In the afterglow of the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well concerts, we highlightedThe Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, an online project launched in 1995, which provided editorial footnotes explaining the references of every original Grateful Dead song.
For many of these songs we have Robert Hunter to thank. The majority of the Dead’s songs were Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia collaborations. Garcia composed the music, and Hunter, the lyrics. Hunter didn’t perform with the group (Garcia called him “the band member who doesn’t come out on stage with us”), but he was an integral part of the group all the same. When the Dead entered the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Robert Hunter was one of the inductees.
Being part of the Grateful Dead family, Hunter sometimes joined the band on tours, which weren’t always fun and games. As Dennis McNally, the Dead’s official historian, wrote in A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, the band, especially as it gained popularity and toured on a bigger scale, pulled some rough and tumble people into its orbit. The business managers made life difficult for the musical purists. And there was dissension at times. At one point, writes McNally, Robert Hunter wrote an open letter to the band members, structured as a sarcastic list, which “identifies the least-charitable aspects of life in the Grateful Dead hierarchy.” It reads as follows:
The Ten Commandments of Rock & Roll
1. Suck up to the top cats
2. Do not express independent opinions.
3. Do not work for common interests, only factional interests.
4. If there’s nothing to complain about, dig up some old gripe.
5. Do not respect property or persons other than band property and personnel.
6. Make devastating judgments about persons and situations without adequate information.
7. Discourage and confound personal, technical, and/or creative projects.
8. Single out absent persons for intense criticism.
9. Remember that anything you don’t understand is trying to fuck with you.
10 Destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity.
It is surprising to me, but a few people I’ve come across don’t know the name of cartoonist Robert Crumb, cult hero of underground comics and obscure Americana record collecting. On second thought, maybe this shouldn’t come as such a surprise. These are some pretty small worlds, after all, populated by obsessive fans and archivists and not always particularly welcoming to outsiders. But Crumb is different. For all his social awkwardness and hyper-obsessiveness, he seems strangely accessible to me. The easiest reference for those who’ve never heard of him is Steve Buscemi’s Seymour in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World. There’s an obvious tribute to Crumb in the character (Zwigoff previously made an R. Crumb documentary), though it’s certainly not a one-to-one relation (the film adapts Daniel Clowe’s comic of the same name.)
Whether or not Ghost World (or Zwigoff’s Crumb) rings a bell, there’s still the matter of how to communicate the lovable lewdness and aggressive anachronism that is Crumb’s art. For that one may only need to mention Big Brother & the Holding Company’s 1968 classic Cheap Thrills (top), the first album cover Crumb designed—and which Janis Joplin insisted upon over the record company’s objections. With its focus on musicians, and its appropriation of hippie weirdness, racist American imagery, and an obsession with female posteriors that rivals Sir-Mix-a-Lot’s, the cover pretty much spans the spectrum of perennial Crumb styles and themes. Above, see another of Crumb’s covers, for a compilation called The Music Never Stopped: Roots of the Grateful Dead, which collects such roots and old-school rock and roll artists as Merle Haggard, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Reverend Gary Davis, Howlin’ Wolf, and more.
Though he objected to the 1995 assignment—saying to Shanachie Records, “You want all these people on a CD cover? What are they, like, five inches across?”—Crumb must have relished the subject. (And he was paid, as per usual, in vintage 78s.) Next to those posteriors, Crumb’s true love has always been American roots music—ragtime, swing, old country and bluegrass, Delta country blues—and he has spent a good part of his career illustrating artists he loves, and those he doesn’t. From famous names like Joplin, Dylan, and B.B. King (above, whose music Crumb said he “didn’t care for, but I don’t find it that objectionable either”), to much more obscure artists, like Bo Carter, known for his “Please Warm My Wiener,” on the 1974 compilation album below.
