Bill Kelliher has revealed how his Star Wars tattoo sparked a conversation with Brent Hinds that gave Mastodon their name.
Kelliher said, “Hey, this is Bill Kelliher from the band Mastodon, and this is how we came up with the name Mastodon. Choosing a band name isn’t really f*cking hard.”
“I remember I had a really long list,” he continued. “I was taking, like, some lyrics from, like, Bad Brains. I can’t remember what they were, though. They were all terrible. I was like, I’ve been working on this list for, like, months, and this is the best I could come up with, and none of them—I don’t like any of these. They’re all pretty terrible.”
“Me and Brent (Hinds) was sitting next to me on the couch in my apartment, and I have this—I always called it a… it’s a mythosaur, I think, skull,” Kelliher added. “I always thought it was a bantha skull. I’m a Star Wars kind of geek, and so I have all these Star Wars tattoos. But this is my first tattoo.”
“At the time, I think I only had this,” he concluded. “And we were sitting there banging our heads against the wall trying to think of a band name, and Brent looked over at me, and he saw this. He goes, What is that? Is that— that’s like a mammoth? And I go, Mastodon? Like mammoth and mastodon. I probably never even used that word in my life. It came to me. I was like, Mastodon? And when I said it, we were all just like, [bleep], let’s make sure no one’s already used that name. But we thought we were f*cking genius.”
Kelliher’s recollection is one of many stories that trace back to the band’s earliest days, when Mastodon was still a group of friends figuring out what to call themselves in Atlanta, Georgia. The name stuck, and so did the lineup that made it famous.
Mastodon formed in Atlanta in 2000. Kelliher and drummer Brann Dailor had played together in Today Is the Day before relocating from New York, and they met bassist Troy Sanders and guitarist Brent Hinds at a High on Fire concert. The four musicians began writing and rehearsing together, and the original core lineup was in place.
Hinds was a founding guitarist, vocalist and principal creative force in the band. The lineup of Sanders, Hinds, Kelliher and Dailor remained unchanged for 24 years, an unusually stable run for a heavy metal band.
That stability produced a rapid creative rise. Mastodon released its debut studio album, Remission, in 2002, followed by Leviathan in 2004, a concept album inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Leviathan earned major critical acclaim and helped establish the band as one of the most distinctive American metal acts of the 21st century.
The band’s later work brought mainstream recognition as well. the album Emperor of Sand produced the song “Sultan’s Curse,” which won Mastodon its first Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance.
