Where did they get the name Guster?
Well, Guster was originally called Gus, and the first few copies of Parachute have that name on them. There are about ten dozen different stories about where they got Gus, including that it was the name of Ryan’s freshman roommate Evan’s dad, or that it was short for “asparagus”. The one that’s been claimed by the band the most is that they were named for the 1976 Ed Asner-Don Knotts masterpiece “Gus”, about a failing football team that hires a field goal-kicking mule and goes on to great success – the band gave this story in a 1999 online chat and later repeated it in a recent interview on “Austin City Limits”. It’s quite possible that none of these stories are true, but the important thing is that they soon discovered that about ten dozen other bands were called Gus too. Popular myth (or just Brian) would have it that that in the midst of their struggle with what to rename themselves, Brian’s friend Rit Zbikowski was leaving for Japan to teach English. As he walked out the door to go
