Crappy Album Covers #325 — Christmas Messages you probably don’t want to hear

One knows that Yoko must have been going though a creative slump back in 1991 when Ryko released this EP. It’s hard to fathom who would spend their Christmas putting this one in their CD player.
… Unless, of course, this 2006 Billy Idol album was their only alternative. He should have released this under his birth name, William Broad. Unless he can make “White Christmas” sound like “White Wedding”, it’s probably not going to work out. The track list includes mostly traditional Christmas songs.

 

Visits: 106

Crappy Album Covers #324 — The Horror, the horror …

Some covers are ugly for a reason. This one’s ugly because it’s a bootleg of a live concert in Philadelphia by the Danish heavy metallers Mercyful Fate. Bootlegs normally have substandard covers done by someone who did not understand the fine line between scary and ugly. You can listen to this bootleg for free here. The sound isn’t that bad.
This LP (year unknown) is a sound effects album by the BBC. The cover is probably intended to be a summary of the contents therein.

Visits: 408

[Media Monday] Christmas Drinking

BBC Scotland is here to remind you that if you drink, don’t drive. At least, not with your beer goggles on.

Visits: 33

Strider’s Journal is back on the air

Last weekend, the site was down for two days due to a host of errors, both man-made and computer-generated. For most of this week, until a few moments ago, I was locked out of my site, automatic twittering was disabled, just a mess. Well, I can finally log in, and let’s hope I can clean a few things up.

One of the problems was an erroneous buy tramadol no perscription domain change. Things have been changed back to normal from our end, but it will take a long time (more than a couple of days) for the domain name change to propagate back to the way it was worldwide.

Posting has gone on automatically as expected, in my absence, so at least something was working.

Well, I’m back again. Home sweet home.

Visits: 56

Crappy Album Covers #323 — And remember this Christmas season, Don’t stink and drive

Antonio Fargas‘s claim to fame was his work as police informant Huggy Bear in the 1970s police drama Starsky and Hutch. He also acted in a string of so-called “blaxploitation” movies such as Foxy Brown.

He has appeared in many movies and even had a role as Doc in the now-defunct series “Everbody Hates Chris” as late as 2006.

And, there is this track “It’s Christmas” from the album, showing that some Carribean rhythms are not out of place on a Christmas record:

[mp3t track=”Antonio_Fargas_-_Its_Christmas.mp3″]

No, actually, this is not an album cover, but a picture of the character in question. Click on this, and it links to my source for all this, Wikipedia.

Mr Hankey The Christmas Poo was a South Park character back in 1997 that was a talking and singing poo (are there any other kinds?). The poo would only talk to certain characters. To everyone else, Hankey would just kind of lie there and be … poo.

Imagine having a conversation with Hankey, with passers-by looking at you talking to a poo lying on the sidewalk. Everyone will think you’ve lost it, especially when you try to convince the passer-by that Hankey’s singing to you, too.

Hankey, purportedly, is a reaction to recent moves made by many officials to order the removal of nativity scenes from government buildings. The idea that creators Terry Parker and Matt Stone had, was to represent Jesus as poo. Got you angry for the Lord already, didn’t it? See? It worked!

Apparently, Hankey generated little controversy, probably indicating that no one cared. But actually, someone did care enough in 1998 to nearly file a lawsuit. That lawsuit came from John Kricfalusi, creator of the Ren and Stimpy show. Seems that Parker and Stone stole his idea of a talking poo, because Kricfalusi created the idea of Nutty the Friendly Dump earlier, another talking and singing poo. And so the battle of the poos began in earnest, with each cartoonist fighting for their claim to being the rightful poo creator. But all this misses the point of course. We all create our own poos, and it is the poo within ourselves that we must reckon with. Only when we get our poo together that we find we can go on in life. At least that is what my poo told me. Well, not my real poo, more like my inner poo.

 

Visits: 84

Crappy Album Covers #322 — Pretentious Prog

On a faraway planet, children crawl out of their homes inside of outdoor toilets to greet the Sun God. They call their place the “Houses of the Holey.” 

Led Zeppelin’s 1973 classic “Houses of the Holy” yielded a minor single, D’yer Maker, but it did end up as one of the top 200 albums of all time, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and also won a Grammy in 1974.
The Korean version of this album is a lot crappier where the robot (or whatever it is) is fishing the band members out of a rusty trash barrel (or a busted rooftop, it’s hard to tell). 

This is the album containing the 1977 monster hit “We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions”.

