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.