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."

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."