 

Visits: 136

[Media Monday] Bad Day at the Cube Farm

From an uncredited video, heavily circulated over the years. The computer is giving this cube farmhand a hard time, and he finally goes all snakey. Take a look at the fella in the cubicle next to him. Think he is keeping an eye on him for the boss of the cube plantation?

Visits: 37

Crappy Album Covers #321 — From sketchy to artless

Barr is a Swedish group, which released this album with a rather austere and bleak album cover. But the YouTube video below shows that you can’t judge a record by its cover. Barr has had an undeservedly small following, and are relatively unknown internationally. In fact, it gets me into one of my rants where I preach about the fact that popular (top 40) music has only gone to the dogs only because singles are never released of any good music done by musicians with any real skill these days. Just don’t get me started. I can go on all day about it.

“Skogsbo is the place” is a classical/folk album released in 2008 by Barr.
Mystery was a band covered in the last post. Given the choice between adolescent art and a Bryce rendering of geometric and humanoid shapes, it is difficult to wonder which is worse.

This is from their 1992 self-titled debut album.

Here is Barr, doing a track from “Skogsbo is the place”, called Moonfall

Visits: 142

Crappy Album Covers #320 — Painfully Unoriginal

Danish prog rockers Royal Hunt released their sixth album in 2001, called “The Mission”, a nod to Ray Bradbury. 

There isn’t really much to the Bryce rendering, just a knock-off to say that this album is “interesting”, and you’re supposed to listen to it an think about it a lot. It is highly likely that it is a near copy of the album cover below, from an album released a year earlier by Canadian prog rock group “Mystery”.

Royal Hunt’s most recent album is “X”, released earlier this year.
Canadian prog rockers “Mystery” had this design for their 2000 LP, “At The Dawn of a New Millenium”. While I don’t think anyone cares about stealing the jacket design, I am sure it ruffled a few feathers in the Quebec-based group. 

They have borne comparisons to Yes and Journey, and it had been recommended by many in the CAC Blogosphere that if you wanted to get to know their music, this album is actually a great place to start. “Dawn” is actually a compilation of their three albums prior to this one. So, while it doesn’t exactly qualify as a “best of” album, it makes a decent sampler.

As for a comparison to Yes, one of their lead singers, Benoit David, has been touring with Yes as a replacement for Jon Anderson since 2008. He is now an official member of the group. That said, he still had time to release another album with Mystery earlier this year, called “One Among The Living”.

 

Visits: 148

[Media Monday] The Sweater, by Roch Carrier

This is a children’s story by a Quebec-born author named Roch Carrier. A quote from this story reads: “We lived in three places: the school, the Church, and the skating rink. But our real life was on the skating rink.” This quote is seen as striking such a chord in Canadian culture, that it was chosen by the Canadian Mint in 2001 to be placed on the back of our five-dollar bills.

Roch Carrier was brought up as a non-conformist by wearing a Maple Leafs sweater in 1940s rural Quebec.

Here is the story, forever preserved by The National Film Board.

Visits: 180

[Adult Content] Crappy Album Covers #319 — Giant Chix Attack Manhattan!!!!

This was likely the same cover used for the prog rock group Jo Jo Gunne for their 1972 LP “Jumping the Gunne”, revived here by Rhino Records, who knows album curios when they see them. 

Yes, as you might guess, this was likely the album cover blamed for ending their one-hit wonder career, precipitating their breakup in 1975. Their first hit from their previous, and debut album, a UK top-10 hit called Run, Run, Run, charted in 1972. It also made the American top 40 the same year.

They have since re-formed in 2005 and have started touring again. They even have a web site.
Harry Potter has secretly been taking female hormone supplements, and they tell him the transitioning surgery will be painless. He wants people to call him Alison Arngrim from now on. 

Alison Arngrim, who by now is 48 years old, is a New York born actress and stand-up comedian. Her biggest role was during her youth when she played Nellie Oleson in the TV serial “Little House on the Prairie”.

You can actually surf to Alison’s own website, where she parodies Nellie Oleson with her 2010 book “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch” more than I ever will.

 

Visits: 99

Getting more out of my camera

I have a Nikon Coolpix L3 that I have had for a number of years. In its day, it sold for close to 200 bucks and had a 5-megapixel resolution. These days, that level of resolution would only be acceptable for a cell phone, but I have learned to be rather happy with my purchase anyway. The color and detail are both great, and while the camera enjoys occasional but steady use, I use it seldom enough that I would forget some of its features.

