Get Stoned by The Rolling Stones

A slight cheat this one, as the back cover, bar the track listing, is all but identical to the front. A recent charity shop purchase, it was bought for purely nostalgic reasons. Get Stoned was my first real contact with the Stones, discovered as I leafed through my father's record collection. At the time I can remember not liking the vocals much (out of tune to my young ears) and by being a little alarmed by the rather grotesque mould of Jagger's lips on the front. It has always been fascinating to me how our music tastes change (develop?) and particularly how reactions from early listens can be totally at odds with how we grow to feel about a singer/band/song. I had similar experiences on first listens to Bob Dylan and Neil Young, which I expect are not uncommon.  

 

A few years later, when looking to buy the record myself, I couldn't seem to find it and naively thought the provocative title had led to it being banded for such a brazen drug reference. As it turns out, Get Stoned offered a great intro to the band (up to Sticky Fingers) and has a number of tracks (Dandelion, 2000 Light Years from Home) rarely to appear on their other many compilations.

The Velvet Underground & Nico

This is just an example of a great album, the back cover of which I hadn't given much thought to until I started this blog. Most retellings of the Velvet Underground's debut album major on how poorly it did commercially on initial release and the back cover has a part to play in this story.

The album’s back cover features a photo of the group playing live with an image projected behind them. On the initial pressings the projected image was a still of actor Eric Emerson from a Warhol film, Chelsea Girls. Emerson had been arrested for drug possession and, desperate for money, claimed the still had been included on the album without his permission. The label recalled all copies of the album until the legal problems were settled (by which time the record had lost its modest commercial momentum), and the still was airbrushed out.

Back cover credits: Colour show photo by Hugo. Portraits by Paul Morrissey (director, alongside Andy Warhol, of the film Chelsea Girls).

Being There by Wilco

Something I rarely do is buy records on the basis of the cover alone. Instead, all too often I'm prompted into new purchases by either knowing a band already or reading endless rave reviews. Buying blind (or rather, deaf) may seem a wasteful approach but it does also have the potential to make record buying more rewarding if it leads you to something you would otherwise never have listened to.

I bought Being There by Wilco purely on the basis of the cover when it first came out. I can only assume I wandered into a record store with some spare change in my pocket and was attracted to the nice upended shot of a guitar and the left hand playing it (but with the player otherwise not visible). What I heard on the album wasn’t exactly a revelation, but it was great music - an eclectic mix of country, white noise, blue-eyed soul and folk (The White Album as if played by the Flying Burrito Brothers maybe) - but it was the start of a hugely enjoyable journey exploring their music. The cover photos were by Brad Miller, of whom I have been able to find little information, but they did perfectly capture what was fundamentally rootsy music inside.

The white noise on the opener “Misunderstood” was a pointer their fourth album, the excellent Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. An album that led some to dub them the ‘American Radiohead’, as well as to them being dropped by their record label. A story captured on the riveting film by Sam Jones, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco. A whole other story in itself, Sam Jones talks to Pitchfork about his experience making the film here.

New Morning by Bob Dylan

I stumbled across this in a secondhand record shop and was intrigued by the back cover. It showed a clearly much younger Dylan than the age of the album (released in 1970) standing next to someone he looked very proud to be photographed with. It was not a Dylan album that I was particularly familiar with, really only knowing "If Not For You" and "Time Passes Slowly", both of which feature on the excellent compilation Biograph, the former also covered by George Harrison on All Things Must Pass. 

It is easy to forget those we revere today also revered their predecessors. None more so than Bob Dylan, who had already been pictured on an earlier album, Bringing It All Back Home, brandishing, among other albums, a copy of Robert Johnson's King of the Delta Blues Singers. His adoration of Woody Guthrie, and his pilgramage to see him on his deathbed, is of course well documented.

Ed Ward's 1970 Rolling Stone review of New Morning sheds more light on the origin of the 1962 photo: 

"To begin with, there's the cover. Dylan, looking like he's been through some rocky times, but confident. And the back cover, with Young Zimmerman and Victoria Spivey, self-appointed "Queen of the Blues," standing by her piano. He's holding a guitar that Big Joe Williams had just given him, and she is beaming up at him, immensely pleased. The look on his face seems to say, "I thought I could do it, and I could. Shit, man, I'm Bob Dylan, that's who I am." And indeed, that's who he was. And is."

The man who took the photo of the young Bob Dylan with Victoria Spivey was Len Kunstadt, Victoria's husband and manager.

In a 2001 interview with Rolling Stone Dylan himself reinforces the point:

Rolling Stone: It seems that some of your most impassioned and affecting performances, from night to night, are your covers of traditional folk songs.

