Slut Castle. No, it’s not a new Uptown establishment that is made of sluts or full of sluts as many people have mistakenly thought over the years, said Anthony Longanbach. It’s a band name, one of numerous eye-catching local band names over the years.
“Really, it’s like a raunchy term for a boy’s club,” said Longanbach, who fronts the two-piece band alongside his brother Lucas. “The songs are about situations and the dangers of being slutty or dealing with slutty people can bring about.”
Slut Castle was formed hastily after Longanbach was inspired to write songs after a tense breakup in 2013. Ever since, he and his brother have been working on their noisy rumpus punk style and warning people of the dangers of sluttiness for both men and women.
“The general reaction is they find it offensive and sexist, but then I remind them that my brother and I are the sluts here,” Longanbach said. “Any publicity is good publicity, and if people are talking about the name Slut Castle then that’s something.”
Plenty of strange band names have come and gone over the years and Jonathan Holmberg, chairman of the Athens Clean and Safe Halloween Committee, has been around to see most of them.
He recounted bands such as Myriad Creatures, Hot Cakes and Jehovah’s Waitresses. He even remembered The Pharrel Children, which featured a lead singer who had epilepsy and had epileptic seizures in the middle of the crowd as part of the show.
“Athens has always been a place where people go out of their way to come up with strange names for bands,” Holmberg said.
Holmberg himself, alongside Jorma Kaukonen, former guitarist for Jefferson Airplane, was even part of a group named The Clogging Dahmers in an “attempt at humor” to imagine Jeffrey Dahmer and his family as a traveling clogging dance troupe.
Rob “Lazer” Lewis fronts the Cincinnati group LZRPNY — pronounced “Lazer Pony” despite all the missing vowels — that frequents Athens’ bars and said a band name can say a lot about the style of music the group plays.
“When we tell them what the name is they think we’re an electronica band or something like that, but we’re blues pop rock,” Lewis said. “It can be misleading but I really like it, and I think it pops for sure.”
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This story appeared in print under the headline "Bizarre band names: From Slut Castle to LZRPNY, some eccentric band names have emerged from the local music scene."
