Who uses Stage Names?

[Bard2dbone]

About a million years ago I had a band that got pretty popular on a local level for a couple or few years. When we would introduce the band members we would do these long drawn out and pompous titles to describe our role in the band. For example, Eric wasn't our 'keyboard player'. He was 'The Chairman Of The Boards!'.

Okay. Maybe it wasn't as lame as it sounds now, considering how many other people said similarly pompous things back then. But because I played bass and wrote all our lyrics, I got a phrase that covered both of those and included the town/city I lived in at the time, followed by a nickname I'd picked up in boot camp based on how I looked without a beard: "And on my left, the Lord of the Low Frequencies, the Bard of Arlington, Ziggy Roy!!"

No. Ziggy is not my actual first name. But I've got a lot of pretty good friends who've never heard me called anything else.

So was 'Ziggy' a stage name? A nickname? An alias? Define it as you will.

By the way 'The Bard Of Arlington/Wedgewood/Burleson...' is the original source of my username.

 

[hrodbert696]

Just to point out that sometimes nicknames evolve into stage names. If I remember right, that's the case with both "Sting" and "Flea." The one showed up to a couple of rehearsals in a yellow striped sweater, the other had a habit of hopping all over the stage. They weren't so much deliberately adopted stage names as just natural outgrowths of their nicknames.

 

[phatbass]

IMO, nick names and Stage names are cool, as long as they're given to you by someone else...

 

[ggunn]

In a related story...

Back in the mid 80's the Houston Police Department had a PR problem. A couple of incidents had received national attention, the most notable of which being the time when a black or Hispanic suspect died in custody. According to the HPD, he escaped from the officers holding him, climbed over the eight foot hurricane fence on the edge of the bridge they were on at the time of the routine traffic stop, jumped off into the bayou and drowned. This was despite the fact that he was handcuffed behind his back at the time.

The Houston Police Officers' Association launched a program to counter the bad press they were getting, and called it "The Badge Means You Care", with billboards and bumper stickers displaying the slogan.

There was a punk band in Houston at the time named AK-47. They wrote a song called "The Badge Means You Suck" which contained unflattering (to the police) lyrics about that incident and others. They released it as a single 45 (remember singles?), and inside the sleeve they included a "bumper sticker conversion kit", which was a small sticker containing only the word "SUCK" the same size and typeface as the word "CARE" on the policemans' association sticker that one could use to radically change its message. Lots of people in Houston used them.

The association filed a lawsuit against them, but since the band had used their stage names in the credits, no one could find them. Somewhere deep in the Harris County Court archives there is a document of public record of a lawsuit naming Raton Pi, Meatball Stu, and Tim Phlegm as defendants. The band members have long ago moved on (although they played a reunion gig last summer), but the incident is a point of pride with them.

EDIT: Here it is:

 

[stratovani]

Think I'll go with Gary Lee Weinrib. Nobody's using this name anyways.

Gotta go practice my screeching...