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Tag: Rock
Crappy Album Covers #152 — The Death of Death
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Crappy Album Covers #150 — When being cool is a bad thing
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Crappy Album Covers #149 — Women perpendicular and parallel
Bob Geldof to deals with the three dominant sources of insecurity, satisfaction and anxiety for the human species in his 2002 album, “Sex, Age, and Death”.
While this photo had to be part of the best photo shoot ever for the photographer, it reduces the theme of the album to a cliche. Many others probably thought the same, since there is no record of the album or its hit single, an anthem to “Pale White Girls”, charting. Since then, he had met a fork in his career path, and has seemed to have chosen activism. Geldof was the former frontman for The Boomtown Rats, and has received many awards and honorary degrees. I don’t think this record cover influenced anyone’s decision to give him accolades, though. |
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And you see, the band Louis XIV charted this album at #24 in 2005. Any elements from the album design made it possible? Both have nude/semi-nude women on the cover. That’s old-school. This woman is parallel to her photographer. Is that it? Naw…
Hmm… Oh, yes! This one has a “Parental Advisory/Explicit Lyrics” sticker on it. That has to be the reason. Just having naked women on the album cover doesn’t cut it anymore, folks. Those warning stickers have made many a mediocre act skyrocket to fame and glory. Geldof ought to get with the program. This album, called “The Best Little Secrets are Kept” has an otherwise un-original concept with the playlist once again written on the skin of the model posing nude for the album. To be fair, there was the Hoover, Alabama Board of Education in the Southern US who stopped them from playing in Hoover, because the lyrics were too explicit. Leave it to school boards such as the Hoover, Alabama school board to provide the kind of publicity that could never have been bought at any price. |
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Crappy Album Covers #148 — Seeing things from a different perspective
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Crappy Album Covers #140 — Bad Hair III
Enough with bad hair on women, Guys are equally capable of falling out of the wrong side of the bed and combing their hair with a mixmaster.
Many may like the music inside this 1998 double CD by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, but clearly, their hair is wearing them, not the other way around. The album was recorded over two separate years, all but 5 tracks were done in 1967 and the rest in 1969. |
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Chris Lee clearly has a case of bed-head. Photo was likely cut off at the top to hide the “cow-lick”.
This 2003 album “Cool Rock” has been mildly recieved by reviewers, and has not charted, that I am aware of. |
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Crappy Album Covers #139 — Out of their depth
Allmusic.com sums Pat Boone up best. Having started his hit-making career before the “British Invasion”, Boone was the only worthy rival to Elvis Presley. Boone was the “nice guy” of the set, seeming to symbolise wholesome values at a time when Rock and Roll was considered by many to be a sign of the apocalypse. Many can say what they want about him, but nobody can deny that he’s had 38 top-40 hits, all of them in a seven-year span between 1957 and 1963.
Boone, like Presley, were experts at picking music from R&B and so-called “race music” and delivering it to white audiences at a time that many radio stations would not play music by Black artists.
Descendant of frontiersman Daniel Boone (if Allmusic says it, therefore it must be true), Boone broke away from his recent Gospel singing efforts to blaze a new path for himself in 1997 with “In A Metal Mood: No More Mr Nice Guy”, the subtitle named after the Alice Cooper hit, which he covers.
Hear Boone sing Van Halen’s “Panama”, or Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water”; Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Paradise City”; Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”. Some of this stuff I can imagine being more believable, though it is still a stretch: Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” or Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary” could remotely be imagined to be sung by Boone. There are no satisfying audio clips that I could find, so you can just preview this stuff at sites like Amazon, where they will have 30-second clips. This link is to CD Universe.
While it should be clear that this album is an abomination on many levels, I think it was intended that way. And Boone knows that big band treatments of this kind of music is best served dedpan. Few had the stomach for this album, which peaked at #125 on Billboard in 1997.
It should be added that this album was recorded when Boone was at age 60. Much of his Christian following didn’t get the joke, and the Trinity Broadcasting Network dropped him from their program “Gospel America” after he appeared at the American Music Awards dressed in black leather and covered in wash-off tattoos.
