hand drawn long player

Here's a cool idea - hand drawn long players. @danblahblahblah is collecting hand drawn album covers and publishing them at www.handdrawnlongplayer.com.  If you have five minutes to spare maybe you could sketch one and send it to him (instructions at www.handdrawnlongplayer.com).

This is Happening, thecornpoppy

 



Once upon a time, when I was young, an LP was a big deal.  First of all you needed to have some cash to buy it.  When you're 11 or twelve that is tricky,  You had to save up the half crowns that Christmas and birthdays brought.  As time went by it got a little easier - a paper round helped.  As did some trading of bootlegs. 

The Velvet Underground & Nico, Abi

 



Here's a little aside regarding bootlegging.  The music industry (deliberately) confuses bootlegging with piracy.  As an historian I am often asked the difference between piracy and  privateering. Well, students, "pirates" were seamen who attacked other vessels and took their cargoes, whereas "privateers" were seamen who attacked other vessels and took their cargoes - but had a letter from the king saying it was ok so long as the cargoes taken were French. Or Spanish. Or Dutch. Or otherwise furrin. A "free trader" is a holder of the political point of view that government regulation should be minimised - in commerce, trade and usually everything else.

In modern terms, intellectual copyright and all that, the following applies:
Making illegal copies of legitimately released music/film/etc to sell:     piracy
Making illegal copies of legitimately released music/film/etc to share:    viral marketing
Making copies of non-commercial recordings to sell: piracy
Making copies of non-commercial recordings to trade/share: free trade
Utilising free download sites: free trade
Record companies selling music downloads instead of hard copy:    privateering
Record companies selling the same cd with a few extra tracks, a few months after the original album came out: grand theft audio.

I was never in the business of making illegal copies of legitimately released music to sell.  That's just wrong.  But making available product that was hard to get . . . it was a service.  The only people who buy audience recordings of gigs by their favourite bands are people who already have all the commercially released stuff.  Not only that but all the money I ever made from selling stuff to my schoolmates went back to the music business - I bought records and went to gigs with the proceeds.

Pendulum In Silico, James

 

Back to album covers.  Having acquired the funds to purchase a record it was time to go off to a record shop.  For younger readers, these were like the physical embodiment of iChoons where all of the mp3 files were printed onto slabs of vinyl, some 7", some 12" and wrapped in artworks.   You could lose youself for a Saturday afternoon looking through the racks.  Maybe you went with a specific record in mind, maybe the choice would be made as you looked through the racks..  Maybe you'd been through the racks every Saturday afternoon for the last month and now you had amassed the cash.  Now you could buy something.

 

Some records were more special than others.

 

Dark Side of the Moon, thecornpoppy

 

When you arrived home with a copy of, say, Dark Side of the Moon you were about to embark on a journey.  The gatefold cover was an important part of that journey.  The cover set the scene.  If the cover of DSOTM had looked like Tales of Topographic Oceans, or even Wish You Were Here, it would have sounded like a different album.  The cover was just right.  The cover, the lyrics, the credits, it was all part of the experience.  The pyramid poster was on my wall all through the Punk Wars, increasingly covered with (punky) stickers. 

 

There was a golden age of record cover design which passed when cds superceded vinyl.  There is no need for sleeve design for mp3s so the craft of the sleeve designer will go the way of the wagon wheelwright and the lamplighter.  Maybe there'll be a section for them at Country Fayres, close to the coppice workers and charcoal burners.

 

Help keep this dying art alive by celebrating long players and hand drawing an album sleeve.  Don't forget to send it to www.handdrawnlongplayer.com.

Lou Reed

Velvet Underground & Nico

 

 

They were wild like the USA

A mystery band in a New York way
Rock and roll, but not like the rest
And to me, America at it's best
How in the world were they making that sound?
Velvet Underground.

A spooky tone on a Fender bass
Played less notes and left more space
Stayed kind of still, looked kinda shy
Kinda far away, kinda dignified.
How in the world were they making that sound?
Velvet Underground.

Now you can look at that band and wonder where
All that sound was coming from
With just 4 people there.

Twangy sounds of the cheapest types,
Sounds as stark as black and white stripes,
Bold and brash, sharp and rude,
Like the heats turned off
And you're low on food.
How in the world were they making that sound?
Velvet Underground.
Like this...

Wild wild parties when they start to unwind
A close encounter of the thirdest kind
On the bandstand playing, everybody's saying
How in the world were they making that sound?
Velvet Underground.

Well you could look at that band
And at first sight
Say that certain rules about modern music
Wouldn't apply tonight.

Twangy sounds of the cheapest kind,
Like "Guitar sale $29.99,"
Bold and brash, stark and still,
Like the heats turned off
And you can't pay the bill.
How in the world were they making that sound?
Velvet Underground.

Both guitars got the fuzz tone on
The drummer's standing upright pounding along
A howl, a tone, a feedback whine
Biker boys meet the college kind
How in the world were they making that sound?
Velvet Underground.

Wild wild parties when they start to unwind
A close encounter of the thirdest kind
On the bandstand grooving, everybody moving
How in the world are they making that sound?
Velvet Underground.

 

Jonathan Richman, Velvet Underground

Banana

I bought my first Warhol when I was 12 or 13 back in early '70s.  It was a picture of a banana and came with a free vinyl album of songs by the Velvet Underground although this wasn't mentioned on the visible artefact.  I don't remember the cost but it was probably around £2.99 and constituted several weeks accummulated pocket money. 

You may say "but that was just a record cover, Andy Warhol didn't personally paint each one".  However I have read a lot about Warhol and I know that he didn't personally paint a lot of things that went out under his name.  There is a statement that the  music by the Velvet Underground was "Produced by Andy Warhol" but I heard Lou Reed say that he didn't produce that either. 

One of the difficulties when it comes to understanding art is understanding the relationship between an idea, a concept, the execution of that concept and the reproduction of that execution.  As an example, take Warhol's Campbell's soup cans.  Although Pop Art, Consumer Art, Commonism, is taken for granted now, after fifty years of advertising, record sleeves, MTV, etc back in 1962 the idea of a large painting of a soup can was radical. 

Warhol's execution of the idea was not technically excellent.  A better painter (or silk screen artist) could have produced a more accurate representation (but Andy liked it rough) so really the radicalness, the shock was the fact that an artist had painted something as common, as ordinary, as a soup can.  But it wasn't Warhol's idea.  That came from Muriel Latow.  So, not his idea.  Andy had his Factory workers helping to produce the physical work, executing the concept.  So, not his own work.  Turning thirty two individual pictures of soup cans into a single piece called 32 Campbell's Soup Cans was an act of Irving Blum.  So, not his original concept.

But Andy Warhol had the style it takes.  If he had a Brillo box and said it was art, then, it was Art.  Originality wasn't the be all and end all.  But don't get me started on Richard Prince and the Marlboro Man.

The picture above titled "Warhol" is a photograph of some spilt oil on a roadway which accidentally/serendipitously looked a little like a Warhol wig.  Accidental art.