A Few Small Repairs came out twenty years ago and was recently re-issued in a fancy new edition. It was Shawn Colvin’s commercial breakthrough, became a big damn hit, and won several Grammys. Who doesn’t like a break up album, after all?
I’ve always loved Julie Speed’s album cover even if I wasn’t up to speed on who did it until recently. It turns out that Speed is a friend of Colvin’s; the latter saw the painting and it inspired her to write Sunny Came Home.
The album is only available in the YouTube playlist format so I decided to post just the videos for Sunny Came Home, Get Out Of This House, and You and the Mona Lisa:
Atomic Rooster was a British prog-rock band best known to me for their swell name and the fact that Carl Palmer was their first drummer. Atomic Rooster also had some terrific roostery album covers beginning with their debut album. Here’s a sampler beginning with their 1970 eponymous LP featuring a mutant rooster:
Not all their album covers featured roosters but those are the ones I like the best. Next up are covers from two compilations, which are cockier than hell, which rhymes with cockrell:
Ready for some mutant rooster music? Here’s Atomic Rooster’s debut album in its entirety:
Switched-On Bach was revolutionary when it was released in 1968. It brought the original Moog synthesizer to the masses. It also has a swell cover with a hint that Walter Carlos would eventually become Wendy: Trans-Electronic Music Productions Inc.
I have a confession: I watched the eclipse on the tube with the other boobs. I ventured out briefly to shadow gaze but it was insanely hot so Oscar and I watched CBS and the Weather Channel. Della didn’t give a shit because it wasn’t about her. So it goes.
The sum total of my contribution to eclipse mania is to post this 1974 Billy Cobham album cover two days after the fact. Hey, at least it’s a great album made by great players including Cobham on drums, John Scofield on guitar, Michael Brecker on woodwinds, and Randy Brecker on trumpet. It’s fusion at its finest. The cover is swell as well.
The back cover is good but doesn’t eclipse the front:
Finally, here’s the whole damn album. Play it loud:
I’m reading Dave Weigel’s brilliant history of prog rock, The Show That Never Ends. One of the earliest prog bands were the Soft Machine who took their name from the title of a book by beat generation icon William S. Burroughs.
Circular cut-out in sleeve, revealing rotating ‘clockwork image’ card insert- through which the band members can be viewed on a further inserted full-color backing sheet.
The older brother of a friend of mine had the LP. I recall messing about with it much to his displeasure. Kids do the darndest things.
Here’s the cover:
Here’s the gatefold featuring the band and a woman’s butt:
Here’s the whole damn LP. Despite the blank look, if you click on play, it, well, plays;
I’ve selected Bad Company’s debut album because the cover spawned the logo that the band uses to this day. The logo was designed by Hipgnosis and still adorns Simon Kirke’s drum kit as well as providing a backdrop for their live shows.
I prefer the cover of the single of Can’t Get Enough to the LP back cover, so here it is:
Another Wednesday, another Sixties psychedelic album cover. I’m familiar with the loopy grandeur of Manfred Mann’s hit version of Bob Dylan’s The Mighty Quinn but I’d never seen the album before. It has a wicked cool cover by Victor Moscoso who got his start as one of the Fillmore poster artists. Moscoso has persisted and thrived since he executed this album cover in 1968.
The back cover is nothing to write home about. It’s a pity that the band is not depicted in Eskimo regalia sitting outside an igloo. Now that would be cool.
It was not exactly a shocker that this album isn’t online. Here’s the smash hit title track:
I’ve done more than my share of strange posts over the twelve years I’ve been blogging. This mashup may well take the cake but somehow it works. The title may be awkward but these are awkward times.
There were plenty of monkeyshines on Capitol Hill yesterday. The motion to proceed to debate the mystery Trumpcare bill passed in the Senate. That’s not the whole ballgame but the bad guys have the momentum right now. If anyone from Nevada is reading this post, it’s time to go off on Senator Dean Heller who tops the list of most endangered GOPers in 2018. I’ll be calling Double Bill Cassidy’s office again but he’ll do what he’s told by the leadership.