Crumb’s use of racially questionable and sexist imagery—however satirical—has perhaps rendered him untouchable in some circles, and it’s hard to imagine many of his album covers passing corporate muster these days. His recent work has moved toward more straightforward, respectful portraiture, like that of King and of Skip James on the best-of below, from a series called “Heroes of the Blues.” (Crumb also illustrated “Heroes of Jazz” and “Heroes of Country,” as we featured in this post.) See Crumb’s inimitable, looser portrait style again further down in 2002 album art for a group called Hawks and Eagles.
Crumb may have shed some of his more unpalatable tendencies, but he hasn’t lost his lascivious edge. However, his work has matured over the years, taking on serious subjects like the book of Genesis and the Charlie Hebdo massacre. For an artist with such peculiar personal focus, Crumb is surprisingly versatile, but it’s his album covers that combine his two greatest loves. “What makes Crumb’s art so appropriate for the album sleeve,” writes The Guardian’s Laura Barton, “is its vividness, and its certain oomph; it’s in the mingling of sex and joy and compulsion, and the vibrancy and movement of his illustrations.”
Crumb hasn’t only combined his art with music fandom, but also with his own musicianship, illustrating covers for several of his own albums by his ragtime band Cheap Suit Serenaders. And he even provided the illustration for the soundtrack to his own documentary, as you can see above—an extreme example of the many self-abasing portraits Crumb has drawn of himself over the years. Crumb’s album cover art has been collected in a book, and you can see many more of his covers at Rolling Stone and on this list here.
My introduction to the work of James Newell Osterberg, Jr, better known as Iggy Pop, came in the form of “Risky,” a song from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Neo Geo album that featured not just singing but spoken word from the Stooges’ lead vocalist and punk icon. On that track, Pop speaks grimly and evocatively in the persona of a protagonist “born in a corporate dungeon where people are cheated of life,” repeatedly invoking the human compulsion to “climb to this point, move on, climb to this point, move on.” Ultimately, he poses the question: “Career, career, acquire, acquire — but what is life without a heart?”
Today, we give you Iggy Pop the storyteller asking what life is with a heart — or rather, one heart too many, unceasingly reminding you of your guilt. He tells the story, of course, of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” originally written by the American master of psychological horror Edgar Allan Poe in 1843.
Here, Pop takes on the role of another narrator consigned to a grim fate, though this one of his own making. As almost all of us know, if only through cultural osmosis, the titular “Tell-Tale Heart,” its beat seemingly emanating from under the floorboards, unceasingly reminds this anxious character of the fact that he has murdered an old man — not out of hatred, not out of greed, but out of simple need stoked, he insists, by the defenseless senior’s “vulture-eye.” For over 150 years, readers have judged the sanity of the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” in any number of ways, but don’t render your own verdict until you’ve heard Iggy Pop deliver the testimony; nobody walks the line between sanity and insanity quite like he does.
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The story of the avant-garde is never just one story. But it tends to get told that way, and we tend to think we know how modernist and post-modern literature and music have taken shape: through a series of great men who thwarted convention and remade language and sound in ways their predecessors never dreamed. Arthur Rimbaud, Claude Debussy, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage… We could make many such lists, and we do, all the time, occasionally including the names of a few women—Yoko Ono, for example, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf….
But we might write it differently, indeed, for the simple reason that women have shaped the avant-garde just as much as men have, as prominent poets and composers, not simply spouses of famous men or guest stars in a mostly male revue. You can hear one version of such a story here, thanks to Ubuweb, “the learned and varietous online repository” of “all things avant-garde.” Their podcast Avant-Garde All the Time offers us two episodes called “The Women of the Avant-Garde,” hosted by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who admits the survey is a corrective for the podcast’s own blind spots. Through a small but select number of poets and musicians, Goldsmith aims “to show that there are dozens and dozens of great women artists on Ubuweb”—and everywhere else art lives.
Instead of a history, Goldsmith gives us something of a constellation of artists, many of them clustered tightly together in time and space. New York poets, writers, and musicians who came of age in the 70s and 80s—Kathy Acker, Lydia Lunch, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Eileen Myles—all feature in Goldsmith’s account. Theirs was a time and place the poet Myles has described as “a moment” that was “very uncensored and really excited and it just made you feel like there was room for more.”
