Having just begun rewatching season 3 of the always-relevant The Wire—the season to first introduce Reg E. Cathey’s super-smooth character, mayoral aide Norman Wilson—I was delighted to find an episode of Studio 360 that features the actor reading a text by jazz great Charles Mingus. Even more delightful is the subject of his text: instructions for toilet training your cat. I cannot testify to their efficacy; it seems like a labor-intensive process, and my own cats seem pretty content with their litterbox. But if anyone could accomplish such a feat, it was Mingus, a man who once ripped the strings from a piano with his bare hands (so it’s said in the documentary 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz), and who won a Grammy for an essay defining jazz, written just a few years after he helped redefine it.
Mingus may have had a notoriously short temper, but as a composer, he was infinitely patient. Apparently this also goes for his role as a cat trainer. He spent weeks teaching his cat, Nightlife, to use human facilities, and detailed the process in a pamphlet, The Charles Mingus CAT-alogue for Toilet Training Your Cat, available for cat fanciers and Mingus fans by mail order.
Hear Cathey read the instructions in part in the video at the top and in full in the audio above. Studio 360 describes this odd document as “full of charming advice and meticulous pedagogical detail.” It is indeed that. In four concise steps, Mingus lays out the program, simple as can be—or so he makes it seem.
Mingus writes, “It took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, Nightlife.” He also admits that aspiring trainers may need to modify the program somewhat, “in case your cat is not as smart as Nightlife was.” One can imagine less gifted cats struggling with this unusual method. One can also imagine more ornery, less cooperative breeds simply refusing to play along. Like Mingus himself, cats have a well-deserved reputation for doing their own thing. Should you be intrepid enough to attempt the Mingus method with your own feline companion, all I can say to you is what Mingus says at the end of his instructions—Good Luck.
The art of the album cover is ground we cover here often enough, from the jazz deco creations of album art inventor Alex Steinweiss to the bawdy burlesques of underground comix legend R. Crumb. We could add to these American references the iconic covers of European graphic artists like Peter Saville of Joy Divisions’ Unknown Pleasures and Storm Thorgerson of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.These names represent just a small sampling of the many renowned designers who have given popular music its distinctive look over the decades, and without whom the experience of record shopping—perhaps itself a bygone art—would be a dreary one. Though these creative personalities work in a primarily commercial vein, there’s no reason not to call their products fine art.
But in a great many cases, the images that grace the covers of records we know well come directly from the fine art world—whether appropriated from pieces that hang on museum walls or commissioned from famous artists by the bands. Such, of course, was the case with the much-ballyhooed cover of Lady Gaga’s Artpop, a candy-colored collaboration with pop art darling Jeff Koons, who gets a namecheck in the Gaga single “Applause.” Gaga has put a unique spin on the mélange of pop and pop art, but she hardly pioneered such collaborations.
Long before Artpop, there was Warhol, whose promotion of the Velvet Underground included his own design of their 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. The cover originally featured a yellow banana record buyers could peel away, as Flavorwire writes, “to reveal a suggestively pink flesh-toned banana.” The “saucy covers” required “special machinery, extra costs, and the delay of the album release,” but Warhol’s name persuaded MGM the added overhead was worth it. It’s a gamble that hardly paid off for the label, but pop music is infinitely better off for Warhol’s promotion of Lou Reed and company’s dark, droning art rock.
Of the many millions of bands inspired by that first Velvets’ release, The Smiths also looked to Warhol for inspiration when it came to the even more suggestive album cover (above) for their first, self-titled record in 1984. This time, the image comes not from the pop artist himself, but from his protégée Paul Morrissey—a still from his salacious, Warhol-produced film Flesh. Just one of many savvy uses of monochromatic film stills and photographs by the image-conscious Steven Patrick Morrissey and band.
Ten years earlier, another Smith, Patti, posed for the photograph above, a Polaroid taken by her close friend, Robert Mapplethorpe. At the time, the two were roommates and “just kids” struggling jointly in their starving artisthood. In her National Book Award-winning memoir of their time together, Smith describes the “exquisitely androgynous image” as deliberately posed in a “Frank Sinatra style,” writing, “I was full of references.” Mapplethorpe, of course, would go on to infamy as the focus of a conservative congressional campaign against “obscene” art in 1989, which tended to make his name synonymous with sensationalism and scandal and obscured the breadth of his work.
