#89: The story of Toad the Wet Sprocket

Broken down in Blythe, CA

What’s this? A new post even though I said a week and a half ago that there’d be no June newsletter because I’m moving? Is this some kind of Father’s Day Miracle? No, it’s a Juneteenth Mishap.

As I was driving from California to Texas yesterday, my otherwise very reliable 2011 Ford Fusion Hybrid broke down on I-10 just inside Arizona. By “broke down,” I mean the engine turned off as I was going 75 mph on the highway. Luckily, an exit ramp lay just ahead, so I coasted to a stop there and tried not to panic about being stranded alone in the middle of nowhere while the temperature was 108 degrees and rising.

It was 113 when I took this pic.

Long story short, I’m currently in Blythe, California as I await word from the Ford dealership’s service department on Monday. My googling tells me the alerts that came on while I drove mean something’s wrong with the powertrain, and the car went into fail-safe mode while I was driving to prevent further damage. Sounds expensive!

So now that I suddenly have a bunch of time on my hands, let’s look into the origins of Toad the Wet Sprocket, who head out on tour next month.

At Band Name Bureau, we talk a lot about preposterous names, but seldom—if ever—are they specifically designed to be that way. Such is the case with Toad the Wet Sprocket, a name that qualifies as strange even by the extremely lenient standards of Band Name Bureau.

Like lots of weird names, this one is also a joke, but not an inside joke among friends or an “it was funny at the time” leftover from getting super baked one night. Toad the Wet Sprocket comes from Monty Python.

Eric Idle wrote that sketch and on 2000’s Eric Idle Sings Monty Python, he talks about the name:

“I once wrote a sketch about rock musicians, and I was trying to think of a name that would be so silly nobody would ever use it, or dream that it could ever be used. So I wrote the words ‘Toad the Wet Sprocket,’ and a few years later I was driving along the freeway in LA, and a song came on the radio, and the DJ said, ‘That was by Toad the Wet Sprocket!’ And I nearly drove off the freeway.”

The original sketch offers a bounty of names, as Idle rattles off a long list of goofy monikers another group, Dead Monkeys, went by over the course of their career:

Dead Monkeys are to split up again. According to their manager, Lefty Goldblatt, they’ve been in the business now 10 years, nine as other groups. Originally the Dead Salmon, they became, for a while, Trout, then Fried Trout, then Poached Trout in a White Wine Sauce, and finally Herring. Splitting up for nearly a month, they reformed as Red Herring, which became Dead Herring for a while, and then Dead Loss, which reflected the current state of the group. Splitting up again to get their heads together, they reformed a fortnight later as Heads Together, a tight little name which lasted them through a difficult period when their drummer was suspected of suffering from death. It turned out to be only a rumor, and they became Dead Together, then Dead Gear, which led to Dead Donkeys, Lead Donkeys, and the inevitable split-up. After nearly 10 days, they reformed again as Sole Meunière, then Dead Sole, Rock Cod, Turbot, Haddock, White Bait, the Plaices, Fish, Bream, Mackerel, Salmon, Poached Salmon, Poached Salmon in a White Wine Sauce, Salmon Meunière, and Helen Shapiro. This last name, their favorite, had to be dropped following an injunction, and they split up again. When they reformed after a record-breaking two days, they ditched the fishy references and became Dead Monkeys, a name which they stuck with for the rest of their careers. Now, a fortnight later, they've finally split up.

Why Toad the Wet Sprocket instead of Dead Monkeys or the “tight little name” Heads Together? Dead Together was probably too dark for them, and Dead Loss probably skewed too hardcore (and a band from Glasgow claimed it in the ’70s.) If the four members of the band were seafood enthusiasts, Idle provided a lot of options!

Frontman Glen Phillips has admitted Toad the Wet Sprocket “was basically the worst” of all the names in the sketch. He has spent nearly 40 years explaining the name since the band formed in Santa Barbara, California, in 1986.

We had a gig and we didn’t have a name yet. Dean [Dinning, bassist] was a big Monty Python fan—so am I—and we had all the records. They had a hilarious comedy sketch on ‘Rock Notes’ proposing a bad rock band name. It was Toad the Wet Sprocket featuring an electric triangle player named Rick Stardust. We thought it would be just a terrible name for a band, but that we could come up with a better name later.

In that first interview I linked, Phillips says they “figured it’d be hilarious to see [Toad] in print and have it be us.” They were just out of high school, so what do you want? (Reminder my high school punk band briefly went by the name Schooled Stupid.) Another story mentions that Three Young Studs and Glen was also a contender.

“Most days we regret having named the band that,” Dinning told something called WhatzUp, speaking of terrible names (“NORTHEAST INDIANA’S BIGGEST ENTERTAINMENT CALENDAR”). “No one would have named the band that on purpose. We were just silly, nerdy kids who wanted to see that name in the paper.”

But Dinning thinks it also helped them.

“If you just heard the music by itself, you would have thought it was the new song by Bread. ‘What the hell?’ you would have thought. ‘They sure took a long hiatus.’ But because we had this wonderful alternative-sounding name, our music was played on a lot of alternative stations.”

Only a man comfortable in his skin would compare his music to Bread, who wrote the wussiest song of the 1970s:

Eric Idle recorded his live album in 1999, and after he does the “Rock Notes” bit with its summary of Dead Monkeys’ tortured history, he says, “And sadly, I heard last week that Toad the Wet Sprocket just broke up.”

They actually called it quits in 1998 after a solid run that saw four of their five albums chart (peaking at No. 19 with 1997’s Coil) and four charting singles, including the hit “All I Want.” It reached No. 15 in 1992, and if you were around back then, you heard it a lot.

Aside from a few one-off gigs, Toad the Wet Sprocket stayed broken up for more than a decade, but reformed by 2010 and have stayed active since. 2013’s New Constellation even made it to No. 97 on the Billboard 200.

So let Toad the Wet Sprocket’s shocking longevity be a lesson to comedy writers everywhere: Don’t test comedy nerds, because you’ll lose.

POST-SCRIPTS

• Juneteenth is observed on June 15th in eight states, including California. Don’t @ me.

• Shoutouts (shouts out?) to Buckaroo’s General Store in Brenda, Arizona, for the shelter, and especially to Michael at Everett’s Towing, who very kindly drove me to a motel in Blythe. There’s zero chance of them seeing this, but it feels good to say. I could’ve been so, so fucked yesterday.

• This is at least the second name inspired by Monty Python to be featured in Band Name Bureau. A Horse A Spoon A Bucket is the other.

• Schooled Stupid is still a great name. Also don’t @ me.

• I may have mentioned this before, but one of my favorite throwaway Simpsons jokes is Bart distracting Homer with this:

• Also shoutout to reader Jason Taylor for sending me this. I’m partial to Shit Cig.

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