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1977 was the height of the disco invasion. And I say “invasion” rather than “revolution”, because at least revolutions are welcome in some homes.
Rod McKuen’s Disco parody “Slide Easy In … Disco” has been described as a “gay porn version of Grease”. The hit single “Amor” never made it in North America, but it was quite prominent in many European countries. |
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These days, if anyone looked like this at a border crossing, they would be subject to a cavity search on the spot.
That being said, many blogs remember Instant Funk’s brand of Philadelphia Soul quite fondly, in spite of their having changed record labels from TSOP to New York’s Salsoul Records prior to the release of this 1979 LP. Disco and its sub-genres had been on life support after its mega-overexposure by the Bee Gees by that time, and even the best albums of the genre were being abandoned by all but the most hard-core fans by that time. The TSOP label was home to artists such as Lou Rawls, The Three Degrees, McFadden and Whitehead, and The O’Jays. I like these artists, and have never really associated them in my mind with Disco, except in the loosest sense of the term. They sound closer to R&B, and were grouped together with Instant Funk as part of the “Philly Soul” sound. |
Tag: crappy album covers
Crappy Album Covers #278 — Ellis Dee (LSD)
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This is a 1966 reocrding produced by Alan Livingston and Lawrence Schiller. Dick Clark is uncredited for the narration, and Dr. Sidney Cohen gives some medical background on various aspects of LSD.
I wish they would have taken the record sleeve designer’s stash of LSD and flushed it down the toilet. |
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This is the infamous Timothy Leary (1920-1996), with his recording, also from 1966, called “LSD”. This popularizer of the hippie catch phrase “Tune in, turn on, drop out” and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 was a Harvard lecturer but was fired amidst allegations of involvement with various psychoactive drugs.
The lecture on this record came after police raids on his Milbrook esteate, looking for drugs. Hence, it is said this recording has a bitter tone to it, compared to his other recordings. |
Crappy Album Covers #277 — Pink
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After your first bottle, you say “Here come the Elephants”, after about 4 or 5, you say “Here comes the twister” (see below), and the room begins to spin. The album looks at least old enough to have Johnny Bond participate in The Iraq War Drinking Game (the first one), but in reality he was never alive for it, having died of a heart attack in 1978.
Cyrus Bond (1915-1978) had a string of top-10 hits in the 1940s up until the late 50s. In 1999, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. |
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I had agony researching this group. I ran into a freaking domain-parked website offering info on “Po Boy”, “The Boy” and “The Po”. It is painfully obvious that someone didn’t attend their RESL classes (that’s Redneck English as a Second Language).
Then there was this site. Our boyz don’t look like post-punk/hip-hop dudz, yo’. But if they were those Po’ Boys, they would have a killer logo. I am new to Po’ Boysology, but according to my observations, any band calling themselves The Po’ Boys seems to consist of
Just what we need … two guys in the band whose names are Jimmy and Jim. Look, guys, they don’t have to be your real names. I’m sure one of you wasn’t christened Snuffy!?! Could one of you have picked a different name? After a couple of pages of bizarre stuff having nothing to do with this band except the name, I gave up. But there is indeed a genre out there. |
There is a brass band called “The Po’ Boys” which does a killer cover of Led Zep’s 1971 hit Black Dog:
(moved or deleted by YouTube)
And as for the Twister, here are the Talking Heads, same as they ever were…
(moved or deleted by YouTube)
Crappy Album Covers #276 — My Babe Magnet II
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The Calvary Boys were a traditional Southern gospel group that formed around 1970, touring around in their babe magnet, depicted on your left. They hail from the Piney Woods region of Texas, often called “East Texas” or “Deep East Texas”. “Gettin’ Ready to Leave” might bave been their first album, although it is not mentioned on their website, as far as I could tell.
They call themselves a quartet. That might be because the other 3 folks in the picture are the mechanics. In Deep East Texas, you repair your own damn touring vehicle! |
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Chicks dig motorcycles. Dr. Dave had a novelty hit with “Vanna, Pick Me A Letter“, sung to the tune “The Letter” (a #1 hit in 1967 by a group from Memphis Tennessee, calling themselves The Box Tops). “Vanna” was a staple on the Dr. Demento show, having been played on 38 episodes between 1986 and 2008.
Dr. Dave (David Kolin) channels his best Cheech Marin imitation (at least that’s what it sounds like), making it a matter of debate in the song that phone is spelled F-O-N-E, and trying to convince Vanna to come to his place to play The Home Edition. What you are looking at is the cover of their 12″EP released in 1986. |
Crappy Album Covers #275 — What’s that in your pipe?
