Either/Or by Elliott Smith

The back cover of Either/Or, released on Kill Rock Stars, has always brought to mind the similarly stark image on Neil Young's Tonight's the Night. It's not a great leap, as both feature brilliant white subjects on jet black backgrounds. In both cases, that starkness is reflected in the music. As Pitchfork put it, "[a]chingly spare, these songs were hushed and intimate".

The album title was derived from the book of the same name by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, which as The Guardian noted, "deals with such themes as existential despair, dread, death and God. By this time, Smith's already-heavy drinking was now being compounded with use of anti-depressants."

As Scott Floman highlights, compared to his earlier releases, "this album is less about Smith's tough childhood and depencenies (drugs/booze), but despite some lighter moments most of the topics are still grim: feelings of emptiness, social anxiety issues, anger about the music industry, relationship woes... (“I hope you’re not waiting around for me, ‘cause I’m not going anywhere, obviously”). Yet so strong are the songs on this album that it leaves me feeling uplifted rather than depressed."
The back cover photo by Joanna Bolme's, a ex-girlfriend of Smith, at whose house some of the album's traks were recorded. The shot was later used by Kill Rock Stars as the front cover for a post-humous release of an alternate take of "Ballad of Big Nothing".

In reviewing the album for their top 100 albums of the1990s, Pitchfork wrote, "His elliptical lyricism and slithery song structures moved beyond the overwrought metaphors and folk regularity of his previous material to arrive at this logical, if unforeseen, conclusion."

All Night Long by Junior Kimbrough

"My songs, they have just the one chord, there's none of that fancy stuff you hear now, with lots of chords in one song. If I find another chord I leave it for another song." Junior Kimbrough

Despite the first set of commercially recordings from Junior Kimbrough being recorded in 1992, his story, and the back cover of that first album, echoed those of his 1930s forebears and their 1960s revivial. But he wasn't derivative. As his label - Fat Possum - points out, he was "an originator, Junior did more than build on certain tradition or perfect a certain style. Junior re-imagined the blues; he made a sound for himself."

His story was one of late recognition to a wider audience. Apparently a father of 36 children and son of a share-cropper, he recorded only sporadically through the 60s and 70s, with his first available recordings made when he was 62.

On his mediation on repitition in music, Mark Richardson identified what made Junior special: "Take a guy like Junior Kimbrough, vamping on one chord and playing what some people call "modal blues". Without chord changes, his songs move relentlessly forward, in parallel with his stories, the guitar spinning off on variations of which exist in relationship to the one chord's root note. When I first heard this sound, the blues all of a sudden sounded interesting again. But this was the paradox: it did so by becoming more repetitive, not less."

Like the early blues albums reissued in the 60s, the back cover was where you learned about the artist. In his wonderfully evocative liner notes to All Night Long, the album's producer Robert Palmer said that "you'll hear (Junior) sing something that sounds like a pre-blues field holler while he's playing a guitar rhythm like Memphis soul music, and when the bass and drums come in on one of Junior's riffs, the music might sound like some kind of hillbilly-metal-funk that hasn't been heard yet - except around Junior's place."

As Wes Freeman noted in his Perfect Sound Forever article, "'Junior's place' was an institution in the hill country of Northern Mississippi. Originally, it was his house. Kimbrough and his band, the Soul Blues Boys, would rehearse on Sunday afternoons and people just began showing up...Kimbrough's house has since burned down.

In the '70s Junior's place became a small wooden shack in the hills. In the early '90s, his reputation began to grow, first with his appearance in the documentary Deep Blues (1990) and then with the release of All Night Long, which received 4 out of 5 stars in Rolling Stone. Prior to recording All Night Long, Kimbrough moved his juke joint to an abandoned church, and there, his reputation was really made."

Presumably the building captured in the photograph on the back cover is one of 'Junior's Places'.

 

Desire by Bob Dylan

"I guess I like it because I played that album at least a thousand times in my teens and remember loving all the documentary style photos, symbolism and general mash up of illustration and collage, and the homemade aspect of it.

It's very much of it's time. Once you've heard each track so many times you know every word the back cover stills remains a bit mysterious." Alex Gravenstein (pictured with his copy)

The collage theme seems to echo the chaotic circus feel of the early sessions for the album and the subsequent Rolling Thunder Revue. As a 2012 Mojo magazine piece on the album noted, for early sessions there were often over 20 musicians were playing at once. The frustation caused Eric Clapton, one of five guitarists, to walk out, apparently muttering, "Zimmy's gone crazy". It also mirrors the accidental nature of how the album fell together (it was pure serendipity that violinist Scarlet Rivera was spotted crossing the road with her violin case and asked by Dylan to attend the sessions).

As Billboard wrote in their glowing 1976 review, "Another plus factor is packaging, with its striking cover shot and liner photos. Also the inside liner notes are by Allen Ginsberg, and they reflect the mood of the recent Rolling Thunder Revue tour of the Northeast."

John Berg designed the album art, with the back cover collage by Carl Barile (whose only other album credit seems to be a Lester Young album on Verve) and collage photos by Ruth Bernal (who also shot covers for Harry Chaplin).

Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones

"About as unrehearsed as a hiccup" Bobby Keys

"'Cinema verite? I got into audio verite..... Hey, I've made records where you analyze everything you do 3,000 times and it's perfect. I'm sick of it. I want to make a record that's totally stark naked. Raw. I don't wanna fix any of it. I don't care if it's totally out of tune, man, let's play. Fuck it.... I like the idea of capturing something. Record something that happened. I'm a musician. I don't wanna sit there and build a record. I built a couple of records. Big deal. Tonight's the Night doesn't care. And that makes you feel good about it. There's no pretence.'"

