5 No-Name Bands with Future Rock Stars

Dischord Records

Every Friday we dole out pop trivia you can use at the bar.

Rock bands are complicated social enterprises. Your bandmates are not only your creative partners, but also your business partners, long-haul vehicular companions, and significant others. (Playing in a band can be almost exactly like dating several people at once, usually without any sex.) Like most kinds of relationships, bands usually split up before they go too far, and it's not always for lack of talent. A lot of times a painfully unpopular group will have a rock star in its midst, just one who needs to find the right batch of partners with whom to make it big. Here are five notable no-name bands whose members went on to bigger and brighter things.


The glammy rock group Geordie, from Newcastle, England, weren't entirely unknown during their time together in the '70s. As the above video proves, they were well-known enough to land the occasional European TV spot, but their C-list fame doesn't really compare to what frontman Brian Johnson would go on to after he quit the band in 1976, which was to replace the recently departed Bon Scott as frontman for AC/DC and become one of the most iconic performers of the hard rock era.


The Golliwogs, a quartet of wailing garage rockers that were also high-school students at the time, had not one but four future rock stars on their roster. It took a name change, a move to newly hippiefied San Francisco, and a newfound lyrical fascination with the South before they eventually found fame as the Creedence Clearwater Revival.


Everyone knows that before he was in the Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl played drums for Nirvana. Fewer are aware that he got the Nirvana gig largely on the basis of his work with the D.C. hardcore band Scream, one of the less popular groups on the roster of the incredibly influential Dischord Records label. Even though he was only in his teens at the time, the hard-hitting style he'd eventually ride into mega-stardom was already in place.


Some rock stars embrace the music they made pre-fame, and some wish more than anything in the world that they could just forget about it and make everyone else in the world forget about it, too. Such is the case with Billy Joel and Attila, one of a couple bands he was in before he found his niche as a solo artist, and by far the most embarrassing. Caught up in the heady, try-anything atmosphere of the late '60s and the emerging "heavy metal" sound of guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, Joel and his bandmate in the Long Island psych-pop outfit the Hassles decided to strike out on their own as a two-piece band called Attila that played hard rock with an organ in place of the usual guitar and wore fur vests in emulation of their namesake. Easily one of the most Spinal Tap-ishly hilarious things to happen in real life.


Watch them live on YouTube.

In the days before the White Stripes brought the Detroit garage-rock scene to the world's attention, the organ-driven freakbeat trio the Hentchmen were one of the biggest bands in the city. It only makes sense that Jack White, then in the process of laying the foundation for his global domination plan, would cross paths with them. On some of the handful of tracks they recorded together, White plays bass.


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