Like the Velvets and Patti Smith, the members of Sonic Youth have had a long and fruitful relationship with the art world, pursuing several art projects of their own and collaborating frequently with famous fine artists. The relationship between their noisy art rock and the visual arts crystalizes in their many iconic album covers. My personal favorite, and perhaps the most recognizable of the bunch, is Raymond Pettibon’s cover for 1990’s Goo, inspired from a photograph of two witnesses to a serial killer case. Pettibon, brother to Black Flag founder and guitarist Greg Ginn, is much better known in the punk rock world than the fine art world, but Sonic Youth has also collaborated with established high art figures like Gerhard Richter, whose painting Kerze (“Candle”) graces the cover of their acclaimed 1988 album Daydream Nation (above).
Another example of a band using already existing artwork—this time from a painter long dead—the cover of New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies comes from the still life A Basket of Roses by 19th century French realist Henri Fantin-Latour. Designer Peter Saville, who, as noted above, created the look of New Order’s previous incarnation, chose the image on a whim. Writes Artnet, “the art director for the post-punk band… had originally planned to use a Renaissance portrait of a dark prince to tie in with the Machiavellian theme of the title, but failed to find anything he liked. While visiting [the National Gallery in London], Saville picked up a postcard of the Fantin-Latour work, and his girlfriend joked that he should use it as the cover.” Saville thought it was “a wonderful idea.” As Saville explains his choice, “Flowers suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives. They’re seductive.”
Another art-rock band, the Talking Heads—formed at the Rhode Island School of Design and originally called “The Artistics”—went in a very high art direction for 1983’s new wave masterpiece Speaking in Tongues, their fifth album. Though we’re probably more familiar with frontman David Byrne’s cover art for the album, the band also produced a limited edition LP featuring the work of artist Robert Rauschenberg, which you can see above. Byrne, writes Artnet, approached Rauschenberg “after seeing his work at the Leo Castelli Gallery” and Rauschenberg agreed on the condition that he could “do something different.” He certainly did that. The cover is a “transparent plastic case with artwork and credits printed on three 12 inch circular transparent collages, one per primary color. Only by rotating the LP and the separate plastic discs could one see—and then only intermittently—the three-color images included in the collage.” The artist won a Grammy for the design.
You can see many more fine art album covers by painters like Banksy, Richard Prince, and Fred Tomaselli and photographers like Duane Michaels and Nobuyoshi Araki at Artnet and Flavorwire. The selection of enticing album covers above will hopefully also propel you to revisit, or hear for the first time, some of the finest art-pop of the last four decades. Finally, we leave you with a bizarre and seemingly unlikely collaboration, above, between pop-surrealist Salvador Dalí and Honeymooners comedian Jackie Gleason for Gleason’s 1955 album Lonesome Echo. No weirder, perhaps, than Dalí’s work with Walt Disney, it’s still a rather unexpected look for the comedian, in his role here as a kitschy easy listening composer. Gleason’s many album covers tended toward the Mad Men-esque cheap and tawdry. Here, he gets conceptual. Dalí himself explained the work thus:
The first effect is that of anguish, of space, and of solitude. Secondly, the fragility of the wings of a butterfly, projecting long shadows of late afternoon, reverberates in the landscape like an echo. The feminine element, distant and isolated, forms a perfect triangle with the musical instrument and its other echo, the shell.
Make of that what you will. I’d say it’s the one album on this list with a cover much more interesting by far than the music inside.
Blank on Blank returns this week with another one of their groovy animations. This time, we find Lou Reed recalling the goals and ambitions of his avant-garde rock band, The Velvet Underground. We wanted, he says, “to elevate the rock n’ roll song, to take it where it hadn’t been taken before.” And, in his humble opinion, they did just that, far exceeding the musical output of contemporary bands like The Doors and The Beatles, which he respectively calls “stupid” and “garbage.” If you listen to the complete interview recorded in 1987 (web — iTunes), you’ll hear Lou diss a lot of bands. But which one did he give props to? U2. Go figure.
