Category: crappy album covers

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

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

Crappy Album Covers #196 — Superstition and legend

The Incans were ahead of their time. Their legends may have given us the first samples of pornography. Voice of the Xtabay is a legend about a woman who has sex with countless men, then died with Xtabentum (fragrant flowers) growing on her grave. It has all the elements of a plotless porn film. All it needs now is bad acting in between the sex scenes.

Depicted is a very young Yma Sumac (1922-2008), a Peruvian soprano known for her 5-octave vocal range. For the Exotica genre that was popular in the late ’40s and throughout the 1950s, they don’t get more famous than her.

This 1950 studio album, and Sumac’s first, was produced by no less than Les Baxter, who also helped write two of the tracks. It features Peruvian rhythms, and of course, Sumac’s vocal range. The recording can be purchased in CD form through any number of online vendors.
Two Polynesian dudes are busy singing along, when all of a sudden both say: “Hey, who brought in the white chick?” This is yet another CAC from that veritable CAC factory, TOPS.

The composer was Robert Drasnin (1927-2015), at the time, a recent UCLA graduate with a Master’s in Music. In 1959, he was approached by the upper management at TOPS to produce an exotica record. On that record you will likely hear the piano of John Williams, who would later go on to write the musical scores of Star Wars and Jaws. Drasnin himself would later produce music for the small screen, most notably The Twilight Zone, and Gunsmoke. By 1977 he became the director of music for the CBS television network.

To date there has been at least two reissues of Voodoo on compact disc. To show that Exotica has not yet died, Drasnin recorded Voodoo II on CD in 2007 when he was 80.

 

Visits: 100

Crappy Album Covers #149 — Women perpendicular and parallel

Album_Cover_Crap_261_gigwise_com 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.
Album_Cover_Crap_260_gigwise_com 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.

Visits: 104

Crappy Album Covers #139 — Out of their depth

Album_Cover_Crap_208_-_dio_netAllmusic.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.

Album_Cover_Crap_216_-_vinylrecords_chCompleted 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”.

Visits: 79

(Images may be disturbing) Crappy Album Covers #138 — Food on Vinyl VII

Album_Cover_Crap_222_-_amright_com 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.
Album_Cover_Crap_203_vinylhaven_com 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.

Visits: 70

Crappy Album Covers #133 — Hicks from the sticks

Album_Cover_Crap_164_showandtelmusic_com Felix Lorentz will sing your requests whether you want him or not. He comes out of his shack near the lagoon to the bar in the nearby village and rips the mike out of the hand of the entertainer that was scheduled to arrive, and yells out “I take requests!”After a few moments of stunned silence, someone says in a timid voice: “Can you sing ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips?'” 

Someone else pipes up: “Happy Birthday To You!” “Row, Row, Row your boat!” It was then Lorentz realised that he had barged into an old folks home, an the bar was next door.
Album_Cover_Crap_162_showandtelmusic_com_Greatest_Picks Ahh, the games you can play with a title like “Wild Country”. A hootenanny gone wild…wild music by wild musicians….Your wildest guesses won’t know who is on the playlist. Wild musicians: “Your Cheatin’ Heart” played by Jimi Hendrix. “Achey Breakey Heart” played by AC-DC. “Till I Gain Control Again” by Pink Floyd. 

None of them made it to the sessions for this album, but thank you for your purchase of this fine vinyl record album, and thanks for coming out.

Visits: 75

Crappy Album Covers #132 — More happiness

cover6 Another album cover which has been fodder for the CAC blogs, “Return to Oz”, from a Leo Sayer wannabe named Dardy. I can’t for the life of me find any info on him. If anyone can tell me something biographical about Dardy, drop me a comment.
Album_Cover_Crap_161_showandtelmusic_com_Greatest_Picks This dynamic fun machine also produces happiness. Every home should have one. This one has a flat tire, so it can only produce mild sanguinity. It’s all you can do until the Dynamic Duo purchases a tire tube at Wal-Mart’s next clearance sale.

Visits: 121

Crappy Album Covers #131 — Are you happy?

Album_Cover_Crap_157_showandtelmusic_com Get ready for a feeling of bliss that is beyond belief … The Young Believers are going to impose cheer and goodwill whether you like it or not. Rise and shine! Up with the crows! The happiness you have demanded all your life is now mandatory.
Album_Cover_Crap_158_showandtelmusic_com And after you have complied with the minimum requirements for happiness, you get to consume special pills and fly into a perfect utopia where the food is great, the sex is better, and the best thing about this epic voyage is that you don’t even have to leave the room.

Visits: 68

Crappy album Covers #130 — More Do-It-Yourself Covers

Album_Cover_Crap_166_showandtelmusic_com_Greatest_Picks A recurring rule of CACs is that if you don’t want to make your album cover crappy is occasionally in the attempt to overvalue the art of their children and make their art. The motorhome (bus?) looks like a hot dog on wheels.No information on “Sounds of VIctory” (or is the band name “Jesus Freak?) that I could find.
Album_Cover_Crap_165_showandtelmusic_com_Greatest_Picks You certainly can’t possibly get more late ’60s than this design. These ladies were from The Vassar College Glee Club in Rhode Island.They sing “America”, “White Rabbit”, and other 60s contemporary (at the time) hits from folk and acid rock genres.