Completed in 1978, long after they had the wind taken out of their sails by punk and disco, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, and Carl Palmer released this light album, intended to complete their contractual obligations before their first breakup. Various re-releases have been issued, as late as 2008.
Light as it is, “Love Beach” still sports a 20-minute track called “Memoirs of An Officer and a Gentleman”.
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(Images may be disturbing) Crappy Album Covers #138 — Food on Vinyl VII
This is the last (I promise) of the Herb Alpert parody covers I have.
Jabberwocky is an audio montage troupe in the tradition of Negativland and Plunderphonics. All these folks use spliced audio sequences and multi-track audio in order to make social commentary on media, popular culture, sexuality, war, and religion. You can download the whole album (In the tradition of Plunderphonics and Negativland, audio and artwork are open-sourced) and cover art here. |
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It is said that donkeys like carrots, so one can hold a carrot on the end of a stick in front of the donkey, and this makes them move forward, thus overcoming stubbornness.
That’s the cliche I think the album depicts. The idea is that the donkey never gets the carrot, but hopes that it does. Kind of like the deal that Badfinger made with Warner at the time this album came out, 1972. This album was the last one made for Apple Records, essentially ending their close association with The Beatles. Other bloggers have noted confusion about the name Badfinger and Ass being on the same cover. It is a pet peeve that I have had of most bands since the early 70s, in that the metaphors are so mixed up that the message is completely lost. Usually a sign of what is inside the cover. This LP peaked at #122 with its single “The Apple of My Eye” peaking at #102 on Billboard. |
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Crappy Album Covers #136 — Food on Vinyl V
While I can’t say whether the alternative group Soul Asylum qualifies as Aplert “wannabees” exactly, having bassist Karl Mueller sit half-naked in a mountain of clam dip and other unintelligible seafood was actually something that made Alpert very un-amused. And since he is the owner of A&M Records, who in turn own Twin Tone (where Soul Asylum was signed under), this 1989 album was something that almost marked the beginning of the end of the group.
This album is still in print (according to Wikipedia) under Rykodisk. |
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Is it a parody of Alpert’s record? *Is* it?
Take a good look at the woman’s “dress”: yes, kiddies, it is made of bubblegum. This is “Right to Chews: Bubblegum Classics Revisited”. Features groups with quasi-familiar names (at least to me) like “The Mitch Easter Sound!”, “Jim Laspesia With Michael Quercio”, “The Rubinoos”. This website has verified that this 2002 album does not suck. It’s currently selling on many websites for around $15. |
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Crappy Album Covers #128 — Channelling the Great Rock Legends
The design element (there is only one) that John Bayley uses combines all of the most incoherent elements of late-60s album design, hoping it will amount to something, for this 1976 album, “Minstrel of the Morning”.Lessee … what do they throw in? A clay tiger, a kid in a lotus position (who will surely become warped when he gets older), a nearly comatose woman in a flowing dress (the feeding tube was temporarily disconnected for the photo shoot), a sitar, a mandolin, John Bayley channeling Mr. T, and a Wal-Mart circular rug, curtains, a painted over Roman blind, and some artificial plants.
A copy of this was sold on E-Bay last year for $75.00 |
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The closest explanation for this disaster of an album cover is … okay, some guy goes to the Harlem branch of the Salvation Army store in New York City, buys a random mixture of men’s, boy’s and lady’s clothing, then goes to the neighbouring soup kitchen at the Habour Light, and tells four jobless hoboes that he is willing to pay them two cases of beer each if they will dress up in these clothes for an album cover. At this point the hoboes still hadn’t bargained for mascara being part of the deal. But hey, there’s two cases of beer on the line. Each! That wasn’t so bad, but then the photographer told them they had to bathe first.One of the hoboes angrily responded “What’s wrong with our personal hygeine? We take a bath every February 29th whether we need it or not!” That was almost the last straw, and after nearly an hour of thinking about it, they realised that they won’t be able to afford that much beer for a very long time, so they grudgingly obeyed.