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Mark Mothersbaugh’s studio is located in a cylindrical structure painted bright green — it looks more like a festive auto part than an office building. It’s a fitting place for the iconoclast musician. For those of you who didn’t spend your childhoods obsessively watching the early years of MTV, Mark Mothersbaugh was the mastermind behind the band Devo. They skewered American conformity by dressing alike in shiny uniforms and their music was nervy, twitchy and weird. They taught a nation that if you must whip it, you should whip it good.
In the years since, Mothersbaugh has segued into a successful career as a Hollywood composer, spinning scores for 21 Jump Streetand The Royal Tenenbaums among others.
In the video above, you can see Mothersbaugh hang out in his studio filled with synthesizers of various makes and vintages, including Bob Moog’s own personal Memorymoog. Watching Mothersbaugh pull out and play with each one is a bit like watching a precocious child talk about his toys. He just has an infectious energy that is a lot of fun to watch.
Probably the best part in the video is when he shows off a device that can play sounds backward. It turns out that if you say, “We smell sausage” backwards it sounds an awful lot like “Jesus loves you.” Who knew?
Below you can see Mothersbaugh in action with Devo, performing live in Japan during the band’s heyday in 1979.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
No one is surprised when authors mine their personal experiences. If they’re lucky enough to strike gold, other miners may be brought on to bring the stories to the silver screen. Here’s where things get tricky (if lucrative). No one wants to see his or her important life details getting royally botched, especially when the results are blown up 70 feet across.
Cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s path to letting others take the reins as her story is immortalized in front of a live audience is not the usual model. The family history she shared in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has been turned into a Broadway musical.
Now that would be a nail biter, especially if the non-fictional source material includes a graphically awkward first sexual encounter and your closeted father’s suicide.
In the wrong hands, it could have been an excruciating evening, but Fun Home, the musical, has had excellent pedigree from the get go.
It’s also worth noting that this show passes the infamous Bechdel Test (below) both onstage and off, with a book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori.
Back in July of last year, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely performed on an instrument resembling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hurrian Cult Song” or “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” sounds otherworldly to our ears, although modern-day musicologists can only guess at the song’s tempo and rhythm.
When we reach even further back in time, long before the advent of systems of writing, we are completely at a loss as to the forms of music prehistoric humans might have preferred. But we do know that music was likely a part of their everyday lives, as it is ours, and we have some sound evidence for the kinds of instruments they played. In 2008, archeologists discovered fragments of flutes carved from vulture and mammoth bones at a Stone Age cave site in southern Germany called Hohle Fels. These instruments date back 42,000 to 43,000 years and may supplant earlier findings of flutes at a nearby site dating back 35,000 years.
Image via the The Archaeology News Network
The flutes are meticulously crafted, reports National Geographic, particularly the mammoth bone flute, which would have been “especially challenging to make.” At the time of their discovery, researchers speculated that the flutes “may have been one of the cultural accomplishments that gave the first European modern-human (Homo sapiens) settlers an advantage over their now extinct Neanderthal-human (Homo neanderthalis) cousins.” But as with so much of our knowledge about Neanderthals, including new evidence of interbreeding with Homo Sapiens, these conclusions may have to be revised.
It is perhaps possible that the much-underestimated Neanderthals made their own flutes. Or so a 1995 discovery of a flute made from a cave bear femur might suggest. Found by archeologist Ivan Turk in a Neanderthal campsite at Divje Babe in northwestern Slovenia, this instrument (above) is estimated to be over 43,000 years old and perhaps as much as 80,000 years old. According to musicologist Bob Fink, the flute’s four finger holes match four notes of a diatonic (Do, Re, Mi…) scale. “Unless we deny it is a flute at all,” Fink argues, the notes of the flute “are inescapably diatonic and will sound like a near-perfect fit within ANY kind of standard diatonic scale, modern or antique.” To demonstrate the point, the curator of the Slovenian National Museum had a clay replica of the flute made. You can hear it played at the top of the post by Slovenian musician Ljuben Dimkaroski.
