Names of Bands...

I forgot to mention earlier that Lovin' Spoonful was taken by John Sebastian from a line in a Mississippi John Hurt song "Coffee Blues". Cheers, Lee

Fleetwood Mac was called 'chicken coop' before they had their epiphany

If you read a lot of in-depth music mags like Mojo etc and music biographies. the origin of most band names come up-as is the way and what can be seen from some of above these can turn into Chinese whispers and the truth gets distorted or lost totally even by those involved-such is history-e.g Jeff is about 98% correct with the origin of Zeppelin-the actual well known phrase is "going down like a lead balloon"-Keith Moon usually gets credit for this as part of a proposed supergroup around the time of birth of Zeppelin-he changed it from balloon to Zeppelin but the idea of failure was the central one-Peter Grant then made the phonetic change from Lead to Led (so it wouldn't get mixed up with the word lead, as in to shephard forward).
10cc I used to read was the average volume of sperm ejaculated by a male during climax-I recently read in fact the average is about 8 or 9cc so the Manchester band increased it to 10cc as highlighting their supriority.
Mott The Hoople are named after a novel by William Manus.
There is even debate about the likes of Bob Zimmerman changing his name to Dylan-nearly always accepted as taken from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas-Robert Shelton also mentioned that Dylan as a teenager was a big fan of Gun Smoke a TV series who's main hero was Matt Dillon.
Clearly the history of band names has two main inspirations-usually to change a dull real name or to avoid confusion with existing names and/or to simply create something that sounds good or interesting.
I have undoubtly forgotten more origins than than I can remember-not least down to the fact they are usually pretty mundane.

Uriah Heep invented something, can't remember what (the cotton gin?). 10cc is supposed to be the average volume of a typical male's ejaculation...whatever...

What about:
Fairport Convention
(Nick Cave and) the Bad Seeds

Uriah Heep is a character from a Charles Dickens novel....