A, An, and The, out of Alphabetical order

I probably need a whole new column for alphabetical ordering, but...

I want something like this for now (I think):

select band, ltrim(band, 'THE ') as alpha from bands order by alpha;

except I only want a match on 'THE ', not any any character within it,
which is what ltrim does...

Is there something like what I want that's easy to do?
[If it's way hard, I'll just add a column.]

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-- "TANSTAAFL" Rich lynch@lscorp.com