Crappy Album Covers #258 — Georgy Porgy Puddn’ ‘n’ Pie

This is the one-hit wonder  for drummer and bandleader Rob Kuban and his In-Men, called Look Out for The Cheater, which reached #12 in 1966.

This song even made it to the Rock-And-Roll Hall of Fame’s permanent exhibit of one-hit wonders.

Kuban wasn’t the lead singer on this tune, however. That job was left for Walter Scott (1943-1983) who, in the greatest of all ironies, was murdered by James WIlliams, with the collusion of Walter’s wife JoAnn. James and JoAnn were married in 1986. The marriage must have been short-lived, however, as she got 5 years in prison, while James likely received life imprisonment.

Dick Lucas likes to live on the edge, doesn’t he? He meets a nice lady, they go out for some time, he jilts her, they break up, then he misses her and asks for her to come back.

Most songs which explore the tangled nature of love would say things like “take a chance on me”. This one is even more edgier, with the albumtitle being “Would You Take Another Chance on Me?”

The chick who is standing away from him is clearly weighing her options.

Here are The In-Men, with their only top-40 hit.

Visits: 94

Crappy Album Covers #257 — The Gay Life

Playwright and church minister Al Carmine’s (1936-2005) 1973 “Off-off-Broadway” play “Faggot”, was a play which managed to encompass all facets of gay life. The play was likely a celebration of the declassification of homosexuallity as a mental illness, being the first-ever gay musical, and likely the first-ever gay musical, period. Homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness by fiat, by the APA in 1973, the same year as the play.

Historical gay characters featured in the play were Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Catherine the Great.
George Kennedy’s 1967 spoken-word album “Homosexuality in The American Male” struggles with the “mental illness” paradigm of what we seem to accept today merely as a lifestyle choice.

A track can be heard here, courtesy of April Winchell:

[media id=13 width=320 height=25]

Visits: 103

Crappy Album Covers #256 — Why some marketing efforts fail

This post shows that not all women are chosen to grace an album cover for their “prurient potential” “marketing” ability. I can’t possibly think that this album is serious. Must be a “metal parody” record of some kind, must be. 

Shock jock and Arizonan native Dave Pratt have been recording goofy musical parodies for KUPD since he was 18. As you can see, he even displays his own logo. Twice. Is that really necessary?
What is it that makes this album crappy? La piece de la resistance of this record cover has to be the placement of the price tag for the record, which is no fault of the record cover designers. But it is pure genius. The icing on the cake. The only redeeming factor is that, clearly, the chick on this cover was not chosen for her salesmanship ability, thus winning accolades of those who prefer less commercialism. There is a single from this EP that also uses this same chick. 

This is their first-ever album, an EP, really, released in 1995 by the band 12 Rounds. They have been releasing recordings sporadically as recently as 2009.

Visits: 88

Crappy Album Covers #255 — Fascism’s Greatest Hits

A couple of posts ago, I gave a couple of CACs from what may be arguably called “the loony left”. To add balance, I thought I would remind you about the Loony Right.

These guys in the photo could well have the word “Ditto!” written on their heads.
I am the way to the city of woe.
I am the way to a foresaken people.
I am the way to eternal sorrow.
Sacred justice moved my architect.
I was raised here by divine omnipotence,
Primodial love and ultmmate intellect.
Only those elements time cannot wear
were made before me, and beyond time I stand.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

— Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III
Inscription above the gate to Hell’s vestibule

Visits: 84

Crappy Album Covers #254 — More Chix as Marketeers

I am not sure who decided to put “School’s Out” and “Tumbling Dice” alongside songs like “Song Sung Blue” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb”.

I would be very, very surprised if these songs were from the original artists.

Another token chick on the cover to act as the sales rep for this LP.
Not sure what country these are from (Netherlands? South Africa?), but we have another lovely saleslady here, with almost unrecogniseable songs (at least in North America). Supertramp’s “Give A Little Bit” seems to be there, but the other titles could be the titles of tons of tunes done by any number of artists.

The saleslady appears to be sitting in the deepest peat bog I’ve seen in a while. But hey, they say it’s good for your skin.

Visits: 103

Crappy Album Covers #253 — Exploit me! Exploit me!

Coverbrowser.com (click on the graphic) has this “Squirt” LP all over its website.  Wouldn’t you? Here is an LP with little toy Mexican musicians, and a face of a pretty young lady next to the title “Squirt Does Its Thing”.

