.png)
The Liverbirds
The Liverbirds were an all-female rock band from Liverpool, UK, active from 1963 to 1968. They released two albums, and they were mostly a cover band, recording only three original songs. However, they followed their fellow Liverpudlians, the Beatles, to Hamburg, Germany, and they performed in many of the same clubs that the Beatles performed in, billed as "the female Beatles." They developed quite a fan base in Germany, more so than in the UK, and three of the four band members settled permanently in Germany. Apparently, the relationship between the Liverbirds and the Beatles wasn't very warm, as John Lennon was quoted in an interview saying that the Liverbirds couldn't play their own instruments. The group disbanded in 1968 following a tour of Japan and briefly reunited in 1998. A stage musical about the band called "Girls Don't Play Guitars" debuted in Liverpool in 2019, and the two surviving band members, Sylvia Saunders and Mary McGlory, published an autobiography of the band this year.
The band's name comes from the fictional liverbird, the symbol of Liverpool. No one is quite sure what kind of bird it's supposed to be, but it dates back to city seal first designed around the middle of the 1300s. The seal shows a bird with a plant sprig in its beak. Some sources say that it was a poorly executed eagle, but other sources say that it is likely a cormorant, native to the area.
Catgut
All of my life, I've heard the word catgut used to refer to the strings on tennis rackets and musical instruments, and I just decided to actually look it up. No worries: catgut has nothing to do with cats, but it is gut.
Catgut has historically been used as the most common material for strings of harps, lutes, violins, violas, cellos, double basses, and acoustic guitars and for snare drum heads for centuries. It was used surgically as suture material (and still is in developing countries), and it was used in the earliest watches and continues to be used hold to hang weights in some grandfather clocks. It is still used to make high-end, high-performance tennis rackets. What is it? Catgut is actually made from the walls of animal intestines, usually cattle, sheep, and goats, but sometimes also horses, mules, donkeys, and hogs. The word "catgut" may be a shortening of "cattlegut," or it may have derived from the Old English "kitgut," with "kit" meaning "fiddle." After WWII, synthetic materials started replacing catgut in some uses. Acoustic guitarists started switching to steel strings around 1900, and classical and flamenco guitarists switched to nylon after WWII.
The Night Ella Fitzgerald Was Arrested
In the 1950s, Ella Fitzgerald was the undisputed Queen of Jazz and is still regarded as a musical legend. That didn't keep her from being subject to racism, however. She wasn't allowed to tour and perform in much of the South where it was illegal to perform in front of integrated audiences. Even on her European tours, she and her band members were sometimes subjected to unwarranted searches, delays, and hassles by airport security because they were black and because the were jazz musicians. Fitzgerald became a dedicated spokesperson for civil rights, as was her manager Norman Granz. Granz saw jazz as a force for social change, and he stipulated that venues where Fitzgerald performed had integrated audiences. He saw Houston Texas as an opportunity and planned the first integrated show there. He rented Houston's Music Hall for October 7, 1955 for a show featuring Fitzgerald and her frequent touring partner Dizzy Gillespie. He demanded that all segregationist signage be removed, that there was no pre-sale of tickets (so that white buyers couldn't arrange to buy blocks of whites-only seating), and he hired extra security, including a number of off-duty Houston police officers.
Houston, like the rest of the South, was still burning over the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, and someone in the police department and/or city government decided to take action. Five undercover policemen got backstage passes and burst into the dressing room with guns drawn. Fearing that they were going to plant drugs, Granz confronted an officer who jammed a gun into his stomach and threatened to kill him. They "found" no drugs, but they did find Gillespie and a band member playing dice. Fitzgerald, her cousin and personal assistant Georgiana Henry, Gillespie, Granz, and musician Illinois Jacquet (ironically a Houston native) were all arrested for illegal gambling, taken to jail and booked . During the whole process, officers besieged Fitzgerald and Gillespie for autographs. Reporters and photographers awaited their arrival at the station, an indication that it was all pre-planned. After paying a fine, the group returned to Music Hall and performed the second set, the audience none the wiser. A year later, Fitzgerald and Gillespie returned, and the integrated-audience show went on without a hitch.
L-R: Fitzgerald, Henry, Jacquet, Gillespie
People of, ahem, a certain generation - my generation - almost certainly recognize Alfred E. Neuman as the unfortunate-looking cartoon logo of MAD magazine, the naughty parody and humor magazine that satirized television, movies, and popular culture and was marketed to teenaged boys, first published in 1952. Adults generally frowned on the adolescent silliness found on every page, but celebrities and creators knew that they had made it or had a hit when MAD illustrators and writers parodied them. Almost from the beginning, Alfred E. Neuman graced the covers and pages of the magazine, usually accompanied by his trademark line "What, me worry?"
As it turns out, Alfred was not created by MAD's founders Howard Kurtzman and William Gaines. In fact, the image goes back to at least the 1890s, possibly as far back as 1877. The origins aren't clear, but a very similar image appears in advertisements for canned mince meat and plum pudding about 1894, and it appears in an ad for a Broadway comedy from that year called "The New Boy." After that, the big-eared, gap-toothed, freckly or pimply boy's face is used in advertising for numerous different products, everything from dentists to sodas, and the image is often paired with some variation of "What, me worry?" Versions were also used politically, on anti-Franklin Roosevelt postcards in 1940, for example. Kurtzman first saw the image on a bulletin board and said that he immediately saw mischief and a care-free attitude. The name was inspired by the name of a prominent film score composer, Alfred Newman, and by the name of a minor character on comedian Henry Morgan's radio program. The image first appeared on the cover of a MAD reprint collection in November 1954, and it started appearing regularly on the magazine cover in March of 1955.
Bum Farto
Organized crime has always given us some truly unforgettable names over the years, but I just recently learned about the all time best-name winner in the history of organized crime: Bum Farto. Joseph "Bum" Farto was born in 1919, and his Spanish-born father arrived in Key West Florida via Cuba in 1902 and became a restaurateur. From an early age, Joseph constantly hung around the fire station, and the firemen started calling him "Bum." It stuck. He grew up, became a fireman and worked his way up in the department, becoming Key West fire chief in 1964. He was known for being loud and flashy. He drove a bright lime-yellow Galaxy 500 with mirrored tint and chrome wheels and "El Jeffe" ("The Boss") painted on the sides, constantly smoked big cigars, and wore red suits and rose-tinted glasses. In 1968, he was suspended from his position for illegal check cashing, but retained his job. That was just the beginning. Key West was the wild, wild west of drug smuggling in those days, and Farto became a major a major cocaine and pot dealer, even dealing out of his City Hall offices, packing drugs and money in Burger King bags. The US Drug Enforcement Administration conducted a sting operation along with state authorities, arresting Farto and 28 others in Operation Conch. Farto was convicted of drug smuggling in 1976. While awaiting sentencing, he left Key West and drove to Miami. From there, he was never seen or heard from again. T-shirts popped up in south Florida saying "Where's Bum Farto?" and "The Answer is Bum's Away," and he became a bit of a south Florida legend. A podcast called "The Bum Farto Story" dropped in 2020, and "Bum Farto-The Musical" premiered in 2021.
.jpg)
