Jimi Hendrix – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Bomb culture

The Atomic Mr Basie (1957) by the Count Basie Orchestra.

A few more examples and this would have been part of the ongoing Design as virus thread. A recent post at MetaFilter led to this piece about the use and misuse of photos of nuclear tests. The Count Basie album above appears there, a cover I’d not seen before. This isn’t the same cover as in the post since there were several variations of this album entitled either Basie or The Atomic Mr Basie.

Hood, 11:40.00.4 5 July 1957.

The photo on the cover was of “Hood”, one of the detonations from Operation Plumbbob, a series of tests that took place in the Nevada Desert during the summer of 1957.

Crown of Creation (1968) by Jefferson Airplane. Design: John Van Hamersveld.

The Basie cover reminded me immediately of a similar cover for Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation album a decade later. No doubt both albums chose shots of explosions against dark skies since they look a lot more fiery and dramatic than those photographed in the desert daylight. I’ve often wondered if this cover—which runs counter to the peace & love vibes of the late 60s—gave Norman Spinrad the idea for his story The Big Flash published a year later. Spinrad’s story is a twist on the usual scenario of Jesus or Satan appearing in contemporary guise: “The Four Horsemen” are a rock band who are also the actual Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Their popularity leads the world willingly to nuclear destruction.

Fizeau, 16:45 14 September 1957.

The first surprise was that this isn’t a night shot. The second surprise was discovering that “Fizeau” was also a part of Operation Plumbbob. This page has more details of the complete operation in all its cancer-inducing glory.

Dynamite (1974) by Various Artists. Artwork by Phil Richards.

There may be other albums using the Plumbbob photos but the only other example that came to mind was a painted cover which is vaguely reminiscent of the pictures above. I wouldn’t have known this one at all if I hadn’t received it as a Christmas present in December 1974. Of all the cheap compilation albums I used to play on my first record player this was easily the best one, an odd mix of glam, forgettable pop and the heavy rock that in those days made it into the charts on a regular basis. “As advertised on TV.” The Cozy Powell number, Dance With The Devil, was a drum-led instrumental based on Jimi Hendrix’s Third Stone From The Sun. It still sounds good today.

The Age of Quarrel (1986) by Cro-Mags.

An album by a hardcore band that uses a shot of the Romeo test from Operation Castle, 1954. Thanks to @NONPOPOCCULTURE.

Update: Added Cro-Mags.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Lyrical Substance Deliberated

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds from Yellow Submarine (1968).

The advent of spring invariably gets me listening to favourite psychedelic songs, and this year has been no exception. Earlier this week I was idly wondering how many songs there are that follow the Beatles’ lead in telegraphing their drug metaphors by using the initials L-S-D in their titles. Wikipedia’s page for Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (1967) relates John Lennon’s oft-repeated claim that the initialism in the title was a coincidence, and the song itself is really a bit of Lewis Carroll-like whimsy. This might be credible if works of art only ever carried one meaning but they don’t, of course, and the song is both a piece of Lewis Carroll-like whimsy as well as being a pretty obvious paean to the drug experience: “Climb in the back with your head in the clouds / And you’re gone”. Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit (1967) was similarly ambivalent with mushrooms/pills replacing acid.

Among the many things birthed by the enormous success of the Sgt Pepper album, a small flurry of songs or instrumentals have imitated Lennon’s initialism for their titles. The ones that came immediately to mind are detailed below, and they make a curious group. If anyone knows of any others—there must be others…—then please leave a comment.

Burning Of The Midnight Lamp/The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice (Aug, 1967).

The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s B-side not only alludes to LSD but also to STP. The song itself doesn’t go very far before collapsing into freakout mode.

The Trip (1967).

Not a song but included here for that “Lovely Sort of Death” tag. Written by Jack Nicholson! With Dennis Hopper as the acid dealer! See the trailer here, then watch the whole film here.

Lost Soul In Disillusion (November, 1967).

Hard to imagine anyone in London would have heard this in 1967. The Power of Beckett were a Montreal garage group who only released two singles. Lost Soul In Disillusion turned up years later on compilation albums.