Now, before you get too heatedup over the pornographic possibilities of the photo and the title, “Squirt” is a lemon-flavoured soft drink that was popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This promotional LP is called a commercial “tie-in” with the product. Squirt is still popular in smaller markets, and currently owned by Dr Pepper/Snapple.

Sorry to deflate you. You can stop salivating now.
You can start salivating again. I hear that The Crazy Girls squirt, too.

Visits: 113

Things to blame for my miserable life

Today, I have made a discovery. If you want to bring Windows 7 Home Edition to its knees,  all you need to do on your laptop is plug in a 2 GB SD card into the SD slot. Every time I have done this, I have either gotten the well-known “green bar of death”, or the shutdown process would take forever. In many cases, the Windows Explorer window would freeze, or Cygwin (for W7) would not take system commands such as “cd” or “ls” on any directory. Then I could not exit Cygwin. In this case, I was merely running the shell.

Another time, I opened Windows Explorer to view the contents of the SD drive, and this time, I got a green bar once more. But it was cancellable. It said it was “computing items”. While I could close the window, the computer would not shut down.

Tell me, why does any operating system need to do anything more than just show me my files when I ask it to?

Visits: 103

Crappy Album Covers #252 — The Overthrow of the Proletariat

The Key record label, during the Red Scare, released a series of anti-Communist screeds such as this spoken-word LP. The Office Naps blog tells of other Key releases.

In really good condition, I have seen this LP listed for $78.00
And as for pro-Communist screeds, this one is in the form of song. This is an American release, but I know little else about it.

Trade unions closed the gap between rich and poor to a great extent. Today, this would be called “extreme left”. In its day, it was just “the left”.

Visits: 96

Crappy Album Covers #251 — More Phallic Symbols

This is the 1981 LP from the L.A. Boppers called “Bop Time!”. Great concept except for the use of the second hand. Speaking of time, the LP consists of 8 tracks, and is just over a half hour.

This LP now sells in Europe for the equivalent of $39.00 in “VG++” condition. It appears to be a listed on this site as a promotional LP.
If I am correct, this is a 3-record set various artists compilation released in 1970. Hard to tell, since the cover art is missing in the site I was searching at.

But a web site that has this cover suggests that this is only a 1-record compilation, featuring artists such as T. Rex, Ike&Tina Turner, and other signatories to the Blue Thumb Record label during the late-60s/early 70s period.

Visits: 99

Crappy Album Covers #250 — Triple Love

Today, we have a triple bill, kiddies! That is, instead of the usual two albums, this post will show three albums.

Designers for the album “Rome With Love” put in all the things that would be cliche these days (and was likely cliche then also): a Vespa Lambretta scooter, and cargo in the form of shopping things and an attractive lady wearing capri pants.
Same scooter, different guy and girl. “Berlin With Love” gives the impression to people who have never been there that Berlin is nothing more than Rome in disguise. Except that there are one or two visual cues that give a sense of Deutschland. The lady holding a beer stein, for one; an open advocacy of drinking and driving.

Hey, to heck with German engineering! Everyone knows that Italian Vespas are better! Capri pants too!
Hey… do you notice that each time Jo Basile makes another album “with Love”, there is a different guy and girl, and the Vespa seems more crowded than before? This time, there is more of a sense of formula. The Vespa, the national garb, the shopping things which are more noticeably culture-specific, but no capri pants this time.

There are others, many others… Here is another cover “From Rio with Love”, for example.

Joss Baselli (1926-1982) was born to Italian parents who emigrated to France. He is a virtuoso accordionist who plays under the pseudonym Jo Basile.  This formulaic approach lasted for 24 of his 40 or so albums. He has worked in TV and movies, and has recorded with the likes of Dick Hyman, Bobby Rosengarden, and Phil Kraus.

Visits: 127

Crappy Album Covers #249 — Head-Scratchingly Crappy

Out of Abbfinoosty comes this crappy album cover from 1996, called “Comes the Storm.” It’s supposed to look spooky, but it just looks like someone got a little too happy with Photoshop. This album was not listed on the official website, so I had to go to Amazon to find info on it.

I don’t list metal albums on this blog for many reasons. One big one is that you expect them to be over the top and that is what metalheads are looking for.

This looked like a metal album, and whenever I make an exception and discuss it, it is usually for good reason. See the guy on the right?

