Marquee Moon by Television

The iconic front cover photo was taken by the legendary and occasionally controversial Robert Mapplethorpe (who also took the photograph that appears on the cover of Patti Smith's first album, Horses), but very little information seems to exist for the back of Marquee Moon. The spiral design is credited to Billy Lobo, but I can find no more out about him beyond that. It looks almost James Bond-esque, but does perhaps echo what Pitchfork called a "shockingly economical" album with a "tightly wound web of simple guitar parts".

What the back does contain though is an example of the sort of detail music lovers delight in. It lists which of the two guitarists played each solo. 

Nick Kent wrote an infamous review for NME on its release, which is worth quoting: "Marquee Moon is an album for everyone whatever their musical creeds and/or quirks. Don’t let any other critic put you off with jive turkey terms like ‘avant-garde’ or ‘New York psycho-rock’. This music is passionate, full-blooded, dazzlingly well crafted, brilliantly conceived and totally accessible to anyone who (like myself) has been yearning for a band with the vision to break on through into new dimensions of sonic overdrive and the sheer ability to back it up. Listening to this album reminds me of the ecstatic passion I received when I first heard ‘Eight Miles High’ and ‘Happenings Ten Years Ago’ – before terms like progressive/art rock became synonymous with baulking pretensions and clumsy, crude syntheses of opposite forms."

More recently, Chris Dahlen writing for Pitchfork mirrored these sentiments: "the things that make the record so classic, that pump your blood like a breath of clean air, are the guitars. This whole record's a mash note to them. The contrast between these two essential leads is stunning: Richard Lloyd chisels notes out hard while Verlaine works with a subtle twang and a trace of space-gazing delirium. They play lines that are stately and chiming, rutting and torrential, the riff, the solo, the rare power chord, and most of all, the power note: the second pang on the riff to "Venus de Milo" lands like a barbell; the opening bars of "See No Evil" show one axe rutting the firmament while the other spirals razorwire around it.

What Matt LeMay had to say for the album's entry into Pitchfork's Top 100 Albums of the 1970s was an alternative take on the guitar parts, but was no less in awe of the end result: "Its lengthy and numerous guitar solos are individually credited in its liner notes. But at its core, Television's Marquee Moon is shockingly economical-- a tightly wound web of simple guitar parts wrapped around Tom Verlaine's straightforward and impressionistic songwriting. Taken out of context, the guitar solos on Marquee Moon aren't just unimpressive; they're downright illogical. Everyone who plays guitar will, at some point, learn the solo from "Stairway to Heaven", but it's practically impossible to sit down and actually play anything from Marquee Moon. Like The Velvet Underground before them, Television's songs focus on interplay and exploration, rather than individual melodies and chord progressions.

This, of course, is just icing on what is unquestionably the finest release from one of the most talented bands to be nurtured by the scum-soaked floors and paint-chipped walls of 1970s CBGB's. The subtle buildup of "Marquee Moon", the nervous energy of "See No Evil", and the melodic tension of "Guiding Light" are all songwriting masterstrokes, articulated perfectly by able and adventurous players. The punk scene from which Television emerged is often cited as discarding the concept of musicianship entirely. And in a sense, this is exactly what Television did with Marquee Moon, recasting virtuosity as a function of the brain, not the fingers."

It is clearly an album that moves people, which is all you can really ask.

Yazoo Records

Another blues record where the back cover is more academic, almost archaeological, and attracts attention because of the information it contains. It comes from my father's fantastic collection of blues records assembled during the blues revival of the 60s and 70s.

"It is a compilation of tracks recorded by blues artistes Leroy Carr (piano) and Scrapper Blackwell (guitar) entitled "Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell - Naptown Blues 1929-1934". During the blues revival in the '60s and '70s a number of labels emerged which compiled old, mainly pre-war, 78 rpm recordings borrowed from collectors' libraries of rare originals. One of these labels, Yazoo, was founded in New York by Nick Perls in 1967, adopting an art deco peacock as its logo taken from the 1927 Black Patti label (see below). As can be seen from the back of the album, released as Yazoo L1036 in 1973, there is little to attract the artistically minded but much to anyone interested in details of the content and the performers, even, in this case, to the extent of seeing the death certificate for Leroy Carr who died in 1935. The cover art is attributed to Bob Aulicino who also produced artwork for Nick Perls on the Blues Goose label which he started in 1970 and which focused on live recordings of some re-discovered blues performers as well as some of the up-and-coming artists."

No Other by Gene Clark

I first became aware of Gene Clark's No Other from the same 2006 '100 Coolest Albums' list that brought Frank Sinatra's collaboration with Antonio Carlos Jobim to my attention. At the time I had no idea he was a ex-Byrd. Following its release in 1974 it became something of a lost classic after Asylum records, dismayed by the excessive cost of its production and lack of immediate hits, failed to promote it properly. As the Wikipedia entry notes, "[f]urther confounding matters was the album's artwork: the front cover was a collage inspired by 1920s Hollywood glamour, while the back featured a photo of the singer with permed hair and clad in full drag, frolicking at the former estate of [actor] John Barrymore." Modest sales saw it deleted in 1976 and it remained largely unavailable until three tracks appeared on a retrospective of Clark's career, Flying High, released in 1998, with No Other finally seeing re-release in the early 2000s.

In terms of how good the record actually is, Allmusic put it well: "The appearance of No Other on CD in America some 26 years after its release offers the opportunity to hear this record for what it was: a solidly visionary recording that decided to use every available means to illustrate Gene Clark's razor-sharp songwriting that lent itself to open-ended performance and production -- often in the same song (one listen to the title track bears this out in spades)."

As recently as last November, Allan Jones wrote in Uncut about its original release. "When it comes out in the autumn of 1974, Gene Clark's No Other seems to me like an album everybody should hear, nothing short of a masterpiece. I beg for enough space to review it at appropriate length in what used to be Melody Maker, to a wholly unsympathetic response, people regarding me as someone who's taken leave of their senses who should be approached with caution and a very big stick. I'm told to stop my infernal whining and write 100 words on the album, which I do, sulkily, most of them superlatives. The extravagant claims I make on its behalf, however, bestirs few people enough to actually go out and buy the thing. Many more simply ignore the album altogether and it quickly sinks without trace, barely a copy sold...No Other was meant to be the album that returned him to former glories and was lavishly financed by David Geffen's Asylum Records; to the tune, some said, of $100,000. This is a lot of money for only eight completed tracks and an album that could only have sold more poorly if it had remained unreleased. When Clark announces to an appalled Geffen that for a follow-up he intends to record an album of "cosmic Motown", he's introduced to the wooden thing in the wall otherwise known as the door."