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Pipes, as shown here, can be fun for both boys and girls. You can slide down the mouthpiece; stand on top of a flame coming out of the pipe and not get burnt. Just as you can smoke a pipe and not get lung cancer, or walk between the raindrops in a storm and not get wet.
Los Melodicos is the brainchild of Renato Capriles, way back in 1958, and made its debut as one of Venezuela’s foremost Latin-oriented orchestras, and have made over 100 albums. |
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The anthropologists knew about ‘shrooms all along. They had the jump on the hippie generation, who tried to use it under the ruse of “artistic inspiration”.
Yeah, mushroom ceremony, my arse. They were passing aruond the pipe because they couldn’t get enough of that buzz. The Mazatec (meaning “Lords of the Deer”, which is often something you see when you are stoned) were an “Indian” (aboriginal) tribe in the south of Mexico in the state of Oaxaca to the south. Their recorded history was made up of either defensive war against the Aztecs or defensive war against the Spanish Conquistadores. |
Crappy Album Covers #274 — Psychedelia
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Psychedelic art is supposedly the kind of art induced by drugs such as LSD. The thinking being, that the kind of mental state induced by psychedelic drugs are a kind of artistic inspiration. Psychedelia had long died out as a fad in 1977 when Dragon released their third album, Sunshine. I have a painting below which is popular in psych textbooks. It was a painting of a cat owned by Louis Wain back in the early 20th century in the later stages of the onset of schizophrenia. He needed no drugs to turn his ordinary still life into works of psychedelia. |
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I wish these guys chose a better color scheme. But these are Austin Texas denizens who call themselves The 13th Floor Elevators, late 60s cult favourites. They have been covered by bands like REM, Jesus and Mary Chain, ZZ Top, and Primal Scream.13th Floor Elevators had, among their more normal instruments, the use of a jug — an electric one, no less. |
Here is a Lous Wain’s cat, after having late onset schizophrenia:
And here are the 13th Floor Elevators with one of their bigger hits “You Gonna Miss Me”
Crappy Album Covers #273 — The SJ Blind Dating Service
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Jerry Hitt is a do-it-yourselfer (album cover wise) from way back, and it is difficult to pick out the year of this recording. |
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Joyce Drake’s stunt double, Joyce Landorf meets Jerry Hitt and they now are cozy together thanks to the SJ Blind Dating service. |
Crappy Album Covers #272 — Lone Ranger References
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I’ve heard it all since my childhood… The Lone Drycleaner, and others. But here is “Metal Rap” from a group called Lone Rager, released no later than 1984.
This is metal, so while it goes against my no-metal policy, it is not a shocking cover as you can see … Just stupid. A Lone Rager vid appears below. |
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And here is the Lone Arranger. This 1980 LP by Ernest Gusella must have been where Russell Oliver got his ideas from (see video below).
The 10 tracks of experimental/Jazz music have titles such as “Body Art Disco”, and “Pissin’ in the Snow”. You might want to play this on your second date at the very earliest. |
Here is Metal RAPsody by Lone Rager:
Ta da!!! Here is Russell Oliver, the Loan Arranger:
And here is an Air Farce satire on Russell Oliver:
Crappy Album Covers #270 — The Overuse of Cadillacs
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After some looking about, I can’t for the life of me remember where I got the record cover from. While the name of the jpeg has the word “coverbrowser” in it, I tried “Coverbrowser.com” and several search strings, to no avail.I recall it was a jazz band, possibly one that was popular in the night clubs. I know nothing else. All evidence of the origin of this photo has disappeared into the Internet memory hole. |
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Guy Drake had a minor spoken-word hit with “Welfare Cadillac”, a song which poked fun of welfare recipients. Johnny Cash was asked to perform for Richard Nixon, and Welfare Cadillac was one of the songs Cash was requested to play. He refused, citing “short notice” rather than political reasons.Drake’s tune was one of a small group of “right-wing” hits; another from the same period being “Hokie From Muskokie”, a tribute to Nixon’s Silent Majority who didn’t protest the war, didn’t use recreational drugs, and didn’t listen to rock-and-roll. |
Crappy Album Covers #269 — For the Kiddies
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Colby was a TV series that began in the late ’80s, that send a Christian message to children. You can find Colby records and CDs for sale at on-line Christian bookstores everywhere.The title “God Uses Kids!” smacks of this other CAC posting. |
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If I was a child and I wanted to be introduced to jazz, I would let Cannonball Adderley introduce me to it. In the 50s and 60s, he, Miles Davis, and others were considered the best in their field. Adderley played on Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” LP, released in the late 50s, the album which was to Jazz what Sergeant Pepper was to Rock and Roll. |
Crappy Album Covers #268 — Sensitive People
By some coincidence, both of these album releases are from Cuba, and from the year 1968.