This is not the time to give up. Keep calling your Senators. They need to understand that they will pay a price for this vote. Senators *still* do not know what they’re actually voting for. If this weren’t so deadly serious, it would be funnier than a barrel of monkeys or the Marx Brothers’ flick Monkey Business. It’s time to send a big FUCK YOU to congressional Republicans for their health care votes. And what the hell is skinny repeal? It’s got nothing to do with Blake Farenholdt, that’s for sure. If he fought a duel with Collins or Murkowski I have no doubt who would prevail. It wouldn’t be the congresscritter who was once malaka of the week.
A word about John McCain. Every time I go soft on him, he does something terrible. I felt tremendous compassion for him over the de facto death sentence that was his diagnosis. I had planned to make his 2016 primary opponent Kelli Ward malaka of the week for crudely urging McCain to step aside. I deleted that post during McCain’s ludicrous speech after he voted AYE on the motion. If he was really concerned about the institution and “proper order” he would have given that speech *before* the vote and then voted NAY. I rarely yell at the teevee but I did Tuesday afternoon.
Shorter Adrastos:
McCain: All talk and no action. All profile and no courage.
This is the first time I’ve morphed an Album Cover Art entry into an instant analysis post and it will probably be the last. Lots of things are unprecedented in 2016.
In 1968, everyone had psychedelic album covers even the King of Salsa, Tito Puente. In Spanish-speaking countries, of course, the tile was El Rey. Whatever you call it, it’s a swell record with a groovy cover, baby or is that bebé ?
The good news is that the music isn’t a psychedelic knock-off but Tito’s classic mix of Cuban-Jazz and Salsa. It will make you wiggle in your chair. The entire album is not online but here are a few choice selections.
The Osmonds were effectively one of the first boy bands. I recall seeing them on the teevee when I was a kid. My mom liked The Andy Williams Show and the Osmonds were frequent guests. I preferred the talking bear myself.
The reason I’m doing an Osmonds LP cover is that I stumbled into a swell feature in the Guardian’s art section: how we made it. The piece on Crazy Horses was great fun as is the album art. The best bit was Jay Osmond’s description of their meeting with Elvis Presley:
When we met Elvis at one of his shows, he said: “Hey guys, I wanna show you something.” He opened up one of his closets and showed us all these jumpsuits. “Now that’s what you should be wearing,” he said and introduced us to his designer, Bill Belew, who did a jumpsuit for each of us, with accents in our favourite colours.
It’s time for the album art, which has an ecological Mormon white trash thing going on:
Here are the boys performing the title track of the album. And, yes, they’re wearing the aforementioned jump suits:
Jim Kweskinwas a respected folkie in the Sixties. He got involved with a semi-cult in Boston that was founded by the harmonica player in his Jug Band, Mel Lyman. There was a hair-raising story about the Lyman Family by David Felton in Rolling Stone in 1971. It was one of the magazine’s early forays into investigative reporting and it remains a helluva yarn.
The Lyman Family did not have an apocalyptic end a la the Manson clan or the Heaven’s Gate cult. Mel Lyman died in 1978 and members of the family founded a construction company, which is still active in Los Angeles. Jim Kweskin is a VP of that company: Fort Hill Construction.
Jim Kweskin’s America was recorded in 1971 during the heyday of the Lyman Family. It has a much longer official title as you can see from the cover. Richard D. Herbuck was a pseudonym for Mel Lyman. One cannot make this shit up. So it goes.
I’m not sure who did the album design but it’s a pretty good Sgt. Pepper inspired photo montage.
Blue Oyster Cult is one of the best band names ever. Their cover art was always pretty darn good as well. Here’s a sampler in chronological order for a change.
Finally, a scatological parody of the previous cover:
If you fear the reaper, here’s a song that asks you not to.
You would be well-advised, however, to fear the farter…
In Our Lifetime was Marvin Gaye’s sixteenth and last Motown/Tamla album. It came at a low point for the artist commercially, personally, and artistically. It represented something of an artistic comeback. He was ready to leave his ex-brother-in-law Berry Gordy’s stable of artists and gave it his best effort on his way out in 1981.