Despite being a quote about one of his own albums, Neil Young captures what, by many accounts, were the circumstances surrounding the recording of Exile on Main Street (or at least the tracks they laid down in France before doing some polishing in Sunset Sound, LA). Take "Happy", a Keith Richards track, "recorded in a single take when Richards woke up one morning – or evening – and gathered up the only other people who were awake, saxophonist Bobby Keys and producer Jimmy Miller, who was drafted in to play drums in place of the absent Watts. The whole record was, says Keys, a good ol' boy from Texas, "about as unrehearsed as a hiccup"." (The Guardian)

Dark, haphazard, ragged, the recording of Exile was a play with large cast of actors, an "extended retinue of session players, studio technicians and hangers-on." and with the drug-use, a "retinue of shady characters and criminals". This feeling is echoed on the front and back covers of the album, with the back cover being inspired by the front.

The front cover image is from Robert Frank's photo documentary “The Americans”, taken of a wall in a tattoo parlour in New York City (although another account has it taken on Route 66, colloquially, and perhaps coincidentally, known as the Main Street of America). The wall is covered with photos of strange and unusual people, displaying neat symmetry with the recording sessions.

Frank also filmed the Stones with a Super 8 camera. The stills of individual frames were used to compose the back cover to match his original wall picture. The back cover also features a "mystery woman" pictured in the lower left side, who turns out to be Chris O'Dell, their personal assistant.

Layout and design was by John Van Hamersveld and Norman Seeff. Describing his contribution, Van Hamersveld was very clear on its impact: "my arrangement of materials...would go beyond Frank’s photo style, creating an identity that would become the basis of the PUNK FASHION MOVEMENT. To the spectators, critics, and others in the Establishment, I had made a package that was not glamorous. It was not a friendly image to put on display in the record stores, but it was THAT image that established the anti-establishment look of PUNK."

Playlist #2

A selection of tracks from the last few albums featured (plus our short Daytrotter interview):

1. Otis Redding - I'm Sick Y'all

2. Neil Young - Tell Me Why [Live]

3. Robert Johnson - Love In Vain

4. Terry Allen - My Amigo

5. The Beatles - I've Got A Feeling

6. Talking Heads - Crosseyed and Painless [Live in Rome]

7. Plant and See - Put Out My Fire

8. The Beach Boys - Feel Flows

9.The Band - King Harvest (Has Surely Come) [Live in the studio]

10. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi - Radiohead [Live from the Basement]

11. Time Fading Lines - Woods [Daytrotter Session]

Click below for the playlist via YouTube:

Immediacy and Impulse: The Vibration of the Take

Reflecting on my continuing fascination with recorded music in the After The Goldrush feature,  I couldn't articulate it better than that fascination being rooted in the recording process' ability to "capture a real performance, and in so doing, document a moment that can move you." It's what M C Taylor called the 'vibration of the take'. Below we collect some of our favourite thoughts on the topic:

“I got the chance to go back after hours and tried to improve some things and I realised it wasn’t possible. It was part of something that happened at the moment and you just couldn’t change it. It might have been more perfect, but it wasn’t as good. So I just said, That’s it. He knew what he was doing and this is how the baby came out. Honour the moment….I wish there was more of that stuff in music because as grateful as we are for the technology to do things we couldn’t do early on, sometimes we get seduced trying to get things perfect when actually I don’t think there is such a thing. Desire just has a feel to it. It’s visual. Bob was like a painter who was throwing paint on a canvas, but he knew what he was doing.” 

 

Emmylou Harris on recording Desire (as told to Mojo Magazine)
 

The ethos is to keep-it-simple so that what the bands leave behind is "four absolutely collectible songs that often impart on whomever listens to them the true intensity that these musicians put into their art, sometimes with more clarity than they do when they have months to tinker with overdubs and experiments. These songs are them as they are on that particular day, on that particular tour – dirty and alive."

Daytrotter

"Cinema verite? I got into audio verite..... Hey, I've made records where you analyze everything you do 3,000 times and it's perfect. I'm sick of it. I want to make a record that's totally stark naked. Raw. I don't wanna fix any of it. I don't care if it's totally out of tune, man, let's play. Fuck it.... I like the idea of capturing something. Record something that happened. I'm a musician. I don't wanna sit there and build a record. I built a couple of records. Big deal. Tonight's the Night doesn't care. And that makes you feel good about it. There's no pretense."

 Neil Young

"Don't spend too much time or too many takes on each song, try to capture the vibration of the first couple of takes even if it means leaving mistakes in. Keep overdubs to a minimum unless the song is begging for something special. Immediacy and impulse."

 M C Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger)

"At Stax the rule is: whatever you feel, play it. We cut everything together - horns, rhythm, and vocal. We'll do it three or four times, go back and listen to the results and pick the best one. If somebody doesn't like a line in a song, we'll go back and cut the whole song over. Until last year, we didn't even have a four-track tape recorder. You can't overdub on a one-track machine."

 Otis Redding

“[On Mirage Rock] a less-is-more approach freed up a lot of mental space just to enjoy the moment, I'd also say it stopped us from worrying too much about what we sounded like or what we can program into a computer to make it sound more cohesive. It was more organic, haphazard even, and I think that is so important when making a record. Because of modern technology, it's so easy to over think the process and lose focus on the actual songs. That was the most enjoyable part of the whole experience for me, and hopefully it's something I'll take away and use in the future.”

Ben Bridwell (Band of Horses)

Surf's Up / Pet Sounds / Best Of by The Beach Boys

This selection of back covers by The Beach Boys are all a little drab in contrast to the front covers of two of them. The front of the third, Surf's Up, has been described as their most 'un-Beach Boys' cover. It is a painting based on the sculpture End of the Trail, by James Earle Fraser, which honours the struggle of the Native Americans (I had wrongly assumed it depicted an image of Don Quixote I half-remembered). As The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit points out, Surf's Up saw "[n]o more songs about girls, cars, or surfing" but a "new world-conscious Beach Boys attitude...duly reflected in the choice of album art". The back cover of Surf's Up continues the theme and is dark to the point of almost consuming the black font of the song titles.

