Coming up on 13 years?

As I type this, we’re coming up on 13 years since Death and Taxes played together.

It’s funny because back when we started (in the late ’80s), the Internet hadn’t really even been heard from. But by the time we split up in ’96, we had a website, a handful of albums (all registered with the Library of Congress) under our belt, and years of weird shows behind us…

We even had our band name protected by the office of patents and trademarks as a “Service Mark” or “SM”. Go look it up, you’ll see. It was something to the effect of “Death And Taxes; a name of a musical performance group to be used int he act of musical performances and recordings” or some such nonsense.

Every few months we’d get contacted about the name… We started getting letters at first, then later emails, from people all over the country complaining that *they* were the rightful “Death And Taxes” or “Death & Taxes” or “Death N Taxes” or whatever. Telling us to cease and desist. Whatever. Well we did, so get bent.

Now you can Google the band name, or any variant of it, and find like 50 bands with the name, all trying to make each other stop using it. All claiming they were the first. All saying they are the “original Death and/&/n Taxes”. Like they’re so clever that it had never been thought of before…

I remember when I came up with the name, sitting with Brian on his porch one hot summer evening. At the time, he said something like (and I’m paraphrasing here), “It’s kinda lame, but it will do for now…”