no, i haven't been overwhelmed by folks about the band name, but i have been getting overwhelmed just in general by alot of the heads that come see us. there are really only a few Dead bands around town. one is an established name - JimMiller band. he sounds good but is in nowehere near the form he was 15 years ago. another is "Into the Blue", a conglomarite of local musicians all in other original bands that do a Dead night every 6 months or so. The field is wide open out here, theres no band you can go see on a consisitent basis that does at least 90% dead tunes (we do some Waits and some Ween), so its perfect timimg for the torch to be passed. But yeah, when we go on break i have to spend the first 15 mintues of it shaking hands and listening to folks tell me stories about how many memories were brought back while we did our first set. When i put up flyers at our "hub" bar where we perform a few times a month, folks just take them off the walls and take them home. i have to go put more up, plus the bar gets calls from folks asking when my band is playing again - which they told me has never happened at this particular bar (dont be fooled , its a crappy bar but as far as bands in my situation, its the best place you can be in this county right outside of cuyahoga). someone recognized me in one of my classes here at college and they went on and on in front of everybody - i was so embarressed, everyone was looking at me and then folks wanted to talk, the teacher starts asking me questions about it - exactly what i didnt want to happen. now everytime i go to this class i have to run a gauntlet of q & a from folks that dont even know me or what the hell im doing for that matter, its silly. i love being put on the spot on stage but not off of it.
things moved so quickliy for us, we've kinda gone into a spin for a few weeks. we made calls to a lot of clubs and then out of nowhere we started getting calls back from bars and clubs all over NE ohio. we played as the current outfit for 2 shows and immediately landed 2 gigs at nelsons -granted one is on the noon timeslot but ya gotta start somewhere.we landed other gigs in clubs in alliance and ashland and generally all over. we were requested to play the saturday night at a large camping/music fest here in lorain county this summer. just too much to mention going on and ive never had to deal with all this stuff before. lots of these gigs are pending as we try to schedule ourselves around the others. we should be gigging every week in a few months and then when the summer comes...man i cant wait for the fun to begin.
You want a Dead band, seem very concerned with how 1 bar will view the name, don't seem to worry if fans confuse your band with another one.
did you not intend for this quote to read like this? i got confused a bit.
We gig as Dead Ahead. a google search turns up nothing. if i go 2 pages on google without seeing another band with the same name then im satisfied. If there were another Dead Ahead in ohio or in an adjacent state then i would look for a change, but as of now that hasnt happened. The whole point of the first post was that i wanted to know if anyone could at some time tell me "hey you cant use that name because pbs has the rights to that name and anything using that name that is Dead related would be subject to a forced switch".
now, the two fellas that i replaced in the band were pushing to use the name "Uncle Monkey" as we were doing almost the entire reckoning album at the time. I never liked the name, it sounds too "cute" for me. when i went to book a show i simply asked the owner what he thought would sound/look better. he told me he wouldnt even book me if i used that band name and that Dead Ahead was perfect. now i know it might sound as though the entire debacle rested on the whim of one bar owners preference but thats not really the case, he just confirmed my suspicions. the 2 fellows that wanted that cute sounding name would shout "UNCLE MONKEY" at the top of their lungs between songs.....i hated that. good guys, fun guys, not very good musicans/decision makers lol.
so something like uncle monkey is out of the question. Dead Ahead is perfect, i was just worried that someone would tell me i couldnt use it.
this is why i take my plight to you guys. you always give me an array of suggestions, some i like some i dont like, but thats the point -to get as many perspectives as possible. this is the best site/community for the insight im looking for. you guys never fail me lol