Dylan: Folk music is where it all starts and in many ways ends. If you don't have that foundation, or if you're not knowledgeable about it and you don't know how to control that, and you don't feel historically tied to it, then what you're doing is not going to be as strong as it could be. Of course, it helps to have been born in a certain era because it would've been closer to you, or it helps to be a part of the culture when it was happening. It's not the same thing, relating to something second- or third-hand off of a record.

I think one of the best records that I've ever been even a part of was the record I made with Big Joe Williams and Victoria Spivey. Now that's a record that I hear from time to time and I don't mind listening to it. It amazes me that I was there and had done that.

Poor Moon by Hiss Golden Messenger

I'm not sure where I first heard about Hiss Golden Messenger's Bad Debt, an EP of acoustic songs recorded at M C Taylor's kitchen table. For me, a captivating cross between Robert Johnson and Neil Young. It was either through The Guardian's New Band of the Day or perhaps via Uncut, who have been constant champions of their output.

That EP led me to their full-length, Poor Moon, on which a number of the tracks from Bad Debt were re-recorded with a full band. As well as the fantastic music, which lost none of its magic in a different setting, the grassroots ethos behind the production of the music itself is inspiring. To begin with Poor Moon was not released on CD and only via limited hand-numbered run of 500 lovingly-produced LPs (I got 165). Put out by Paradise of Bachelors with photography by Abigail Martin and drawings by Alex Jako, front and back covers are real works of devotion to the art of the record.

"The imagery was drawn by my friend Alex Jako, who lives in Todmorden, England. She did an incredible job, I think. It was all laid out by our friend Brendan Greaves. I wanted to evoke a feel similar to some of the Nonesuch Explorer LP covers." (M C Taylor, interview with Uprooted Music Review)

Apparently a new album is also in the works.

Harvest by Neil Young

Harvest was the first album that got me thinking about this blog. In the context of Young's diverse discography it has almost moved into the territory of ‘guilty pleasure’, tainted by a ‘middle-of-the-road’ tag that has been fostered by Young himself. It's reputation cannot fail to be impacted by the darker shadow cast by what came next.

His hand-written liner notes for “Heart of Gold” on his 1977 compilation Decade famously remarked, "This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I met more interesting people there." "Heart of Gold", one of the two singles from Harvest, is perhaps his only genuine 'hit'. As the Pitchfork review for the Harvest reissue notes, this meant that “To embrace Young as an artist after Harvest would mean accepting his many flaws, which have made his career unusually rich and varied as well as maddeningly inconsistent.”

But the back cover puts lie to the perception that Harvest is just a slick mellow album. It captures the creation of some of the ragged, more spontaneous sounding tracks of the band playing live…in a barn (naturally).

An extract from the excellent Neil Young biography 'Shakey' by Jimmy McDonough captures the circumstances of the back cover shot:

"Young's back problems would draw out the completion of the Harvest album. In March [1972], Young went to London with Jack Nitzsche to record a pair of songs live with the London Symphony  - "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There's a World." In April, Young returned to Nashville to cut "Harvest." September would bring the first recordings done on [Young's] ranch, with "Words," "Are You Ready for the Country?" and "Alabama" cut by backing up a remote-recording truck to a dilapidated old barn on the property, where Nitzsche would join Young's Nashville outlaws [session musicians dubbed the the Stray Gators] for these sessions, playing piano and, for the first time in his life, slide guitar....

...Much to Nitzsche's embarrassment, he was soon sitting amid bales of hay accompanying Young on a Kay guitar he barely knew how to play. Bernstein would capture the barn vibe in a photo Young used for the back cover of Harvest: all the Stray Gators, hands at their instruments, staring apprehensively at Young bent over his guitar, his long mane of hair totally obscuring his face, indifferent to their attention..."

For more images by Joel Bernstein go to: www.joelbernstein.com

About this blog

I was inspired to think about album art differently when I was framing some records to hang on a wall at home, only to feel they were just too familiar. So I hung the reverse side up instead and still enjoy seeing them on the wall to this day.

In the age of digital downloads, the art of the album back cover is starting to disappear. Yet for the music enthusiast it holds an enticing alternative to the front cover, not only providing all important details of the recordings, but often images that were less guarded, and might that let you into the musicians world or recording process.

We have all become so used to the classic album covers, but revisiting the reverse side can offer a reason to reconnect with a much-loved album.

This blog was also inspired by an approach to photography that encourages tourists not to take holiday photos of ‘picture postcard’ locations and attractions we have become all too numb to. Instead, it urges us to turn 180 degrees and capture the view less photographed, and in doing so, snap an alternative record of our experience.