Pet Sounds and Best Of (released only two months later) stick to a familiar formula; the band shown in lighter mood on the back cover, with the latter not missing the opportunity for a bit of advertising too.
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Researching these back covers I stumbled across Malcom C. Searle's excellent and marvellously in-depth Back Through the Opera Glass website dedicated to the artwork of The Beach Boys. It is worth reproducng what he says about the back covers of Pet Sounds and Surf's Up in full:

"For the rear of the Pet Sounds album sleeve Capitol Records chose to put together a collage of frames highlighting the importance of the group as they liked to see them. The candy-striped shirts were back in evidence, guitars in hand, mixed in with a number of stills taken during the Japanese leg of their recent concert tour. This was almost suggesting that this was their way of showing that the album was their boys together … not merely a frontage for Brian’s strong-minded dominance of the music within.

Whilst Brian had been recording the instrumental tracks for the new album, using Los Angeles’ finest collection of studio session musicians, and prior to the boys laying down the vocals, the remaining five-piece band had been performing a 15-date tour of Japan, followed by a one-off return journey show, on Saturday 29th January, in Honolulu. Eleven of the fifteen pictures that graced the rear sleeve were taken during this tour, four of which featured Mike, Alan, Carl, Dennis and Bruce dressed out in traditional Japanese costume, pictured during a promotional visit to Kyoto's famous Samurai studios on January 10th. The remaining tour pictures featured the band on stage, dressed in traditional Beach Boy costume. Striped shirt and white pants, Capitol Records undoubtedly smiling silently in the background, although judging by the picture of Carl wearing a Hawaiian flower Lei around his neck they are taken from a variety of the shows from the tour. Japanese-based photographer and writer Dave Jampel is credited with being the man behind the lens for this series of pictures, and at least Bruce once again made the rear cover …

“I think that album is my favourite, and it drove me crazy that I couldn’t get my picture on the (front) cover because I was still signed to CBS, from the days when Terry Melcher and I were producing for them. I couldn’t get a clearance to be on the front cover, but I’m on the back … but I’m so proud just to have been able to sing on that record …” Bruce Johnston (Beach Boy)

Brian only appears in two pictures on the rear montage, uncomfortably alienated away from the antics of his fellow band members he is seen driving his car, leaning out of the window, sombrely dressed in black, whilst the more dominant pose sees him sitting at his piano, fingers poised over the chord structure of another great composition. It’s a strange sight seeing the sad, lone figure, the group mastermind, presenting his personal masterpiece, surrounded by shots of his smiling, laughing comrades …"

 And on the Ed Thrasher-designed Surf's Up (see also):

"For the reverse of the sleeve the deep blue and green hues that had framed Fraser’s front image re-appeared, this time as an ageing parchment (or maybe even tobacco leaf). The song titles were simply laid out from top to bottom, and nothing else was printed or featured that could remove the impact of the barren, desolate creation that was held up before the eye. It really was a most impressive, yet despairingly depressive sleeve to behold....

Overall, and despite the comparison to the bands precious releases for both Capitol and Warner’s, it is clearly apparent how this one sleeve epitomises the mood of the album held within. It deserves serious listening, serious appraisal … and it is indeed a serious offering."

In Rainbows by Radiohead

"Knocking over a table covered in candles [and] NASA’s website" Thom Yorke (on the inspiration for the album's art-work, as told to The Believer magazine )

The story of how Radiohead chose to market and charge for In Rainbows is well known (without a record label, initially only in digital format on their own website, with buyers able to pay as much or as little as they liked), but the artwork was part of the intrigue that surrounded the album's release. Initialy the band decided not to include a cover for the digital release of the album, ditching it last minute and holding it back for the physical release. In the absence of a cover, people even made their own.

The artwork, both back and front, was designed by Stanley Donwood, who has worked with Thom Yorke on all of Radiohead's album covers since The Bends. In The Believer interview Yorke explained the genesis on the In Rainbows cover:

The Believer: It’s funny, because the loss of palpable CD artwork seems like it would effect Radiohead more than other bands, considering that your artwork collaborations with Stanley Donwood have become so linked to your aesthetic. How do you normally work with Donwood on artwork?

Thom Yorke: Has it? Well, the In Rainbows artwork came literally from him knocking a table over. He had some candles on a table and, well, we were gonna do some pornographic etchings, which didn’t work out for a number of really good reasons…. They were pornographic landscape etchings.

The Believer: Pornographic landscape etchings, huh? Is that how I would describe them if I saw them?

Thom Yorke: No, you’d say, “That’s a bunch of fucking scratches on a piece of paper, mate.” [Laughs] But in the process of doing that he knocked all these candles onto his paper and thought, Well, that looks nice, scanned it in, and went from there.

The Believer: And weren’t NASA pictures somehow involved?

Thom Yorke: Me and my son got into watching the shuttle live. And one day I ended up at the gallery to the NASA page, which is fucking amazing. So all my input ended up being, “Here, look at these NASA pictures.”

The Believer: So you’ll continue collaborating with Stanley on artwork? This isn’t the end of Radiohead album art as we know it?

Thom Yorke: No, we’ve actually got a really good plan, but I can’t tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off. But we’ve got this great idea for putting things out.

The NASA images seem to have been the main source of inspiration for the back cover.

In an interview with A.V.Club, Ed O'Brien and Thim Yorke elaborated on Donwood's role:

Ed O'Brien: Stanley is always in the studio with us when we're working.

A.V.Club: Is that by design?

Ed O'Brien: He's either in a little room adjacent or above us in the mezzanine, or in the shed at the bottom of the gully. He's always with us, and we need him in that creative process. Not just for his artwork, but because he'll say, "I know nothing about music, but that was fucking brilliant!" By being there, the music seeps into him. He listens to things the same we do, having it repeated over and over and over again. It gets in him, and the stuff in that—the mood of the songs—is conveyed in the artwork. He's a receptor to that, and that's great.

Thom Yorke: There can be some really difficult times in the studio, but most of the time, we have a laugh in it. A lot of times, when we're doing the artwork and things, there is an element of comedy about it—I've been throwing wax at bits of paper! It's not exactly the punk ethic, but we always end up taking a piss.

