The Whistlin' Wolves?

I will get back to this blogging thing in earnest soon enough, but I thought I should drop a little one here and now.

Since I joined up in June, my band with Emily, Trip, and Spiff has forever waffled about our name. Initially on the fence between Whistling Rufus and The Whistle Pigs, we played our first few gigs unsure of who we were and, thus, unable to further promote ourselves and whatnot. When last fall rolled in and brought with it many many bookings, we decided there and then that we needed an actual name. For reasons still unclear to me (but by no means problematic), we decided to go with Whistling Rufus.

Now listen: Trip knows traditional American music better than just about anyone I know, and he made us fully aware of the racist implications of the old fiddle tune after which we had just named ourselves; but assuming that this would continue to be a very informal band, in addition to the fact that we had gotten the "go-ahead" from one of the foremost African-American interpreters of this style of music, we went ahead and started promoting our gigs as Whistling Rufus. People in the know seemed to let it slide (after all, there are lots of other trad. groups going by that same name) and people who didn't know of its derivation simply thought it sounded cute or funny.

So as the months and gigs flew by we realized that this band is actually pretty good and we should probably start bragging about it. As we all move in a few different musical circles we figured we would have the word out in no time, but we quickly came across a hitch in said plan. Emily realized it first as she began preparing a resumé for her latest round of auditions and grant applications. In an effort to show off her musical abilities in a variety of styles, she prepared a list of projects she is currently a part of. Surveying what she had typed out, and, I am guessing, noting that we had no web presence to speak of, she quickly realized that someone might feel the need to google "Whistling Rufus" in an effort to find out more about us. Therein lay the problem. If you're curious, you can go ahead and do this yourself, but I assure you that if you hit Google up with the same query it will take you less than five hits to come across the word "nigger" more than once. uuuhh... yeah. NOT. COOL.

It's odd how difficult it was coming up with a new name seeing as we had cared so little about our original collective alias just a few months prior. Nonetheless we discussed and bickered and pandered and waffled. In an effort to highlight Emily's incredible whistling talent (she has won several international championships), we wanted to keep "whistling" or "whistlin" in the name, but, as the rest of us are men, and, thus, always concerned about not being macho enough, we needed the other part of our name to make up for the "cutesiness" of "Whistling...". Now: anyone who has been in a band before knows this, but I will state it here again for those of you not in the know: NAMING A BAND IS FUCKING DIFFICULT. While I fully recognized that my ex-rock/striving-for-the-big-time band, Joanie Loves Trotsky, belabored almost all of our collective decisions, I will never forget the hours we spent in our singer Cliff's living room debating the merits of names such as "Pol Pot Pie", "Ninjavitis", "Gonhorrea Perlman", and another hundred or so pun-tacular names in addition to the silly one we wound up choosing. I mean: this was serious business... and I guess some things never change. To be fair: we never came to strong words or blows over deciding what to rename that artists formerly collectively known as Whistling Rufus, but it took us several weeks to even come up with something we could all tolerate, let alone be truly proud of. So after much hemming and hawing we decided to borrow our new name from an old Rose & The Maddox Brothers tune we had recently added to our repertoire and now call oursevles The Whistlin' Wolves.

I don't know that any of us love it, but we are committed to it - for the time being :) - and have invested a little actual energy into promoting ourselves and whatnot. We have a ton of gigs coming up and have even scored a radio appearance later this month! More immediatley for youse, you can actually see and hear us online! We have stepped boldly into 2004 and set up... wait for it... a MYSPACE PAGE!!! (I know!) So welcome to the world of the Whistlin' Wolves. Check out the tunes online and I hope to see some of you at one of our many upcoming shows!