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Eduardo Davidosn (1929-1994) is a cuban-born musician who released a 1968 album called “Le Chien (The Dog)”, perhaps in an early effort to make himself the darling of animal rights groups. |
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A muted version of The Many Facets of Roger… here, we see the two sides of La Lupe’s armchair.
Guadalupe Victoria Yoli Raymond (1939-1992) had a brief but rewarding career in the late 60s and early 70s, being the first Cuban singer to sell out in Madison Square Garden, but was in an increasing state of poverty later in life. |
Crappy Album Covers #267 — Can you hold my pineapples for a minute?
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You have to feel sorry for the model. She must feel pretty tired holding those pineapples, and I wish I could help by holding them for her, … her pineapples that is. No information exists on the album “Go with me to Hawaii” (Fahre mit mir nach Hawaii), except that it is likely from Germany, and the album title appears to come from the song “Riding in the Dreamboat of Love” (Steig In Das Traumboot Der Liebe), but maybe not. |
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I would like to have known when this trend started. I obviously missed this boat, for sure. WFMU has lavished more bandwidth than I will ever spend on this 1982 album, complete with presenting all of the mp3s. WFMU reminds us, it’s not just the marketer on the album cover, it’s what’s inside that counts. And we hear a guy in a fake French accent tell you what moves to make with your body over seductive classical music. |
Crappy Album Covers #248 — De Agony of de Feet
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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! |
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Here is what they did to Franti’s CD cover at amright.com. |
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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. |
Crappy Album Covers #247 — Arguing over the death of God
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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. |
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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.
Crappy Album Covers #246 — CAC Enigmas
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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. |
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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. |
Crappy Album Covers #245 — Man’s Inhumanity to Man
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… 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. |
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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. |
Crappy Album Covers #244 — Progressive Crock
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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. |
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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). |
Crappy Album Covers #243 — Seventies’ Blockbusters
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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. |
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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? |
Crappy Album Covers #242 — Down and Funky
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Why have album covers of the disembodied heads of women? According to Swamp Dogg (Jerry Williams Jr), all that really matters is their lips. And tongues as well. After that, ol’ Swampie just gets happy with the cut-and-paste tool on Photoshop, and pretty soon, he has himself the album cover he had been salivating over. |
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Roger is a complex guy. Sometimes happy, sometimes sad. Sometimes troubled, sometimes glad. Roger Troutman, with freres Lester, Zapp and Larry and a couple of other musicians give their R&B best to many of the 70s classics in this 1981 LP. Roger is known for being a virtuoso with a vocorder, and it is said that this LP has a lot of other electronic instruments and effects that won mild accolades from reviewers.
This album has been re-released on CD (Rhino) as recently as 2002, with bonus tracks. |
Crappy Album Covers #241 — Party People
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Pink Martini is a class act, in every sense of the word. While they do jazz and “international” music, their musicians are classically trained, and there are enough band members using traditional orchestral instruments to call them an “orchestra”.
I had to include band Pink Martini’s 2007 album “Hey Eugene” into the CAC blog, since it looks tacky. But of course, it is consistent with the hit song which makes the title of the album. Lead singer China Forbes is depicted here sitting on the edge of the tub of the bathroom where presumably Eugene’s skinhead friend passed out for several hours, according to the narrative of the song. In the following year, China released a solo album called ’78, which has a more relaxed, folksy version of Eugene. |
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Moscow Nights is, according to Wikipedia, one of the best known Russian songs outside of Russia. This record is something like the old K-Tel/TeeVee International compilations, containing 20 hit songs.
This record possibly comes from the 1970s, and had at one time been released on the American Smithsonian-Folkways label. There was a re-release in CD format in 1993, and mp3s are for sale on eMusic. |
Here is Pink Martini’s 2007 atypical cult hit “Hey Eugene”, as aired on PBS, with lead vocalist China Forbes and bandleader and composer/arranger Thomas Lauderdale being interviewed at the start of the song:
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