For his part, Donwood told Radio 4, "Well it's very colourful – I’ve finally embraced colour! It's a rainbow but it is very toxic, it's more like the sort of one you'd see in a puddle." In an interview with Junkmedia, of his work he said, "My work that I call 'art' is largely concerned with what could be termed 'political' issues. This is the work that I find hard, challenging, difficult, awful, painful, and ultimately, sometimes, rewarding. But I do also feel very drawn to create work that I sincerely hope people will find beautiful. I hope my work for In Rainbows will have some sort of effect in this way."

The Band by The Band

"I'll be down to get you in a taxi honey

You'd better be ready around half past eight
Ah baby don't be late I want to be there when the band starts honey"

I had always been intrigued by the quote on the back cover. Was it from a film, was it made up...if I had looked closer, I would have seen from the footnote that it was actually a lyric taken from "Darktown Strutters' Ball", a song published over 50 years before The Band appropriated it. A jazz standard written by Shelton Brooks, it had been recorded many times, and by a wide variety of artsists including Fats Domino (his version seems to be the lyrics used by The Band), Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin and the Beach Boys.

 The back cover continues the theme from the front; rustic, straightforward, not of its time. A reaction to the psychedelic and explicitly multicoloured music that preceded it; the quote from the early part of the century fits. No surprise that The Band's eponymous album was also dubbed the 'Brown Album'. The subjects and styles all looked backwards, but as Pitchfork put it, both The Band, and its predecessor Music From Big Pink, managed to "sound simultaneously experimental and traditional, irreverent and respectful...blues, folk, jazz, rock, funk, soul, r&b;, and country and western all synthesized into twin monuments to the American music they'd been playing for nearly a decade in clubs, roadhouses, and honkytonks."

A 1971 profile of the band in Melody Maker made a similar point: "Their second album was titled simply The Band, and was a masterpiece, shooting Robbie straight up into the forefront of contemporary composers. 'King Harvest' and 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' reflect sure grasp of the feeling and scope of pan-American music, and the voices of Helm, Danko, and Manuel sounded as old as the hills. The instrumentation was more idiosyncratic than ever; accordion, mandolin, wheezing saxes and grunting tuba made telling appearances."

It was recorded in the pool house of a rented house in the Hollywood Hills once owned by Sammy Davies Jr. The equipment for recording therefore had to be shipped in. As John Simon, who co-engineered the album, recalled in an interview with Sound-on-Sound, "When we finally got all the equipment from Capitol together, we decided to hear what it sounded like. This was in the middle of the night, so we put on the most recent record that we liked, which was a Dr. John album that had a song with snatches of 'My Country Tis Of Thee' and 'America The Beautiful' in the chorus. Our wives were with us, and suddenly one of them ran in, saying, 'The cops are here! The cops are here!' We immediately went outside to see what was going on and it turned out that we'd also hooked the sound up to the outdoor pool speakers, so this patriotic song was just blasting through the Hollywood canyons."

The overlapping voices and the fact the most of band members regularly swapped instruments, gives the album a great feel and despite some overdubs, the basic tracks were indeed laid down as an ensemble. The organic way the voices and instruments intertwine, it can't help but qualify as a great 'feel' album.

Photography was by Elliott Landy (see also Allman Brothers feature), with the design by Bob Cato. The New York Times described Cato, art director and the vice president of creative services for CBS-Columbia Records, as "a ground-breaking graphic designer who helped turn the record album cover into an important form of contemporary art". It goes on to note that he "created or supervised some of the most memorable record-album covers of the 1960's. It was his idea to put the work of the underground illustrator R. Crumb on Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills.'' He also designed the cover for Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits.

Plant and See by Plant and See

"The songs and the artwork are both compelling and unusual" Brendan Greaves (Paradise of Bachelors)

This back cover is as much about the label as it is about the album. I only heard about Plant and See having bought Hiss Golden Messenger's Poor Moon, a limited-run vinyl release. Both were put out by Paradise of Bachelors. It's also our first featured gatefold, with the front and back covers being inextricably linked. As it happens, the music inside is excellent. As Alastair McKay wrote in his Uncut review (see extended version here): "The album suffered because it was impossible to pigeonhole, though that is its strength too. The sound is built on Lowery’s swampy guitar, but flits between the sultry rock stylings of “Put Out My Fire” (like a jittery Hendrix, channelling tribal rhythms) and the sweet soul of “Henrietta”, with Lowery’s pained vocal floating over lush harmonies."

Paradise of Bachelors describe themselves as being "dedicated to documenting, curating, and releasing under-recognized musics of the American vernacular, with an emphasis on the South, broadly defined. In all our projects, we endeavor to commit ourselves to in-depth, detailed contextual research and the presentation thereof, to careful and compelling curation, and to respectful and mutually beneficial collaborations with artists and other partners. This is a mission."

The Plant and See release typifies what thay are about, and the accompanying press release is worth a read:

"Paradise of Bachelors is honored to celebrate the life and music of influential songwriter, singer, and guitarist Willie French Lowery (1944-2012) with the first-ever reissue of the sole eponymous album by his interracial swamp-psych band Plant and See. Originally released in 1969 on L.A. label White Whale—home of Jim Ford, the Turtles, and the Rockets—Plant and See is the strange fruit of disparate people, places, and players in dialogue. Its humid, storm-cloud guitars, ductile vocal harmonies, and intuitive, loose-limbed drumming are redolent of a specifically Southern syncretic musical identity and sense of place, testifying to the outstanding, colorblind musicianship of Lowery, African American drummer Forris Fulford, Latino bassist Ron Seiger, and Scotch-Irish vocalist and songwriter Carol Fitzgerald.

American Indian frontman Willie Lowery grew up in swamp-laced, tri-racial Robeson County, North Carolina, the state’s geographically largest, economically poorest, and most ethnically diverse county. Shaped by his own Lumbee Indian heritage as well as the influence of local African American and European American musical traditions, Lowery’s style developed into a powerful, singularly soulful sound that appealed to contemporary psych-rock audiences while directly addressing the concerns of his own Indian community. Plant and See represents his first major recorded work, following stints playing for the “hootchie-cootchie women” of a traveling carnival and the lite-psych group Corporate Image, as well as serving as Clyde McPhatter’s bandleader.

Plant and See was a short-lived incarnation; White Whale, already on the brink of dissolution, lacked the resources to effectively promote the album, which contravened the standard race, place, and genre-based markets of the day. Shortly after its release, the band regrouped as Lumbee, named in honor of Lowery’s tribe, the most populous East of the Mississippi. Lumbee’s 1970 album Overdose is, like Plant and See, a rare and highly collectable psychedelic classic; it attracted the attention of the Allman Brothers, whom Lumbee joined on tour in the early `70s. However, the mercurial Lowery quickly changed course, exploring ways to use the country, blues, and gospel idioms of his youth to articulate the history, politics, and cultural identity of the Lumbee people."

In an interview with Indian Country Today Media Network, Brendan Greaves of the label added more colour:

"As a label, we’re interested in telling stories of under-recognized musicians, musical artifacts, and communities, so it was critical to have the perspective of family and the Lumbee community to inform and contextualize this reissue...Plant and See was largely unknown except to dedicated psych-rock record collectors, White Whale label fanatics, and Willie’s family and friends. The songs and the artwork are both compelling and unusual, and we were thrilled to have the opportunity to reintroduce and share this remarkable document...The vinyl format pays respect to the original release, sounds better, and showcases the artwork at a proper scale...In my mind, Plant and See and Lumbee weren’t so much seminal or influential — in the grand scheme of things, not many heard them then or now — as they were representative of the best ways Southern music can synthesize various musical traditions and cultural perspectives (American Indian, African American, European American, etc.) into something new and powerful, both strange and strangely familiar."

Remain In Light by Talking Heads

"My first encounter with Talking Heads was probably aged about 10 or so when I saw the video for "Once In A Lifetime". Very strange, I loved the music but couldn't work it out, and for some reason I thought David Byrne was Japanese. It was a cursory moment on Top of the Pops and unfortunately at that age I soon lost track of them. But on re-discovering the song some time later I sought out the album. The cover was as indecipherable to me as the video had been. Why the halloween faces, and what were those planes about ? Kamikaze ? I took the plunge and dived in.

Talking Heads have been a favorite band ever since and of all the bands I've listened to I'm grateful to them more than any. They made me curious of all music far beyond the pigeon holes I was used to. On More Songs About Buildings and Food is the song "The Big County" which is one of my favorites. It was is probably the first time I appreciated the slide guitar which as it fades away has an almost ethereal quality. And the reverse cover seems the image of the song, a hovering luminescent snapshot of America."

Words by Pete Finbow, who kindly suggested this album. It turns out to be a back cover about which a substantial amount has been written.

Talking Heads used the working title Melody Attack throughout the initial sessions for the album (after watching a Japanese game show of the same name). This is said to have been the inspiration behind the warplanes motif, which was originally intended to grace the front cover. After the working title was dropped in favour of Remain In Light, the warplanes were relegated to the back and the computer-defaced band member images used for the front instead.

Not for the first time (see Loaded), the credits on the reverse side of Remain In Light also caused interband tension, with no individual band members other than David Byrne listed. The only other indivudal credit went to the producer, Brian Eno (who had also wanted to be featured alongside the band on the front).

The above draws on This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the Twentieth Century by David Bowman.

Lubbock (On Everything) by Terry Allen

"I don't know why Terry's records aren't more popular because I think they're the greatest. Terry writes really good lyrics, very direct and funny and moving, but his songs fall between the cracks of all established formats. His music isn't quite country and it's not quite rock, but the themes he deals with-- family, love, religion, violence-- are so universal it seems like anybody could relate to them." So said David Byrne of Talking Heads (as quoted in a 1998 Perfect Sound Forever interview with Allen).

 

Allen and Byrne worked togther on the latter's True Stories film soundtrack. In the same interview Allen said of their friendship: "We're friends and we work very different from one another, the way we write songs, the nature of our curiosities. But the real common denominator is that neither of us particularly give a hang about high art, fine art, pop culture or popular art. I think it's about what inspires you, what moves you, what makes you laugh, whatever it is. The information is the same. I just think HOW we get it is very different and how it presents itself."

I hadn't even heard of Terry Allen until I interviewed M C Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger. He chose it as a favourite back cover. "A picture of him covering his face with his hands, wearing a hat. It's an evocative image" and one Taylor has recently echoed in press shots such is the impact it's clearly had on him. The photo was taken by Allen's wife, Jo Harvey Allen.

In his review for Allmusic, Stewart Mason provided heavy praise. "Although it's all but unknown outside of a devoted cult following, Terry Allen's second album, 1979's, is one of the finest country albums of all time, a progenitor of what would eventually be called alt-country. This is country music with a wink and a dry-as-West-Texas-dust sense of humor, but at heart, Lubbock (On Everything) is a thoughtful meditation on Allen's hometown." He concluded, "Lubbock (On Everything) is essential listening for anyone with an interest in the outer fringes of country music."

After the Gold Rush by Neil Young

"There was even a credit for Susan Young's patches, featured in the back-cover close-up of Neil's ass."

 

 

After thinking for a long time that The Beatles were my band, the group that I enjoyed most completely above all others, I've had to admit to myself they are not. This comes after years of having invested a lot of time and money into their music and I was reluctant to give them up easily. But if I had to pick one artist whose music really means something to me, it is Neil Young. This is aided in no small part by learning more about the man after reading Jim McDonough's biography Shakey.

You can always question how much you really learn indirectly. I get the impression that McDonough gets as close as anyone is likely to to someone who, as Pitchfork's review of the book observed, is both 'inscrutable' and 'media-shy'. It's a book already heavily quoted in these pages. What comes across is a willful passionate musician who is compelled to make the music in him at the moment in time it hits him. I've never got that sense with The Beatles, hence I can now understand why, while greatly admiring them and their music, I have never fully felt connected with them.

With the exception perhaps of the early blues recordings, for me, most of Neil Young's records encapsulate the magic and fascination I have with recorded music; capturing a real performance, and in so doing, documenting a moment that can move you.