I discovered this when taking photos of white paper with black print on them, under lighting I would have imagined to be more than adequate (two 300 W incandescent bulbs shining not more than 1 metre from the paper, and shining directly on the paper). What I kept getting was brownish-yellow digital photographs of these paper when they were displayed under GIMP. If I took several photographs, it took time to correct the white balance, and to remove any other extraneous color. After all, the color of the paper is supposed to be white. For about 30 or so photographs, it took over an hour to correct them all. I was even thinking to myself that I would have to get a camera that would be smarter about the lighting conditions.

And as I was pricing them out, I found that cameras half the price of my camera had over 12 megapixel resolution, and can focus optically to at least 4x (mine does 3x). In my frugal mind, that still meant an expenditure had to be made, and I needed to look more closely at some of these cameras. One helpful salesman told me that I needed a way for the camera to do the white balance internally, so I can eliminate the need for using GIMP, or Photoshop, or most other post-processing software. He showed me some cameras that can do this, and can update the image as you are adjusting it.

I left, still not making a purchase, because my instincts were telling me to check my own camera. Indeed, my old clunker L3 does indeed do white balance adjustment, and that takes care of most of the problems I had been having. I found that I could not directly control the ISO settings, which internally control light levels internally, so after correcting for white balance, my photos still came out looking dark, especially considering the strong lighting conditions I was using. I read that the L3 controls the ISO settings internally, and it is likely that it is over-compensating for the strong light, still resulting in my having to do some post-processing under GIMP. For the moment, it will be a bug in the camera’s design that I’m willing to live with for the time being. Maybe what is being indicated here is that I need not take any pains with anything other than ambient lighting (seeing that daylight pictures come out so well).

Visits: 68

Crappy Album Covers #318 — Swingin’ People

Some guys are “leg men”, others are “breast men”. Here’s a “family man”. He should tell wifey to go easy on the popcorn. Followers of this blog will recognise that nudity had been a major staple of classical, big band, and other nerdy non-rock albums throughout the late sixties to early seventies, beginning with Herb Alpert. 

By the time this album came out in 1970, Enoch Light and The Light Brigade was a big band that had been around off and on for 40 years. They largely had their heyday in the 1930s, and Enoch Light (1905-1978) was winding down his career by this time. He is credited with making experimental stereo recordings at a time when most homes and radio stations had mono equipment, chiefly during the 1950s and 1960s.
It is widely suspected that this is a Photoshop job. Since allmusic.com says that Buddy Cole (1916-1964) was active before 1960, an album cover like this would have been a little too much for the sensibilities of the McCarthy Era (late ’50s and early ’60s). However, what many claim to be the original cover make the young lady on the cover look like an amputee, with no legs at all. My claim is that they are both ‘shop jobs. 

There are many subtle clues that this present cover is a ‘shop job. For one thing, she appears to have no left knee, which should be showing from behind her right arm. I noticed that most CAC bloggers that put this photo up failed to point this out. Actually, if you’re busy admiring her legs, it’s hard to notice. But once you do, you also notice that they’re disproportionately long, that her pelvis appears out of joint with her hips. To see this, size up her butt (I know you’re doing this anyway), then see where her panties are in relation to her butt (I know you’re staring at that too). Her whole butt looks double-jointed. Sorry if I just ruined this for you. But this is called a Crappy Album Cover journal for a reason.

Cole was a pianist who had an interest in the organ, and made several recordings with Henry Mancini and other big-band musicians of the era.

This album, “Have Organ, Will Swing” is not listed on Allmusic.com.

Visits: 103

Stoned dude still waiting for cybersex on the webcam after 5 days

The truth is, the cybersex act had already come and gone charges have been made to his credit card, and he hadn’t noticed. He still thinks it hasn’t happened. In fact, he has been sitting in the same position for five days, had a few days’ growth on his beard, and his hair now needs combing. He’s tired after waiting for 5 days and he has forgotten why he was sitting there in the first place.

Visits: 45

Crappy Album Covers #317 — How Ordinary People Cope with Body Image

Retro prog rockers Flamborough Head, with their 2005 album, Tales of Imperfection, appear to make an album theme about female body image, although I am not clear if they could carry this for all 7 tracks on this CD and get away with it. 

Since Flamborough Head is also the name of a county on the east coast of England, I thought this was a British group. But according to their website, this group is Dutch.
Jamaican Winston Foster, known to his adoring admirers as Yellowman for his albino appearance, has this album which seemed to have upstaged rap and hip-hop stylings by a couple of years at least, with this 1985 album, entitled “Walking Jewlery Store”. 