The G-Stringers have been in existence since at least 1965, and various incarnations of them have performed at Carnegie Hall.

Visits: 69

Crappy Album Covers #129 — Atomization and Anomization

Album_Cover_Crap_167_showandtelmusic_com_Greatest_Picks Jim Haun, known as Rouvaun (pronounced “Rove-On”) (1932-1975) was a famous tenor, born in Utah. This is likely to be his first album. Wikipedia says that while he was an unknown woodworker studying voice, he relased this album after becoming an overnight sensation at The Dunes hotel in Vegas. Already with this album we can see that he is billing himself as “The World’s Greatest Singer”.

Well, I guess you are in for some notoriety when your vocal trainer was Mario Chamlee, who had to take over the contract at The Metropolitan Opera house in New York, succeeding Enrico Caruso, who died in 1921. That could give anyone a swelled head.

Listen to Rouvan sing The Impossible Dream, and sing The Lord’s Prayer, using his supreme vocal skill:

The Impossible Dream:

The Lord’s Prayer:
Album_Cover_Crap_151_showandtelmusic_com_Greatest_Picks With Rouvaun, it was all “ME, ME, ME!!!”, wasn’t it?

With the Musical Four, we get the other extreme: Atomie. Lookit, I’m a fan of Emile Durkeim, the founder of Sociology. He wrote of anomie, a dissolution of character as a result of a lack of social norms; and of atomie, which is a condition where the individual blends into to rigid norms so much that he loses all sense of self. Not enough norms lead to alienation from others; while too many norms lead to a lack of sense of self and eventually an alienation from self. Get it?

Well we see The Musical Four as actually 5 people. Individuality matters so little to them that, hey, who cares if there are 5 people? Maybe 5 is just an augmented version of 4. Atomistic in the extreme.

Obviously, Sybil Godwin had enough of that crap, and hired a lawyer to force the group to say “With Sybil Godwin” whenever “The Musical Four” was mentioned in any publicity. The other four thought quietly to themselves, “God will get him for his vanity”.

 

Visits: 129

Crappy Album Covers #128 — Channelling the Great Rock Legends

Album_Cover_Crap_168_MinstrelOTMorning_John_Bayley 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
Album_Cover_Crap_171_Flickr 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.”

Visits: 131

(May be disturbing) Crappy Album Covers #127 — Plastic Surgery Disasters II

Album_Cover_Crap_186_Flickr This is the kind of thing that gives the LGBT community a bad name. Don’t know the artist, album or anything else about this disaster of an album design. 

This is worse than an album cover, because it is a picture disc. Notice the hole punched in the center, near the price tag? Yeah, you take this, put it on your turntable, and watch this guy/girl/whtever rotate as he/she/it sings you some tunes.

Don’t picture this as a rotating CD, because CDs rotate too fast. You need to imagine this rotating at 33 1/3 rpm, where you could still make out some of the details as it spins.

I am usually a curious hound for finding out about most CAC’s but the blog I got this from also didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Album_Cover_Crap_159_showandtelmusic_com_Greatest_Picks This appears to be by a member of the profession that is responsible for disasters like the one above. 

With this album design, I would say that John Butterworth should stick to medicine.

Visits: 110

Crappy Album Covers #126 — Four Guys on a Cover

Album_Cover_Crap_187_Flickr 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.
Album_Cover_Crap_183_Flickr … 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.

Visits: 123

Crappy Album Covers #125 — More Accordions!

Album_Cover_Crap_179_Flickr Yes, the accordion is, apart from bagpipes, the instrument everyone loves to hate. Today we have a double bill. First, the duo Doug Setterberg and Stan Sorenson have this album called “Yust Try to Sing Along In Swedish”. 

Sorenson and Setterberg might be Swedish by ethnicity, but all sources I have place these two in Seattle, Washington some time in the 1960s.  Otherwise, I suspect the title wouldn’t be in english.
Album_Cover_Crap_172_Flickr After Setterberg and Sorenson left the stage, this 400-pound gorilla came on stage, picked up the accordion, and started playing. 

The members of the audience either didn’t notice, or noticed an improvement. “Hey, keep the Gorilla on stage! He sounds like Brian Eno, ” exclaimed one audience member.

“They Said It Couldn’t be Done”, if played at low volume, will likely qualify as the first ambient record, and certainly the first non-electric one. A sort of “PDQ Bach” for the polka crowd.

This was a 1959 release by Dominic Frontiere and his Mighty Accordion Band. Frontiere has gone on to compose well-known television themes, such as The Flying Nun, starring Sally Field; and the 70s crime show Vega$, starring Robert Urich.

Visits: 85

Crappy Album Covers #124 — Classical Music for People who Hate Classical Music

Album_Cover_Crap_181_Flickr It’s sad. It really is, that classical musicians must feel that they have to have low-brow record covers in order to sell records. 

And to top it off, we have three Daisy Duke imitators holding their fiddles seductively against their bodies. That’s violins against women!

Not much is known about “Festival Strings”.
Album_Cover_Crap_184_Flickr Hmm… this is another classical album, an opera by Gioacchino Rossini, and the title is in Italian, so in case you can’t read Italian, the album designer left a couple of clues for you in the photograph, which needs little translation. 

And for those who are not only unable to figure out Italian, but are too impatient to listen to all of “The Barber of Seville”, this album only has the “Highlights” of this opera, according to the cover.

Visits: 101