The deeply weird cover was designed and executed by Neil Breeden with input from Gaye. Marvin frequently spoke of the two Marvins: one angelic, the other demonic. The cover is particularly creepy because Marvin was shot dead by his father in 1984; a mere three years later.
There’s an odd but interesting essay about the cover art at Reading Vessel. This image comes from that post:
I’m pretty sure Breeden and Gaye were not predicting events that took place in the 21st Century. As Athenae said the other day, the world has always been on fire.
In Our Lifetime is only available on YouTube in the playlist format. It’s worth a listen:
Larry Graham is one of the best bassists of all-time. He started off with Sly and the Family Stone but got tired of working with the band’s brilliant but unreliable leader. He quit in 1972 and formed Graham Central Station, which is a pun on his name. No wonder I love this guy.
Graham Central Station were pop-soul-funk pioneers who have become, if not forgotten, overlooked. That’s one reason I’m posting the cover of their eponymous 1974 debut album. Another is that the photographs were taken by the great Bay Area rock photographer, Herb Greene. Finally, they’re my homeys and I saw them more than a few times when I was a wee laddie or is that shorty?
Here’s the whole damn album. As their funk contemporaries The Meters might say, get ready to funkify your life.
Abandoned Luncheonette was the Other Dynamic Duo’s third album. It was *not* their commercial breakthrough but features the song She’s Gone, which would go on to be a hit, just not in 1973.
On a warm summer day, once the album was finished, Barbara, her husband, Daryl and John drove from New York city to the rural spot on the road about 40 miles outside of Philadelphia. The group arranged permission to take photos of the old restaurant but they thought that the session was incomplete without getting inside. And so they snuck in and Barbara started shooting, carefully tip-toeing around broken glass and tile. The guys squeezed then into a booth and the rest is album cover history (the interior was used as the back cover). The owner began screaming at them when he realized where they were, and they hightailed it out, hopping into their yellow car and speeding away back to New York City.[2]
Wilson shot the black-and-white 35mm images on an old Nikon SLR and then began a silkscreen process to create the surreal color imagery, using a different stencil for each hue and then hand-coloring the final piece. Atlantic Records bought the idea with one change, to re-do the neon tubing letters, which had all been done by hand. It was the only album cover Wilson ever did.[2]
The result is this classic cover.
Here’s evidence of Daryl and John’s life of crime. One could even call them hamburglars.
The gatefold shows the former Rosedale Diner looking, well, abandoned.
Vive la France week continues with two Charles Aznavour album covers. Aznavour is still very much alive. He’ll turn 93 on May, 22. Aznavour is the child of Armenian immigrants, and has been a French national treasure for decades. Here’s how allmusic.com describes him:
Charles Aznavour is perhaps the best-known French music hall entertainer in the world — renowned the world over for the bittersweet love songs he has written and sung, which seem to embody the essence of French popular song, and also for his appearances on screen in such wildly divergent fare as Shoot the Piano Player, Candy, and The Tin Drum.
I’ve picked covers from early in Aznavour’s remarkable career. The first one comes from 1956. The Carnegie Hall LP came out in 1963 and its cover is tres meta:
Aznavour starred as a Bogie obsessed pianist in one of my favorite Truffaut films, so here’s some cinematic lagniappe:
Stevie Wonder was on top of the world in the 1970’s. His 1973 album Innervisions solidified his status as an artistic and commercial titan. It also has fabulous art by Efram Wolff.
Here’s the back cover from a CD version of the album:
It’s gatefold time. I’ll omit the joint rolling joke this time around. I like to keep my readers off balance.
Ry Cooder is one of the quirkiest artists in rock music history. And 1976’s Chicken Skin Music is quirky even by his standards. It’s also one of his best records. Btw, the title has nothing to do with fried chicken: it’s a Hawaiian expression that means music that gives you goosebumps. Cooder nailed it there.
The album art was done in a Mexican folk art style by Kenny Price. Here we go:
