and writer/reader defections, then sort of backtracking a tiny bit, satisfying no one. I’m still figuring out my next move with all of this, but I’ll keep you posted.
Album title for free: Monetizing Nazis
Band name for free: Nipple Climax