1. Cowboy Mouth. This one could be genuinely confusing to clubgoers/theatergoers, since the play the band is named after is a rock-and-roll affair developed by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith that actually gets staged in rock clubs fairly often. That’s what inspired this list, actually.
2. Angel City: Australian rock band, aka The Angels. Known for the moody metal track “Face the Day” (about not wanting to). Shepard’s play Angel City debuted in 1976. The Angels, who had been around since 1970 in various forms, took the new band name Angel City in 1980 to distinguish themselves from similarly named bands such as Angel.
3. Buried Child. The title has its own rock resonance since it’s a song by the influential and extremely loud band Swans. There’s a band called Buried Child with five songs (including “Self-Caesarean” and “Crucifiction”), but very little bio info, on Facebook.
4. True West. Pop band of the Paisley Underground psychedelic pop scene in the early 1980s.
5. Savage Love. Blues rock trio from Seattle.
6. Inacoma. There’s a Youtube video of this young Malaysian band playing at the IVM Band Battle in Australia in 2009. Sam Shepard wrote a play called Inacoma in 1977.
7. Mad Dog Blues. There are Mad Dog Blues Bands Chapel Hill, North Carolina, London, England, and Edmonton, Canada and throughout the known world. Sam Shepard wrote his play Mad Dog Blues in 1971.
8. Can’t find a band called The God of Hell (one of Shepard’s more recent works, from 2004). But I can’t hear Shepard’s title without ’60s supergroup The Crazy World of Arthur Brown leaping into my brain: “I am the god of hellfire—and I bring you…. Fire!” (Well, what are we expecting the god of hellfire to bring? The communion water?)
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