When the 1990s band Garbage was asked about the source of it’s name, members jokingly claimed; “You have to send away and the music company gives you a choice of names. There were only two names left ‘Hootie and The Blowfish’ and ‘Garbage’ and we choose the better one.” We’re not including songs in this blog this week by either Garbage (remember, their big hit was “Stupid Girl”) or Hootie and the Blowfish (The band had too many 1990s hits that we’re trying to forget, although we did enjoy this surreptitious flashback in the movie “Ted,” which is not at all safe for work! (And we mean it- anything from the movie Ted is NSFW!)
Now what was the point of that anecdote? This week we bring you Insect Music from a band with an even stranger name than those mentioned above, “Deer Tick.” We don’t take the topic of ticks lightly, so we were curious about their name. Wikipedia explains where it came from:
McCauley explained that inspiration for the name Deer Tick came while he and Brendon Massei, also known as Viking Moses, were hiking in the Morgan–Monroe State Forest near Bloomington, IN. McCauley found a deer tick on his scalp later that evening, which caught the singer off guard. McCauley stated that he had never come in contact with a tick, even though as a child he frequently went camping and fishing. He was thus inspired to name his band after the parasite, stating that it sounded cool. McCauley also stated that he was unaware of the bands Deerhoof and Deerhunter until after he had named his band, but apologized for the similarities.[7]
Without making you do any more reading, here’s Deer Tick. (BTW- as we said earlier this week, ticks carry a lot of really unwanted diseases, so please be careful of the real things.)