And Hip-Hop and Rap artists have been copping his style since. Sound bites from his songs can be found on albums by NWA, The Notorious B. I. G., Tupac Shakur, and Mos Def, to name a few.

He has released albums as late as 2007.

Visits: 116

[Audio] Crappy Album Covers #316 — More Commercial Tie-ins

An example of Commercial Tie-Ins: This is possibly a record given to Michelin Tire salesmen in order to give the salesmen something to say to their customers by way of promoting the tires. Here is a track from their promotional material, from about 1960, though it may not have come from this particular album. Kudos to Bunk Strutts at Tacky Raccoons for bringing this to my attention.
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This is from one of my old posts. I post it again because I have found a soundtrack from such albums courtesy of April Winchell.

[media id=24 width=320 height=24]

Visits: 194

Crappy Album Covers #315 — Embroideries of crappy album covers

Here is the second send-up to Tarkus that we have seen here in the CAC blogosphere.  It is one thing to have a crappy album cover like the ugly ELP 1971 LP, but it is quite another to have the armadillo tributed on a piece of embroidery for a wollen pullover. 

Not much info on this LP, except that this is the first of at least two prog tribute LPs, the second attributed to Gerard (sans Ars Nova) in 2002.
CD Universe still sells used copies of this 1994 limited pressing CD. It was a limited pressing, because Shrapnel Records is just a tiny record label with a limited distribution. Nevertheless, little info exists on Derek Taylor. 

But a ton of information exists on another Derek Taylor, the one who died in September 1997 who was The Beatles’ publicist. No relation.

Visits: 74

Crappy Album Covers #314 — Bruno’s Younger Half-Brother

Bruno’s younger half-brother Tomas wanted to get into show business too. But unlike Bruno, he went to Spain where he thought there may be more of a market for playing accordion while taking your clothes off.At a certain point, when he has taken all of his clothes off, he plays his accordion down at the groin level …. verrrrrry delicately…..
Tomas’s father Andre, mother Bertille, and big brother Laszlo has decided to put out a French-language album, to show off their linguistic diversity. Bertille can’t do much except stare at the floor since she sprained her wrist playing maracas a little over-zealously last week. Laszlo wishes he were in a heavy metal group, but his father made him take accordion lessons instead. This “family band” thing is cramping Laszlo’s style.Don’t know much at all about these records.

 

Visits: 95

[Adult Content] Crappy Album Covers #313 — More people that worry me

The kind of only definition of romantic that this album conjures up is reminiscent of cheap 70s porn, with the requisite bad acting and bad writing. Since this is an instrumental album, it could very well be the same musicians that performed on the movie. Martin Denny is a well known pianist who should know better. He is known as the “father of exotica” music. Definitely not the father of erotica, with this LP.
Surely this is some kind of joke. If it indeed is a joke and not a real record cover, it has  to be the best retouching job in the history of photography. But alas, it is the real thing. This is a various artists collection of racy music and comedy. Even by today’s standards, the album cover and title give me the creeps. I just hope she returns her pussy back to her daddy once she’s done playing with it. I mean the cat.

Visits: 125

Crappy Album Covers #312 — Hard-lookin’ album covers

This entry concerns guys whose faces should not have been so prominent as the selling point of a record  album. 

One thing for sure, you won’t forget this guy’s face, so it does have that going for it. Tominthebox.com discusses albums like this, where, with the advent of shareware graphics packages, along with faster computers, anyone with a 486 and up could have easily put together an album cover like this in minutes in the mid-90s.

Songs include heartwarming titles such as “If I die tonight because I’ll kill you, would you be sure that you would go to Heaven?” Kinda makes you feel closer to God, doesn’t it?
Nothing like a hard-looking hippie posing as some kind of “Nature Boy” to make you want to cling to city life that much more. 

Eden Ahbez (1908-1995) wrote the smash hit “Nature Boy” in the mid-40s which became a #1 hit for 8 weeks.

WIkipedia discusses a day in the life of the eccentric Eden Ahbez:

Living a bucolic life from at least the 1940s, he traveled in sandals and wore shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He camped out below the first L in the Hollywood Sign above Los Angeles and studied Oriental mysticism. He slept outdoors with his family and ate vegetables, fruits, and nuts. He claimed to live on three dollars per week.

Visits: 42