Despite being the album of Young's most likely to be reeled off in greatest album discussions, After the Gold Rush is the album of his I have taken longest to fully appreciate. Harvest is an obvious and easy starting point and by the time I came to hear On The Beach and Tonight's The Night I was immediately intoxicated by their powerful intense and dark looseness (or sloppiness even). Along the way, After the Gold Rush got slightly overlooked.

Pitchfork's review sets things straight: "Members of Crazy Horse appear in various combinations on a few of tracks, and songs like "Southern Man" and "When You Dance I Can Really Love" have the hypnotically stoned but sneakily intense groove of the previous record. But more precisely crafted songs like "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", "Birds", and especially the astonishing title track, which has become a rock standard, show Young's gift as a writer of original melodies of extraordinary beauty in full flower. It's an aspect of Young's work that can be overlooked: the guy can write a simple tune over a chord change that hollows you out completely. Sure, the record has a phrase or two that might sound a little dippy to those with an aversion to hippies (Young was one of those, though of a very individualistic sort), but After the Gold Rush is basically unassailable. There's a reason why it's the favorite Neil Young album for so many."

As for the back cover, as Jim McDonough notes: "Young's album packaging was becoming more personal: Gold Rush included a foldout insert of handwritten lyrics, plus - just to make everybody wonder - a list of songs that didn't make the cut. There was even a credit for [Neil's first wife] Susan Young's patches, featured in the back-cover close-up of Neil's ass."

Joel Berstein was again the photographer (see also Harvest), with art direction by Gary Burden.

King of the Delta Blues Singers by Robert Johnson

This album was released in 1961, a compilation of sixteen of Robert Johnson's recordings, thirteen previously unreleased. At the time, when there was a revival of interest in the genre, little detail was known about the lives of bluesmen who had recorded these songs in the 1930s. The back cover was still then a key source of what little information there was available on the featured recording artist. More academic biography and musical analysis than we are used to today. On this album the back cover spent a fair amount of its space just defining what constituted 'country blues'.

 

The notes on the back started:

"Robert Johnson is little, very little more than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records in the files of a phonograph company that no longer exists. A country blues singer from the Mississippi Delta that brought forth Son House, Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson appeared and disappeared, in much the same fashion as a sheet of newspaper twisting and twirling down a dark and windy midnight street."

The album's Wikipedia entry notes the potential unreliability of the information: "At the time of its release very little scholarship had been done on Johnson's life, and the album liner notes contain some inaccuracies and false conclusions, and a speculative portrait of Johnson's personality. As the two surviving portraits of him were discovered a decade later, the cover painting depicts a faceless musician in field clothes."

It is easy see how intoxicating these albums must have been for new listeners, and how important the liner notes became, accurate or not.

Come 1971, a second compilation of recordings was released. With the unearthing of the first known photographs of Johnson still a year away, both back and front covers still had to resort to artistic interpretations. This time depicting the makeshift sessions in San Antonio, Texas in November 1936, recorded in the Gunter Hotel at 205 East Houston Street where the record company had rented Rooms 413 and 414. The former used as the control room while Johnson was playing in the latter.

The cover artwork was produced by Tom Wilson and, on the front, it depicts Johnson playing in Room 414. The back showed what is assumed to be Art Satherly (the record company's recording director) and Don Law (their A&R man) at their recording equipment in Room 413 and with a cable going under the door to Johnson's microphone. With effectively the whole of the 60s between volumes, the back cover had witnessed a material change. No lengthy essay (although still much was unknown about Johnson) and the introduction of some colour. What it did say was hard to argue with though:

"What you hold in your hands is a collection  of 16 songs by the greatest down-home blues singer of all time, Robert Johnson. This, the second volume of "King of the Delta Blues Singers," completes the release of Johnson's total recorded output.

Robert Johnson's influence on contemporary rock is just beginning to be felt. The Stones included one of the tunes from this collection (Love in Vain) on their "Let It Bleed" album....So if  you dig contemporary music, especially the blues, give a listen to Robert Johnson, the original master." (Jon Waxman)

Sources:  Gioia, Ted, 2008. Delta Blues. New York: W W Norton & Company Inc. Dixon, R M W and Godrich, J, 1970. Recording the Blues. London: Studio Vista Limited. http://www.tdblues.com/?p=526. The liner notes for Volume 1 reference The Country Blues by Sam Charters (Rhinehart 1959) and Blues Fell This Morning by Paul Oliver (Cassell, Ltd., 1960) as sources. With thanks to John Seaton.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles

Whilst being one of the most iconic album covers of all time, Sgt. Pepper suffers as a result. The Peter Blake designed image is one to which we are overexposed, arguably to the detriment of the enjoyment the music, or at least the frequency with which we return to it. That's my experience at least. It therefore benefits more than most from flipping over to the reverse side. It reminds us that The Beatles really were as progressive and as important as we are told they are, even if we might tire of their influence at times. They are also important in the history of back covers as they were first major band to print lyrics on the album sleeve (Dylan albums had had selections of his writings on the reverse before, but not his lyrics). That the lyrics were deemed important was noteworthy; 'pop' music was starting to be seen as a culturally significant, studied by academics and fans alike.

The American literary critic and professor of English Richard Poirier wrote, “Learning From the Beatles,” originally published in 1967, a essay on the cultural importance of the album.  As his New York Times obituary notes, the essay "lamented the lack of serious cultural criticism about rock ’n’ roll, it recognized the emergent interaction between “serious” and pop culture and recognized the revolution that the Beatles, their Britishness notwithstanding, had begun to effect in American cultural life."

The fan interpretations were more far fetched, with the back cover thought to hold clues to the (conspiracy) theory that Paul McCartney had in fact been killed in a moped accident in 1966 and had subsequently been replaced by an actor. On the back cover McCartney has his back towards the camera and George Harrison appears to be pointing at the words "Wednesday morning at five o'clock as the day begins", which was supposed to have been the time of Paul's fatal accident.

