Rockband of Revolution

This one is a joke, and the joke has some history behind it. The Founders did not play electric guitars, but they did make music. Thomas Jefferson was a violinist, and Benjamin Franklin invented his own instrument, the glass armonica, in 1761, a row of spinning glass bowls played with wet fingers; Mozart and Beethoven both later wrote for it. The real band of the Revolution was the fife and drum, which signaled orders and marched soldiers into line.

The tagline at the bottom, Live Free or Cry Later, bends New Hampshire's state motto. 'Live free or die' comes from General John Stark, a veteran of Bunker Hill and Bennington, who was too ill in 1809 to attend a reunion of Bennington veterans and sent a toast instead: 'Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.' New Hampshire made it the state motto in 1945.

Four men in eighteenth-century coats and ruffled cravats, two in sunglasses, play guitars and sing into a vintage microphone under a sky of fireworks. The center guitar is finished in stars and stripes. An eagle spreads its wings beneath the word REVOLUTION in yellow capitals, a drum marked 1776 stands in flames at the bottom, and the crowd's raised hands and small flags fill the lower edge.