That’s Billy Joel.

A young Billy Joel, posing with drummer Jon Small, for their 1970 album, Atilla. It was reviewed on Allmusic.com as like making a musical impression of “having a hole drilled through your head.”

Great. I’ll put it on my list of things not to buy.

Visits: 86

The TI-NSpire Programming Language

A couple of changes to the TI-NSpire programming language, including the addition of a host of commands and libraries, and the Request "x",y  command, have made the programming experience more pleasant on the Nspire. Finally, something that comes a giant step closer to behaving like a normal programming language. The language appears to be undocumented as of 2010.

The assignment command using “STO>” doesn’t work the way it used to, but I wasn’t aware that the Nspire had a Pascal-style “:=” for variable assignment.

The spreadsheet could be populated once, but re-running the program to populate the spreadsheet with different data lead to the Nspire becoming confused, and garbage data winding up on the spreadsheet. Deleting the spreadsheet, and re-inserting the array names once more on the tops of the columns resulted in the new array values updating themselves automatically on the spreadsheet.

There needs to be a way to declare and name a spreadsheet programmatically, and I don’t see a way yet. There also needs to be a way of disposing of the spreadsheet or clearing a spreadsheet, inside of the program. Again, I don’t know of a way to do that yet.

Once I get the code perfected a little more, I’ll post it.

Visits: 123

Crappy Album Covers #248 — De Agony of de Feet

The thing about Michael Franti, is that I like his style of music. Edgy, folky, and socially conscious, and entirely listenable.But, Michael, why did you have to ruin your latest record cover with your damn, *&#$!! foot? It’s not that pretty!
Here is what they did to Franti’s CD cover at amright.com.
Next up, Dvorak’s Slavonic Rhapsody #2 by the Vienna State Opera Orchestra.

While another classical LP we’ve featured, called “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” left clues on the cover for the Italian-challenged, there is precious little here to explain th depiction of holding one’s feet in what appears to be a nearly impossible flexibility move for many, which would relate that to the music.

Visits: 156

Crappy Album Covers #247 — Arguing over the death of God

J. C. Crabtree questions Nietsche’s assertion that God is dead. It is likely that Crabtree didn’t read Frederich Nietsche when he made this record, but who knows?

There is no information I could find on this person, although a search turned up this J. C. Crabtree, but makes no mention of a ministry or of making records.
Here is Gertrude Behanna for the second time, here to just show up J. C. Crabtree with her assertion that God is in fact not dead. Heck, with her it’s not even a question.

This album was already discussed here.

To finally settle Nietsche’s question, well, I was talking to God the other day, and He told me Nietsche was dead. That final assertion is much more provable.

Visits: 118

Crappy Album Covers #246 — CAC Enigmas

David Gray’s 1998 CD “White Ladder” did not reach the top of the British album charts until 2001, giving it the record for the longest un-interrupted climb to the top of the British charts.

No one in the CAC blogosphere that I have read about can even speculate upon what the artwork is about, and this makes it one of those Crappy Album enigmas.
1979 was the year Disco was still making too much noise, and prog rock was in a slow decline.

As part of that decline was Camel’s “I can see your house from here”. This album had shorter tracks and was less “proggy” than their previous LPs.

Their successive LPs marked a return to the prog rock format.

Visits: 103

Crappy Album Covers #245 — Man’s Inhumanity to Man

… or this woman’s inhumanity to herself. The fuse is lit, and it’s almost going to be like the 1812 Overture, with the world’s first classically-trained suicide bomber providing us with fireworks. 

Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985) owes much of his enduring reputation to his long-lived tenure with The Philadelphia Orchestra, lasting from 1936 to 1980.
This doesn’t look like an “inhumanity to man” cover until you notice that the croquet “balls” are the shrunken heads of humans. 

This 1971 LP is the third from Genesis but the first to have the “classic” lineup led by Peter Gabriel, Mike Rutherford, and Phil Collins. It is interesting that this album, and the next two afterward never charted all that well in North America. Only the last two did with this lineup.

Visits: 116

Version 2 of the TI Nspire operating system

My main complaint about the Nspire and Nspire CAS, the need to have some kind of input statement in its programmnig language, looks like it is closer to reality. I just have to fiddle with it some more to see if it can really place data in tables (or now, spreadsheets), and see if I can really do I/O in a running program as was the case for the TI-84 family. To be clear, I am not using the new “touchpad” version of the CAS, I am using the slightly older version, which had the original keyboard.