Three years later, Let It Be was an altogether less colourful affair reflecting the album's 'back-to-basics' approach (less psychedelic and less studio wizardry). The back cover states this in black and white: "they performed live for many of the tracks; in comes warmth and the freshness of a live performance". Although some don't agree that this ethos was necessarily preserved by Phil Spector's production. The cover was designed by John Kosh with photography by Ethan Russell. The individual stark images are in contrast to the band photographs of Sgt Pepper, and as Todd Leopold put it, "Russell's photographs show four men trying to rescue their fading musical marriage." Russell is apparently also the only rock photographer to have shot album covers for The Beatles, The Rolling Stones (Get Yer Ya-Yas Out) and The Who (Who's Next and Quadrophenia).

 

Interview with Daytrotter

As his Twitter bio states, Sean Moeller "started Daytrotter in 2006 and that's what I continue to do every day."

The idea is that touring bands pop into Daytrotter's Horseshack studio in Rock Island, Illinois as they pass by on the way to their next show. The ethos is to keep-it-simple so that what the bands leave behind is "four absolutely collectible songs that often impart on whomever listens to them the true intensity that these musicians put into their art, sometimes with more clarity than they do when they have months to tinker with overdubs and experiments. These songs are them as they are on that particular day, on that particular tour – dirty and alive."

Johnnie Cluney  is Daytrotter's illustrator-in-chief ("I play and write songs under American Dust.  I like music, food, bad tv and art."), producing one-off band portraits for each seesion.

I traded emails with them both this week.

The Turnaround: With your distinctive band portraits, artwork is clearly important to Daytrotter. How did they come about?

Johnnie Cluney: well Sean had the idea for Daytrotter and asked me to do the illustrations. They have changed a bit over the years, but I think they have always had a consistent look, and that's what I go for. I was a bit freaked out at first since I only worked with two colors at a time for my fliers and show posters, but here I am working with color, and I'm loving every minute of it.

Johnnie Cluney illustration for Woods session (Oct 2009)

The Turnaround: Do you have a favourite of all the ones done over the years?

JC: Its probably impossible to have one favorite, but... I do like the Woods session quite a bit.

The Turnaround: Any thoughts on favourite album back covers and why?

JC: My favorite back cover to an album is the Walmart version of In Utero. When I was a kid I noticed that all the little fetus babies were turtles on my CD, and that the song "Rape Me" was actually "Waif Me". I found out that Nirvana had released a censored version for Walmart. Major bummer. This back cover made me question morals as an artist, and showed me that Nirvana was not so punk after all.

Sean Moeller: I'm impossible when it comes to favorites.

My current favorite back cover though is Johnny Paycheck's "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" album. It's basically the same as the front cover, just with some credits and the song titles. The reason I like this back cover so much is because I like the front cover so much. It's iconic in as much of a way as Paycheck should be and it's a perfect photograph to represent the songs that he writes.

Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul

For our second 'feel' album we could probably have chosen any Stax album. As Otis himself put it in a Rolling Stone interview: "At Stax the rule is: whatever you feel, play it. We cut everything together - horns, rhythm, and vocal. We'll do it three or four times, go back and listen to the results and pick the best one. If somebody doesn't like a line in a song, we'll go back and cut the whole song over. Until last year, we didn't even have a four-track tape recorder. You can't overdub on a one-track machine."

In the end we chose what Keith Richards called, "The album that soothes a broken heart".



It wasn't uncommon for the back cover to act as advertising, imploring the idle browser to buy and take an album home. Back covers weren't shy (because they had the space) to advertise more explicitly, promoting other albums by the artist too. Here they did both, showing covers of his three previous albums; The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads (1965), Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul (1965) and The Soul Album (1966).

As was typical, they tried to talk directly to the potential listener..."This dictionary, created especially for you, is the undeviating vocabulary of its author OTIS REDDING. Searching for something interesting to enjoy? Here...put this album on your turntable and listen to OTIS. If you should hear a word you don't understand, get your OTIS REDDING DICTIONARY OF SOUL and look it up!"

This was no doubt aimed the white audience Otis Redding had started to tap into. Released in October 1966, Dictionary of Soul was his fifth album and the last to be released before his death in December the following year. After the success of Otis Blue, Redding was increasingly attracting a crossover audience and in early 1966 he performed at the famous Whiskey A Go Go club on West Hollywood's Sunset Strip in front of a predominantly white audience, becoming one of the first soul artists to play in the western United States.

It certainly did its job on at least one member of the Stones.

Playlist #1

Here's a selection of tracks from the first 12 records featured on The Turnaround (a few of the videos may not work on all devices). 

1. Words (Between The Lines of Age) by Neil Young (Harvest)

If this doesn't play, just search YouTube for 'Neil Young In A Barn'!

2. Westering by Hiss Golden Messenger (Poor Moon)

3. New Morning by Bob Dylan (New Morning)

4. Kingpin by Wilco (Being There)

5. I'm Waiting For The Man by The Velvet Underground & Nico

6. Little Red Rooster by The Rolling Stones (Get Stoned)

7. Everydays by Buffalo Springfield (Buffalo Springfield Again)

8. Done Somebody Wrong by The Allman Brothers Band (At Fillmore East)

9. Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars by Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim

10. Say You'll Be Min by Kitty, Daisy & Lewis (Going Up The Country single)

11. Travelling Man by Bert Jansch (L.A. Turnaround)

12. Rock and Roll by The Velvet Underground (Loaded)

L.A. Turnaround by Bert Jansch

I'm a sucker for this kind of back cover. Part insight into the recording process and part peek into the atmosphere around it. The photos are a mix of the recording sessions in a Sussex manor house (captured via mobile recording studio in an Airstream caravan), plus shots of Jansch out and about when the sessions moved to Sound City in California, looking every inch the Scotsman.

The album was for a long while out of print and so became something of a 'lost classic'. Three tracks surfaced on the 2000 compilation Dazzling Stranger, but the album didn't see a proper reissue until 2009, when it was put out on Drag City Records. Perhaps most famously, Jansch himself didn't even have a copy of the album until Johnny Marr of The Smiths gave him a rare copy (Source: BBC). Although another story has Jansch himself having to bid on eBay for a copy.