This is why “They have got to rock and roll.” |
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Crappy Album Covers #126 — Four Guys on a Cover
Here is the first of the cliche “Four guys on an album cover”. I first misread the title as “Jack not again”, but saw that the “n” had a tail like the way some people cursively write their lowercase p’s.
So, the album set in what is likely the early 70s, is “Jackpot Again”. I have little information on this unconvincing-looking Beatlesque foursome. |
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… But the Delltones show them that they can look unconvincing no matter what the clothing.
The Delltones actually have five members in their 2009 lineup, with fellow Queenslanders Woody Finlayson, Danny Mayers, Merv Dick, Ian “Peewee” Wilson, and Owen Booth. They have kept a following since 1958, and still perform in gigs in Australia. Peewee Wilson appears to be the only enduring member. |
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Crappy Album Covers #115 — Trophy animals and trophy women
First, let’s talk about trophy animals.Kind of reminds me of the 1986 college radio smash hit “All I Got Were Clothes For Christmas” by Happy Flowers.
Also, looks like the musician is getting friendly with his trophy deer. There is no info on who this person is or why he has the logo for the American Lung Association painted upside-down on his forehead. |
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Everything was going romantically until Ethel noticed trophies of a beheaded blonde and redhead on the wall, and remembering she is a brunette, she concluded that George must be a collector. Things became tense after that.Yes, trophy women. That is, women’s heads as wall-mounted trophies. This should have been the album cover for Fine Young Cannibals’ “Hunters and Collectors”.
Elliot Lawrence was an American Jazz Pianist and band leader during the late 1950s. He won two Tony Awards for his compositions in TV and film in the early 1960s. |
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Crappy Album Covers #112 — “By his stripes we were healed”
The title of ths blog, “By his stripes we were healed”, is the last line of verse 53:5 in the book of Isaiah.
This tells me that Stryper has come to save us from, uhh …, what? Whtever it is, they had to bring out the guns and armoured vehicles for it. Something tells me that the anwer to our interpersonal conflicts should not involve the use of military vehicles. |
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Clever title, Isabel. I actually like it very much. It says that I choose God for something I like, not for something other people are coercing me to like. You have to respect that.
No information exists on Isabel Baker that I could find, except that this blogger found an MP3 of her gospel singing. This goes beyond categorizations of “Christian Rock.” She sounds more like a cross between Lydia Lunch and Diamanda Galas. While these latter two don’t qualify as Christian Rock, the resemblance between kinds of music was uncanny. I might even add Romeo Void. By the end of that song sample, one would be led to think that she loves God just a bit more than is, uh, Christian. Where have we heard that one before? |
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Crappy Album Covers #111 — People are Beautiful, man
As an extra added bonus, and to conclude this post just the right way, here is REM, featuring Kate Pierson of the B-52s with the 1991 hit “Shiny, Happy People”:
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Crappy Album Covers #110 — Minimalist design
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Crappy Album Covers #108 — Sucking back in the day
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Crappy Album Covers #107 — The International Language of Bad Taste III
Here is Mylon, being photographed for his 1977 LP “Weak at the Knees” while trying to get a piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken out from between his teeth. While he is from the Southern US, I claim that his French name qulifies as international (hey, it’s my blog, I can do what I like!).
Mylon LeFevre was a top-selling songwriter, having had many of his songs sold to the likes of Elvis Presley. He is credited with recording with The Charlie Daniels Band, and Sammy Johns. In the 1970s, can i buy viagra members of his group Broken Heart went on to form The Atlanta Rhythm Section. |
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At least you may not need to understand Hebrew to get that this is likely comedy album. Otherwise, I can’t explain the use of a telephone as a musical instrument.
Hagshash HaHiver, literally “The Pale Trackers” is Israel’s offering to the world as a major comedy group. At least they were big in Israel, adding many phrases to the Hebrew lexicon. The HaGashashim wish you to “drive in peace; the keys are locked inside”. |
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Crappy Album Covers #106 — Crappy Canadian Covers
… And both of them are from that Canadian group from Montreal called April Wine. This group was really big in Canada in the 70s and 80s, and they had some of my favourite songs that I grew up with. Trouble was, while their music was really good, their record covers consistently sucked greasy cheese balls. They were flat, cliche covers that made no impression whatsoever on the buyer. Here are two of, in my opinion, the worst album covers that April Wine had offered in this vein.