It’s a moment that saw a revival in the 90s, when riot grrrl arose to challenge the patriarchal establishment. Around this time, artists working in a more academic context directly and indirectly engaged with literary history ancient and modern. Scholar and poet Anne Carson has twisted and translated the texts of Ovid, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the writers (and translators) of the King James Bible. And German-Norwegian-French experimental poet Caroline Bergvall, whom Goldsmith discusses in episode one above, rewrote Chaucer and rearranged Dante.
In episode two, Goldsmith reaches somewhat further back—to Yoko Ono and Denise Levertov—and farther away from New York, with work from Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad. Prominently featured in this second part of the series, and for good reason, is fierce patroness of early twentieth century avant-garde art and writing, Gertrude Stein. Stein’s own poetry radically disrupted the accepted, and acceptable, codes of speech and writing—setting a precedent for several decades of feminist writers and artists whose appearance in archives like Ubuweb, Goldsmith notes, increasingly come to match or outweigh those of their male counterparts. Hear Stein read from her own work at another such archive, PennSound, and visit the Poetry Foundation to stream and download more episodes of Ubuweb’s Avant-Garde all the Time, including an episode devoted to Stein called “Almost Completely Understanding.”
Today we bring you a lesser-known facet of Steadman’s work: designing album covers. As artist and illustrator John Coulthart notes in a post on Steadman’s album designs, he’s been at it since the mid-fifties, when—for example—he illustrated a release of Conception (top), “an underappreciated masterpiece of cerebral cool jazz” featuring the likes of Miles Davis, Stan Getz, and Sonny Rollins. Steadman’s abstract expressionist-inspired jazz covers soon gave way to more Steadmanesque, though still relatively tame, covers like that above for The Who’s single “Happy Jack”/“I’ve Been Away” from 1966.
It’s not until the 70s, however—after he’d begun his collaboration with Thompson—that his album covers begin to take on the decidedly crazed look his work is known for, such as in the cover for Paul Brett’s Phoenix Future, above, from 1975.
By 1997, Steadman seems to have perfected his inimitable riot of grotesque imagery, wild color palette, and unhinged black lines and lettering, as in the cover for Closed On Account Of Rabies: Poems And Tales Of Edgar Allan Poe, a compilation of Poe readings by stars like Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull, Jeff Buckley, and Abel Ferrara, which we’ve featured on OC before. The artists represented here are—as in his work with Thompson and Burroughs—perfectly fitting for Steadman’s sensibility. So, of course, is the clean-living but otherwise totally bonkers Frank Zappa, whose 1997 Have I Offended Someone? received the Steadman treatment, as you can see below.
In the past few years, Steadman has mellowed a bit, if you could call it that, and his work has taken on a slightly more refined character. His Breaking Bad illustrations seem restrained by the standards of his work with Thompson or Zappa. And in a 2010 cover for Slash’s first official single, “By the Sword,” below, he reigns in some of his wilder graphic impulses while retaining all of the stylist signatures he developed over the decades.
Steadman has always been a one-of-a-kind illustrator. In his album cover design, we can perhaps best watch his work evolve. As Coulthart writes, “the style of the early sleeves is markedly different to the angry, splattery creations that made his name, and without a signature you’d be unlikely to recognise the artist.” See many more Steadman album covers over at Coulthart’s excellent blog.
Next month, David Gilmour will release his first solo album since 2006 and launch his first tour since ’08. But right now, in the dead of August, you can watch a new animated video for his upcoming track, “Rattle That Lock.”
Created under the leadership of Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis (the design group that produced the iconic artwork for Dark Side of the Moon and other Pink Floyd LPs), the animation pays homage to Gustave Doré, whose illustrations of Dante, Poe and Cervantes we’ve featured here before. And the lyrics themselves, they draw inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, reportsRolling Stone. Gilmour, Doré, Milton — surely a trifecta for many OC readers.