The album was produced by ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith and, originally released on the Famous Charisma label following the demise of Jansch's previous band Pentangle, it was a comeback album of sorts. An Uncut review called it the 'best ever Sunday morning LP'. It went on to add, "When Charisma owner Tony Stratton-Smith hired former Monkee Michael Nesmith to produce Jansch’s 1974 debut for the label, the idea seems to have been to make a record that could bring the folk icon to a wider audience. As it happened, the stunning LA Turnaround became one of Bert Jansch’s least-heard albums. Otherwise, though, mission accomplished: Nesmith brought Red Rhodes, pedal steel genius of his own First National Band, and the greater part of the record is simply Rhodes’ sublimely intuitive playing intertwining with Jansch’s. Throughout, Bert’s deep-rooted British balladry meets Nesmith’s experiments in avant-country, and on songs like the sparkling, hypnotic “Fresh As A Sweet Sunday Morning”, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could fail to love it."

In a recent interview, again for Uncut, on whether Jansch was easy to work with, Nesmith recalled, "Yeah, he was for me, I liked him. I didn't know anything about him before that record. Bert was a discovery for me, a wonderful discovery. It was particularly interesting when he got to LA, because he brought all his background with him, but got immersed into the country music bar scene, which is its own particular animal here. That was fun to watch happen. He and Red played really well together."

Some of that bar scene is clearly captured on the back cover.

Kitty, Daisy & Lewis

Bought before I had heard them play a note. Kitty, Daisy & Lewis were enthusiastically recommended to me while at a festival they were playing recently. So I bought this at the on-site record tent in anticipation they might sell out if they were as good as I was expecting. I wasn't disappointed. Their rockabilly-infused blues is perfect festival watching and listening, seamlessly mixing covers with originals. This is a 7" off their first album, a cover of Going Up the Country backed with Say You'll Be Mine.

 

Devotees to all things analogue, they have built a home studio dominated by antique recording equipment. There records are part of the whole package too, with 50s styling and thick, heavy-weight vinyl thrown in. Apparently, the vinyl was also cut by Lewis using his own equipment at The Exchange Mastering Studios.

Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim

I have mixed feelings about ‘100 Greatest‘ lists. At best: They can introduce you to new music or make you revisit music you already own but have neglected. At worst: They are unimaginative and lazy lists with the same old albums and artists always featuring (albeit, you may argue, for good reason). I'm still a sucker for them though...

Occasionally you can be surprised. Years ago I saw a list of the 100 ‘coolest’ albums. While the term is about as subjective as they come, quite a number of albums I had never heard of featured. Three stuck in my mind and this was one of them (the other two were No Other by Gene Clark and Pacific Ocean Blue by Dennis Wilson).

The back cover turns out to be by the 'King of Liner Notes', Stan Coryn. This comes from a time (and genre) when liner notes were feted for their literary qualities. For this album Coryn evocatively reports from one of the recording sessions. Among other liner notes, he wrote those for Lee Hazelwood, Dean Martin and Everly Brothers' albums. Even the back cover seems to exude an effortless cool.

The photograph on the back was taken by Ed Thrasher. His NY Times obituary noted his, "work proved integral to the success of many...albums and helped define the look of rock. His overall art direction included commissioning photographers, typographers and illustrators for albums including the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Are You Experienced,” Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks,” the Grateful Dead's “Anthem of the Sun,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Toulouse Street” and even Tiny Tim’s purposely cheesy “God Bless Tiny Tim.” An expressively moody self-portrait of Joni Mitchell appearing on the cover of her 1969 album “Clouds,” also started a small trend for musicians to create the art for their own records."

Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East

The stories of those who surround a band can sometimes be as interesting as those of the band members themselves…this is also the first contribution from a reader (thanks Dad!).

The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East, often viewed as one of the truly great live albums, was recorded by Tom Dowd at the height of the band's power on 12th and 13th March 1971 and before guitarist Duane Allman's death in 1973. It resulted in a classic double album with a very distinctive cover featuring black & white photographs taken by Jim Marshall of the band posing casually with their cased equipment which had been piled up against a brick wall. Duane was always appreciative of the band's road crew and insisted that the back cover of the album should replicate the front but with the band replaced by their roadies. So, the same setting was used to depict (from left to right) Joseph ("Red Dog") Campbell, Kim Payne, Joe Dan Petty, Mike Callaghan and Willie Perkins. Red Dog, Kim and Joe Dan are holding cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer which, in view of the album's success, was probably as good an advertising campaign as the brewers could have devised themselves. The beer was provided by the photographer as a reward to the roadies for lugging out and stacking the band's heavy equipment for the photo shoot. None of the pictures of the band for the cover were actually taken at the Fillmore East but near the band's headquarters in Macon, Georgia.

"Red Dog" was a red-haired Vietnam veteran and Kim Payne had only just been checked out of a hospital after recovering from being shot by a policeman. He had been stopped for speeding 3 days after the Fillmore concerts. Kim was also the co-writer of one of the band's well-known numbers - "Midnight Rider". Joe Dan played bass in one of Dickey Betts earlier bands - "The Jokers" and Mike Callaghan was a soundman and bus driver for "The Roemans", the backing band for Tommy Roe. Willie Perkins had a degree in business management and had been brought in to replace the band's Tour Manager, Twiggs Lyndon, who was in jail awaiting trial for murder. One of his responsibilities was to look after the books and it wasn't long before he found that the finances were in a mess and that, even as a roadie, he was making more money than anyone else in the band.

At "Red Dog's" suggestion, the back cover also acknowledges Twiggs' absence by having a separate photo of him superimposed on the brick wall beside the track listing.

Words by John Seaton, drawing on Scott Freeman's Midnight Riders - The Story of The Allman Brothers Band and Skydog - The Duane Allman Story by Randy Poe.

Jim Marshall took countless iconic photographs of musicians, from early 1960s images of Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village through to Woodstock, where he was chief photographer (not the first Woodstock photographer mentioned on these pages. Henry Diltz features in the Buffalo Springfield Again entry. Diltz is also described as the official photographer (as, I have discovered, was Elliott Landy), so I guess you are allowed more than one). Marshall also famously photographed Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival, and Johnny Cash at San Quentin. For more visit www.jimmarshallphotographyllc.com