Gotta Get Down On Friday

So here we are, another Friday. Fridays, before they were ruined by some lackluster yuppie, were great days. Now, they're great days once we get over the gibbering-in-the-closet-and-go-catatonic thing brought on by Ms. Black. Nevertheless, we do look forward to the weekends, especially summer weekends, that are drawn out by a late sunset into something just a little bit longer and a little bit sweeter.

On that note, we have a sweet Band Name Of The Day for you this Friday:

The Jelly Bean Mafia, which we envision as a techno rave group, sort of hyperactive, kandy-kid version of Daft Punk, but with a hard, coked-up edge. Cute, poppy, peppy, and addicted to an a rainbow of narcotics of legendary purity that have them mixing all night and recording all day up until the rainbow's end, when hard reality sets in.

Incidentally, they're not the first band to use jelly beans in their name. You can find a couple of others right there at the end of the Wikipedia article on the things, and of course through Google.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia has killed the second possible Band Name Of The Day, when they informed us that Harsh Reality actually exists. Apparently they're a little-known, proto-prog band born in Stevenage, Hertfordshire out of the remnants of the Freightliner Blues Band (formerly the Revolution) in the early 1960s. Too bad the name is taken.

What's really depressing about that, though, is that the name is taken by such a low-level band. It's a fantastic name, but reading the Wikipedia article makes it pretty clear that it's a band that did little more than squat on a great name, like those "websites" that have links to other sites that sell stuff just so they can legitimately claim to be "using" a domain name. And for what? Once you discount the masturbatory writing on the wiki page that sounds like it was created by a nostalgic member of this band,  it comes out that they released one single and one album, and disbanded. Have you heard of them? We sure haven't. But now that name is taken, and because they released and album, probably copyrighted. Bang, 32 years later nobody can come and redeem such a great band name.

And that, dear readers, is why we have this blog. Not to claim or to squat or to copyright anything, but to find these rare gems of band names and bring them to the light where they can be used, preferably by a band that's already got some chops and has the good sense to do more touring than cocaine, so that hopefully something like the Jelly Bean Mafia will go down in history with other great band names like The Stray Cats, Iron Butterfly and The Battlefield Band, and not with gobshites like Harsh Reality.