When I did a test statement

Request "---> ", j
and ran it, the calculator came back with a screen using “–>” as a prompt, and a blank for me to input something. I entered “36”, then the input window disappeared, then the string

--> 36
was output. The input window seems cumbersome.  That could be because I like command line input, and think it has less memory overhead on a device where every byte of RAM is precious.

At any rate, the value is stored in j, and this was proven by doing the multiplication

4j
and I got 144. This was on a calculator whose memory was cleared due to the OS upgrade. The cursor is much more sensitive, and there is a noticeable speed impovement over prior OS versions.

I tried to make a simple program, and got nowhere with the Request statement, when I placed it inside a FOR/END FOR loop in a named program.

Visits: 119

Crappy Album Covers #244 — Progressive Crock

Allmusic.com lists at least 100 albums under the name King Crimson. There are their main releases, countless live albums, and a raft of LPs under the label “King Crimson Collector’s Club” released as recently as 2004. And don’t forget the fact that Robert Fripp re-mastered the entire KC catalogue in the late 90s. And then there are all of those compilation LPs, released as recently as 2009.

This 1969 album, “In the Court of the Crimson King” is the LP that started it all. A prog rock heavyweight at a time that Led Zeppelin were just starting out, it expanded on the then-new idea of “The Concept Album”, started by The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper in 1967. “Crimson”, like “Sgt Pepper”, had no singles, but the LP peaked in 1970 at #28.

A view of someone having fun with this cover is found here.

Musicstack.com lists this vinyl LP as a collector’s item, commanding prices as high as $172.00.
This is Yes’s 1978 offering, Tomato. This album has most of the original Yes members, sans Bill Bruford. There were musical disagreements as to the direction of the music, divided into classical and pop-oriented camps, which hampered the quality of the album. So, not a single song on this LP is over 8 minutes long. By Yes standards, the songs are so short, you might as well be listening to K-Tel.

Then there was the album cover. Hoooly moly…. Rumor has it that the artist had this black-and-white photo of some dude with drumsticks which he thought would go nicely if a bright red tomato were thrown at it. Ohhhh… the contrast in colours! The juxtapositions! Whatever…

A copy of this LP in “excellent” condition currently sells on musicstack.com for as much as $54.95 (US).

Visits: 113

Mucho Problemos with NimbleX

Bogdan Radulescu of Oralndo, Florida is the creator of Nimble X. I thought this version of Linux was a neat idea, but in my eagerness to try new things, I didn’t read the fine print: that the do-it-yourself boot CD I wanted to make and burn to CD was from a 2007 version (kernel 2.6.16). My laptop was made in 2009, and thus every boot option I chose on the boot CD led to a kernel panic.

Then I tried it on a slightly older dual-core PC where Linux is already working. Rebooting into the CD resulted in a proper start, and I had a full X display with KDE and its attendant programs. I wanted to finish the blog in that environment, however, Nimble 2007 lacked a ‘net connection, and an app to add an ethernet connection was hard to find. However, there was plenty of ways I could have added a ppp connection or a wireless one, and I lack a dialup and wireless.

Pretty good environment to do some local work, so long as lacking internet was not an issue. This time, it was an issue.

Visits: 34

Crappy Album Covers #243 — Seventies’ Blockbusters

Gunning for the first weinie roast in zero gravity, Crosby, Stills and Nash’s 1990 LP “Livin’ It Up” took four years to record, and flopped in the record stores. Disappointing, since this was their first LP recorded as a group since 1977’s “CSN”.

Notable appearances on the album which peaked on Billboard at #57 were: Peter Frampton, Bruce Hornsby, Micheal Landau, Branford Marasalis, and JD Souther.
The seventies happened (note tense). This cover of this 1983 album is so seventies (prog style), it almost hurts.

This is Marillion’s first album, and many would also say their finest, which bore comparisons with early Genesis. Allmusic says this LP only peaked as high as 175 on Billboard. However, it yielded a top-40 hit, entitled “He knows, you know”, which peaked the same year at #21.

Does anybody know “He knows, you know”? I don’t know “He knows, you know”. And you probably know I don’t know “He knows, you know”. And I know you don’t know I don’t know “He knows, you know”. And I figure you know I know you don’t know I don’t know “He knows, you know”.

Y’know?

Visits: 89