Crisfield Folk Musicians Retreat 2007
August 30, 2007
Dear Old Dad and I have never been the kind of folks who take pictures of things. I only have a handful of photographs from our adventures over the last twenty years – and most of those were taken by somebody else.
Heck, we don’t even own a decent still camera.
But there were folks at the retreat armed with cameras, and some of them managed to stop playing long enough to take a few pictures.
This morning Carlos sent me a batch of snapshots.
Beak-Lift
August 30, 2007
Back in 1992 I came up with the image of a banjo-playing seagull as a mascot for a weekly concert series Dear Old Dad and I were hosting on the Crisfield city dock.
The original sketch actually used Dear Old Dad as a model (that always drove him crazy) and because of that, even though I have come up with other mascots like the resophonic-guitar-slinging Great Blues Heron, the Funky Seagull always made me smile.
Over the years the gull kept being used over and over again. In 1999 when we were getting ready to start our business a friend of ours brought up the “funky seagull” (he was looking out the window, spotted a messed up looking gull and shouted, “Hey, Patrick, that looks like your funky seagull!”).
That little incident was so charming that we ended up naming our company FunkySeagull.com
Back in 1999 we hired an artist to convert my sketches into something a bit more professional, and for the last few years that image has been the official Funky Seagull.
It’s a great graphic, but I really think it’s time to give the old bird a beak-lift.
Sometime over the next few weeks Dear Old Dad and I will be launching a contest to design a new look for the Funky Seagull or The Great Blues Heron and we have a most excellent prize in mind if we end up choosing a new design.
We’ll be posting more details soon, but until then some of the more artistically-inclined folks out there might want to start messing around with the idea.
