Styx

Styx is an American rock band popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s and known for its prog-rock with hard rock guitar, strong ballads, and a theatrical stage show. The band is best known for the hit songs "Lady", "Come Sail Away", "Babe", "The Best of Times", "Too Much Time on My Hands", and "Mr. Roboto". The band had four consecutive albums certified multi-platinum.

Twin brothers Chuck and John Panozzo got together with their neighbor Dennis DeYoung in 1961 in Chicago to form "The Tradewinds". The band never made it to the recording stage and in 1966, the Panozzo brothers had joined DeYoung at Chicago State College and kept the group together doing gigs at high schools and frat parties while studying to be teachers. In 1969 they added a college buddy, John Curulewski, on guitar and in 1972 the band members decided to choose a new name when they signed to Wooden Nickel Records. According to DeYoung, the name Styx was chosen mostly because it was "the only one that none of us hated".

Styx is a mythical river in classical Greek mythology. It is the river in the underworld over which the souls of the dead are ferried.

Crossing the Styx, illustration by Gustave Doré, 1861.

The word is a cognate of the Greek stygos meaning "hatred" and stygnos meaning "gloomy." The river formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld (Hades). The rivers Styx, Phlegethon, Acheron, and Cocytus all converge at the center of the underworld on a great marsh, which is also sometimes called the Styx.

Red Sox, White Sox and Red Stockings

The first openly all-professional team was the famous Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869-1870. They began as an amateur organization in 1866. But after the American Civil War, interest in baseball returned and the Red Stockings gained popularity as they went on road tour, known as "barnstorming." During their 1869 - 1870 "season" they went undefeated.

Nevertheless, they weren't making a profit and they were disbanded. But when the first professional league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, began in 1871, the Cincinnati Red Stockings regrouped in Boston, joined the new National Association and formed the Boston Red Stockings. (They eventually evolved into the Atlanta Braves.)

The influence of the Red Stockings is still felt in that nearly every professional team in Cincinnati since then has worn red as their primary trim color.

The National Association folded with the better teams and some new additions regrouping as the National League in 1876. One new teams was the Cincinnati Red Stockings who later was expelled from the league in 1880 for selling beer at games and playing games on Sundays.

A separate American Association was created to challenge (but not play against) the National League. The AA was considered the low class version because it had cheaper admission prices, offered alcoholic beverages, and had teams in working class "river towns" like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville and St. Louis.

A resurrected Cincinnati Red Stockings eventually shortened to the Cincinnati Reds and won the first American Association pennant. In 1890, the Reds were readmitted to the National League, and continue to play in Cincinnati to this day.

In the 1950s, "Reds" became a synonym for "Communist"and  they officially changed their name to the "Cincinnati Redlegs" with the logo altered from 1956 to 1960 to remove the term "REDS" from the inside of the C symbol. "Reds" came back in 1961 uniforms.

Cincinnati Reds Fan Shop

When Charles Comiskey brought his St. Paul Saints team into Chicago in 1900, an older team name of the White Stockings which was quickly shortened to White Sox by the press. In 1912, the team started wearing the first incarnation of its "SOX" logo on the shirts.

The team is often called the "Chisox" in headlines to distinguish from the other sox - the "Bosox" of Boston (although within their own hometowns they are often just "the Sox."

Chicago White Sox Fan Shop




In 1901, the American League club in Boston spent 7 seasons wearing blue stockings and was just known as "Boston", the "Americans" or the "Boston Americans" (because they were in the American League and there was another National League Boston team).

For the 1908 season,  the AL team shirts featured a red stocking across the front labeled "BOSTON" along with red stockings and white caps. Confusingly, the NL team also wore red stockings and  red caps with an old-English "B".

The now familiar "RED SOX" first appeared in 1912, coincident with the opening of Fenway Park.

Boston Red Sox Fan Shop

boston.redsox.mlb.com

cincinnati.reds.mlb.com 

chicago.whitesox.mlb.com

 

Urge Overkill

   

Urge Overkill is an alternative rock band, formed in Chicago, United States, consisting of Nash Kato (vocals/guitar), and Eddie "King" Roeser (vocals/guitar/bass guitar). Their cover of Neil Diamond's song "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack became a hit in 1994.

Their first album since 1995, Rock & Roll Submarine, was released in 2011.

The name Urge Overkill comes from a line in the Parliament song "Funkentelechy" that says “from the makers of Mr. Prolong, better known as Urge Overkill.”

Nirvana

The 90s grunge rock band Nirvana is quite different from the Buddhist state of being they chose for a band name.

Nirvana was formed by singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic in Aberdeen, Washington in 1987. Nirvana went through a succession of drummers, the longest-lasting being Dave Grohl, who joined the band in 1990.



They started out with names like Skid Row, Pen Cap Chew, Bliss, and Ted Ed Fred. According to a piece in Rolling Stone, Kurt Cobain said Nirvana was chosen because "I wanted a name that was kind of beautiful or nice and pretty instead of a mean, raunchy punk rock name like the Angry Samoans."

In Buddhism, nirvana is the ethereal plane of enlightenment, reached when a soul has gained enough wisdom to free itself from the cycle of reincarnation.  Nirvana is that stillness of mind after the fires of desire, aversion, and delusion have been finally extinguished.

The word comes from the Sanskrit nir and vati and literally translates to "a blowing out," as in a candle. In shramanic thought, it is the state of being free from suffering. In Hindu philosophy, it is union with the Brahman (Supreme Being).

Though the band had only three studio albums, Amazon lists 72 Nirvana "albums" starting with the band's first single, "Love Buzz", in November 1988 on the Seattle independent record label Sub Pop, and its debut album, Bleach, followed by their breakout release, Nevermind and finally In Utero.

On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head at his Seattle home.

Lady Gaga

The artist known as Lady Gaga was born as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was reborn with a name adapted from a Queen song.

Music producer Rob Fusari claims to have created the "Lady Gaga" stage name because some of Stefani's vocals reminded him of Queen's Freddie mercury. The Ga Ga comes from the Queen song "Radio Ga Ga". The song became attached to her and an inadvertent text message autocorrect created a "Lady Gaga" that Stefani decided was the stage name to use.

Another version of the origin story claims that the name resulted from a marketing meeting.

Either way, the word "gaga" entered the English lexicon in the early 1900s as a term for "crazy" or "silly." Though its origin is unknown, it may come from the French imitative gaga meaning "senile" or "foolish."

Today the word is most commonly used in the sense of deep infatuation, where going gaga for something is the same thing at "mooning over" it. Considering Lady Gaga's record sales and fan base, that meaning seems pretty accurate too.