One of the toughest aspects of forming a new band is settling on the name. Several factors are working against an exciting new project, from finding a moniker that hasn’t already been taken to landing on something that properly reflects the music and attitude. Worshipper, the Boston hard rock band that launched a decade ago, unexpectedly had a lot of help coming up with their name, thanks to a still-going Facebook thread that continues to chug along with unruly and unhinged submissions a decade later.
Exactly 10 years ago today, on the night of Tuesday, September 9, 2014, drummer Dave Jarvis posted a photo on Facebook that would become somewhat infamous in the Boston music scene. Taken from behind his drum kit at the band’s practice space at Studio 52 in Allston, the image showed his three new bandmates, each no stranger to our homegrown music circles: Vocalist and guitarist John Brookhouse, bassist Bob Maloney, and guitarist Alejandro Necochea.
And the pic was posted with a caption Jarvis probably didn’t think too much about at the time: “New band. No name. Great fun.”
Since then, the post has generated nearly 32,000 comments, with friends, family, colleagues, and damn near everyone else offering up a potential band name (some serious, but most silly). Keeping the thread moving fast, a vast majority of the comments are simply one-word or one-name replies.
It’s now weirdly a pretty interesting source of new potential band names, with a few pretty good ones mixed in with lots of (intentionally) cringe-worthy submissions. The thread has been parodied, cross-referenced, and revisited countless times over the past decade and a communal landing spot, all while Worshipper has gone on to become one of the more respected bands to come out of Boston, playing shows around the world, signing with multiple labels, winning the 2016 Rock And Roll Rumble, and releasing three stellar albums, including this summer’s One Way Trip, released in July via Magnetic Eye Records.
As the thread continues to remain active, so do Worshipper, which after playing Koto in Lowell over the weekend, now have a pair of choice gigs on the fall calendar: October 25 at Widowmaker Brewing in Braintree with Wormwood and Cave-In; and November 22 at Medford’s Deep Cuts with Curse the Son for Cortez’ album release party.
Vanyaland caught up with Jarvis over the weekend to discuss the thread’s anniversary, wondering what the band thought of the whole situation, how weird it is to look back on a thread from what feels like 1,000 years ago, and if anyone in those tens of thousands of comments ever came up with the name “Worshipper”.
Michael Marotta: Most importantly, can you fucking believe we’re sitting here talking about this thread in 2024?
Davie Jarvis: This post was made pre-pandemic and pre-Trump. Facebook was a much more fun and innocent place before bots, politics, AI, and everyone’s aunts and uncles showed up… party’s over, maaaaan.
When did you guys first realize the post took on a life of its own?
After a week of not being able to keep up with the notifications. I couldn’t get any work done so I had to shut them off so I wouldn’t be distracted.
Were there any moments where the band was like “Ok, that’s enough, we’re actually a band now…”?
I think we had a conversation in passing about it. We came up with Worshipper maybe the next day or two after the post went up, but I was having too much fun with it and clearly so was everyone else.
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Was Worshipper ever suggested in the thousands of band name comments? How’d that name come about…
I personally snuck Worshipper in at like 8 in the morning the next day after we settled on it. Literally no one noticed and because so many people were commenting, it was pushed off the page quick and lost in the digital ether. So it’s there and it got ZERO LIKES.
What were some of your favorite and least favorite suggestions or interactions?
One of the coolest moments was being given a hardcover book of the post and thread by my Newbury Comics co-workers for my 40th birthday. Pretty surreal to read your friends and some complete strangers internet comments in hard type in a book. I think it only had like 7,000 comments back then… I would say the worst part was policing people who would get too excited and would post like 13 names in a row. It’s not like I put up rules for how to post but c’mon… calm down.
On a more serious note, one thing I noticed scrolling through is that there are a few friends in that thread who are no longer with us. How does that make the band feel as we sit here on its 10th anniversary?
Yeah… I’ve noticed this too. Not only in this particular post but especially in Facebook memories. Most notable has to be Mike Oliver. Man, I miss that guy so much… He loved to be in on the joke. We’re all getting to that age we’re people start taking off for one reason or another. It’s sad but I’m glad that the fun jokes we made are still available to look back on and laugh about. We have been commenting to each other for the last couple months about how we can’t believe it’s been 10 years already. The pandemic was like a time machine that made four years feel like one year… so weird.
And lastly, where was that picture taken and was anything in particular going through your heads at that very moment?
That pic was taken at our practice space at Studio 52 in Allston. We’d only been getting together for maybe three weeks at that point. We were definitely already working on songs for the first album.
The thing I find funniest about this whole thing is that it was just a rare, honest moment on Facebook. Not something I would normally post. It’s not a particularly good photo and I was just an excited young man ready to get the show on the road and to play with people I respected and admired. Everyone was excited to get it up and running as soon as possible and show people what we knew was a great band.
I had zero idea that it would turn into a post with almost 32,000 comments and counting. Now here we are 10 years and three full-length albums later still kicking it and still waiting for that perfect name idea to pop up in the band name thread…