Beatboxing, the practice of producing drum machine-like beats (especially TR-808-like beats) with one’s voice, has long since made the transition from parlor trick to acknowledged musical art form. But we still have much to understand about it, as the recently-emerged first generation of beatboxing scholars knows full well. “A team of linguistics and engineering students at USC wanted to learn more about the mechanics behind the rhythms,” writes Los Angeles Times music critic Randall Roberts. “By using MRI technology, they recorded an unnamed local beatboxer working his magic, broke down the most commonly employed sounds by examining the movements of his mouth and then analyzed the data.”
This resulted in a paper called “Paralinguistic Mechanisms of Production in Human ‘Beatboxing’: A Real-Time Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.” Roberts describes it as “predictably heavy with linguistic jargon, but even to a civilian, the results are illuminating,” especially the video the research team recorded, “which reveals how the human mouth can so convincingly create the pop of a snare drum.” At the top of the post, you can see this sort of thing for yourself: in this video “The Diva and the Emcee,” featured at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) Scientific Sessions in Seattle, we see how a beatboxer’s technique compares to that of an opera singer.
You can find out more at the site of the Speech Production and Articulation Knowledge group (SPAN), the USC team that performed this pioneering research into an important component of one of the pillars of hip hop. Keep their findings in mind next time you watch a beatboxing clip that goes viral (such as the Goldberg Variations one we featured back in 2012) for a richer listening experience. After all, it does no harm to the romance of the beatbox, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, to know a little bit about it.
The picture of punk as the domain of boorish nihilists who can’t play their instruments has been as much a creation of marketing (via Malcolm McLaren) as it has been a virtue-of-necessity minimalist pose and a form of avant garde DIY experimentalism. But there have always been, since the coining of the term “punk” as a musical genre, stellar musicians and thoughtful, poetic lyricists shaping the scene. Of the former, we must mention Television, with their magnificent guitar interplay between leader Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. And, of the latter, we need look no further than the godmother of punk herself, Patti Smith, who has always commanded stage and studio with her smart, arresting lyricism and powerful set of pipes.
Years before the Sex Pistols invaded the States, these two bands played regularly at CBGBs (Television was, in fact, the very first band to play there) with a loose collection of misfits who re-invented rock and roll. In December, 1975, Smith released her first album, Horses, a hybrid of punk and spoken word produced by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale.
But before that record made her famous—in April of that year—the Patti Smith Group took the stage with Television, and two teenage fans were there to record both sets from both bands. First appearing as a bootleg CD generically titled “Early Gig ’75,” the disc has since been reissued as We Can’t Do Anymore… Cause I’m Just Too Tired!, with another set of Smith covers tacked on from a ’78 concert in Santa Monica.
We get classic tracks from both bands, such as Television’s “Marquee Moon” and “Little Johnny Jewell” and Smith’s cover of “Hey Joe” and Van Morrison’s “Gloria” as well as her own “Horses” and “Piss Factory.” At the top of the post, you can hear her do six songs from that night in 1975, the last three with Television joining her onstage: “We’re Going to Have a Real Good Time Together” (Velvet Underground cover), “Redondo Beach,” “Birdland,” “Space Monkey,” “Distant Fingers,” and “Gloria.” You’ll also hear the two young tapers chatting it up in the first few minutes of the tape.
Smith’s band, writes bootleg blog Doom & Gloom From the Tomb, “was transitioning from a cabaret-leaning trio to a fully-fledged rock band sound,” and the ramshackle performances show us a talented bunch of musicians still finding their footing as a group. The following year, Smith and band would appear in Stockholm after the release of Horses. As you can see and hear above (after a brief interview) they’d become a tighter, and somewhat more conventional, rock and roll machine, but the early performances at the top—for all the lo-fi murkiness and intrusive crowd noise—have a raw appeal only heightened by the fact that they are now important documents of a now-legendary musical era. See this review of the bootleg CD reissue for a blow-by-blow description of this historic ’75 concert from two seminal, and phenomenally talented, punk bands.
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