The prehistoric instrument does indeed produce the whole and half tones of the diatonic scale, so completely, in fact, that Dimkaroski is able to play fragments of several compositions by Beethoven, Verdi, Ravel, Dvořák, and others, as well as some free improvisations “mocking animal voices.” The video’s Youtube page explains his choice of music as “a potpourri of fragments from compositions of various authors,” selected “to show the capabilities of the instrument, tonal range, staccato, legato, glissando….” (Dimkaroski claims to have figured out how to play the instrument in a dream.) Although archeologists have hotly disputed whether or not the flute is actually the work of Neanderthals, as Turk suggested, should it be so, the finding would contradict claims that the close human relatives “left no firm evidence of having been musical.” But whatever its origin, it seems certainly to be a hominid artifact—not the work of predators—and a key to unlocking the prehistory of musical expression.
George Harrison had a beloved guitar named Lucy. B.B. King has one named Lucille. Curious, that.
Above, in a new animated video by Blank on Blank, B.B. explains the story behind the naming of his legendary guitar, and then answers the big question: Do you really need to endure hard times to play the blues? No spoilers here.
The audio was recorded in September, 1985 by Warner Bros. A&R manager Joe Smith. While writing a book on the music industry, Smith taped interviews with legendary figures like Dave Brubeck, Lou Reed, Paul McCartney, Joan Baez, Herbie Hancock, David Bowie, George Harrison, Yoko Ono, James Brown, Bo Diddley, Jerry Garcia, Christine McVie, Mick Jagger, Linda Ronstadt and more. Each interview runs 30–60 good minutes. They’re fascinating to listen to, and you can find them on iTunes and the web.
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If you’ve spent any time at all on a college campus, you’ve heard Bob Marley and the Wailer’s 1984 compilation album Legend wafting from dorm rooms and frat house windows. The longest charting album in the history of Billboard magazine, it contains all of the band’s top 40 hits and more or less stands as every young American’s introduction to the iconic Jamaican singer, if not to reggae music itself. Before Legend, there was Eric Clapton’s cover of Marley’s 1973 single “I Shot the Sheriff.” Clapton’s version hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in ’74—his only number one hit in the U.S.—and introduced American audiences to Marley’s fiery politics, if not always to Marley himself. On what would have been Marley’s 70th birthday, we bring you some early footage of the man and his band.
While many Americans may been rather late to the Bob Marley party, and to reggae, the English have long had a fascination with West Indian music. Ska pioneers like Desmond Dekker drew huge crowds in the UK while remaining much less popular stateside (though Dekker had a number one hit in the U.S. in 1969). But even some Brits didn’t quite know what to do with Marley when he and the Wailers hit English shores in the spring of 1973. Playing the Sundown Theater in the London suburb of Edmonton in support of Dekker and a host of other acts (top), Marley, writes Dangerous Minds, “was still somewhat of an enigma and the Wailers were sonically much more adventurous than some of the other acts on the bill that day…. According to reports at the time, most of the audience at this Wailers gig didn’t ‘get’ the group.”
Nevertheless, that ’73 tour changed the band’s fortunes forever. After three albums, a previous UK tour, and several attempts to break into the pop charts, the Wailer’s fourth record, major label-debut Catch a Fire, finally made them international stars, if not yet every American college freshman’s favorite band. Just above, hear an FM broadcast of another date from the UK leg of the Catch a Firetour (see the Youtube page for the full setlist). After Britain, the band played a run of shows at Paul’s Mall in Boston, then four nights at New York’s Max’s Kansas City. Just a few months later, they hit major cities all over the U.S. before returning to England in November in support of Burnin’, and the song Clapton made famous.
While we tend to associate Marley with peace, love, and patchouli—an impression furthered by Legend, which leans rather heavily on the love songs—these early albums are fierce and militant, and do not hold back from explicit calls for violent revolution and condemnation of historical oppression. It’s a somewhat neglected side of Marley’s legend, but in these concerts, we see just how multifaceted a songwriter and performer he was. Charismatic and vibrant, and flanked by the talented Peter Tosh, Marley exudes star power. Today on his 70th birthday, it’s still as good a time as any to celebrate his life and remember his strident yet soulful calls for love and justice.
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