This is their 1973 album “Electric Jewels”, which is cliche in every detail and screams to the buyer nothing more than “this is an album with music in it”. It totally belies what is inside the covers of this album. Well, there is “Electric” in the title, so you might be expected to play this one a little louder.
While just about every track on this record is a strong track, capable of getting you hooked, none of its three singles made the top-10 (Lady Run, Lady Hide (peaked @ 19, lasted 5 weeks); Weeping Widow (peaked @ 40, lasted 2 weeks); and Electric Jewels (never made the top 40)). Both records in today’s posting could easily have been designed by K-Tel. |
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The cover for “Live at the El Mocambo” embellishes the design on the backdrop of one of the stages of the landmark night club. The two palm trees were part of El Mocambo’s trademark. But this idea only works as an album cover backdrop if you live in Toronto. If you are from outside Toronto, or have never been in the night club, you are left scratching your head, wondering if they’ve adopted a Jimmy Buffett sound.
The ElMo, as it is known to us locals, is located on 404 Spadina, in the middle of what they call the Computer Ghetto in Downtown Toronto. Got changed to a dance studio a few years back, then re-opened again. The Ramones played there. So did Lou Reed, Blondie, The Police, Black Flag, Jonhhy Winter, Charles Mingus, Rush, Elvis Costello, U2, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and even Marilyn Monroe. She played there in 1958. When April Wine recorded live for this album in 1977, they were opening for The Rolling Stones. Just like a Canadian band to take all that tradition, and all those bragging rights, and make an album cover that is as lame as you can possibly make it. Believe it or not, their concerts were not lame, explaining why they recorded 7 live albums in their tenure. This album reputedly has a killer live version of Oowatanite. But who would know? By 1979, I remember noticing piles of these albums in the delete bin. |
In total April Wine had released 35 singles by 1993, and 21 of them charted in the Top 40. 7 of them were hits in the U. S., with three of them peaking on Billboard in the Top 40: Could Have Been A Lady (1972), Roller (1979), and Just Between You and Me (1981). At least 3 of their albums went either platinum or double platinum.
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Crappy Album Covers #105 — Selling fantasy
The Jay Gordon Concert Orchestra offers the album “Strictly for Lovers” off of the TOPS label, a CAC factory which was located at one time somewhere in the southwestern U. S. which has supplied my blog with a healthy number of CACs thus far.
There’s an attractive woman, whispering something into her boyfriend’s ear. Something like “I haff zee microfilm.” Anyone who is not a lover should stay away from this record. Turn it off! Don’t buy it! Put it back in the remainder bin! |
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TOPS made money actually selling radiation instruments, if readers of my blog will remember. This could make them part of the Military Industrial Complex. And while we are on the topic of war, here are the natives of Auburn, New York with their band Manowar, with their 1983 album (not found on TOPS, sorry), called “Into Glory Hole Ride”.
This cover has been fodder for many a CAC blog, mostly because of the overwhelmingly subconscious homosexual slant involving handlebar moustaches and loincloths. OK… maybe a little more than subconscious. I suppose they could have called their album “Hairway to Steven”, but the Butthole Surfers already have that album title. Manowar is notable for owning their own label and distribution system. They are a true “Indie” band. Their label is called Magic Circle Records. Wikipedia says that Manowar broke the longstanding record in 1994 for the world’s loudest rock band. Beating The Who by 3.5 decibels, their Hanover concert was measured at 129.5 decibels. Over the years, The Swans, Motorhead, AC/DC, Deep Purple, My Bloody Valentine, and The Rolling Stones have all surpassed this, breaking the 130 decibel mark. Manowar beat them all in 2008 with a Magic Circle Fest concert that measured 139 dB. Guiness Book has stopped making records of “loudest concerts” due to the prospect of encouraging hearing damage. |
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Crappy Album Covers #104 — Crappy Blockbusters
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