Continue reading “Lyrical Substance Deliberated”

Martin Sharp, 1942–2013

Oz magazine no. 15, October 1968.

The psychedelic art of Australian artist Martin Sharp has featured here on several occasions. Unlike his British and American contemporaries who maintained a single graphic style, Sharp was a versatile artist whose work could range from loose, often cartoony drawing and painting to very detailed collage designs; he was also as happy as any other artist of the period to plunder art history, as the cover for issue 15 of Oz demonstrates. The Mick Jagger figure from that cover was later reworked as a poster for “Turner’s Purple Orchestra”, one of a number of pieces of Sharp art which can be glimpsed throughout Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970).

Performance (1970): Michele Breton and a Martin Sharp collage.

Sharp’s involvement with Oz magazine, and the creation of a handful of endlessly reproduced designs—the Bob Dylan Mr Tambourine Man poster, Jimi Hendrix in a Jackson Pollock explosion, the sleeve art for Cream’s Disraeli Gears—makes his art some of the most visible of the period. People may not necessarily know the name but they’ll recognise the work.

In 2009 Sharp’s Oz colleague Germaine Greer wrote a warm appraisal of the artist and his work. A few more examples follow. There’s a great selection of posters and other art and design here.

• The Guardian: Martin Sharp, Australian artist who came to symbolise the ’60s | Martin Sharp in pictures

Mister Tambourine Man (1966).

Continue reading “Martin Sharp, 1942–2013”

Weekend links 125

Coronal Mass Ejection from the surface of the Sun, August 31st, 2012.

• “Most of the main parts were recorded in a single day using Vangelis’s famous technique: try to play as many synths as possible at once.” Simon Drax on the prolific musical output of Zali Krishna. The new Krishna opus is Bremsstrahlung Sommerwind, free to download at the Internet Archive.

• The Northants International Comics Expo (N.I.C.E.) opens on September 22nd. Among the many attendees there will be Mr Alan Moore making his first convention appearance since 1987.

• “Isolated for one night in a boat overlooking the Thames, Geoff Dyer explores representations of reality through the lens of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

Now seems the right time to revisit this secret archive of public broadcasting. It’s an antidote to the celebrity-led, format-driven nature of so many arts documentaries made today. It shows that it’s possible to produce TV that is both populist and experimental. And it also refutes the cliché that the 1970s was a decade only of crisis and downturn. “Feminism, political theatre, Ways of Seeing: I wasn’t thinking, ‘what a terrible time’. It was very dynamic, activist, political. Creatively it was very exciting. Yet all they show on those television retrospectives are episodes of Top of the Pops.”

Sukhdev Sandhu talks to Mike Dibb, the director of Ways of Seeing.

• From 1999: Colm Tóibín reviews A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods.

• What We See: a song by Julia Holter & Nite Jewel with a film by Delaney Bishop & Jose Wolff.

• Rick Poynor on The crash test dummy: from subcultural fringes to pop culture mainstream.

In his 1973 book on Joyce, Joysprick, Burgess made a provocative distinction between what he calls the “A” novelist and the “B” novelist: the A novelist is interested in plot, character and psychological insight, whereas the B novelist is interested, above all, in the play of words. The most famous B novel is Finnegans Wake, which Nabokov aptly described as “a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room.” The B novel, as a genre, is now utterly defunct; and A Clockwork Orange may be its only long-term survivor.

Martin Amis on A Clockwork Orange, fifty years on. My old post about the film’s record shop scene continues to be one of the most popular pages here.

• Wild Boys: David Bowie and William Burroughs in 1974, hand-coloured by DB.

• Alfred Kubin‘s illustrations for Haschisch (1902) by Oscar AH Schmitz.

• Revolution off: industrial ruins photographed by Thomas Jorion.

• Tetrahedra of Space: 22 pulp illustrations by Frank R. Paul.

• The Blue Boy Studiolo: a Tumblr.

• Marina Warner visits Hell.

• The art of Casey Weldon.

• RainyMood.com

• Third Stone From The Sun (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience | Sunrise In The Third System (1971) by Tangerine Dream | 3rd From The Sun (1982) by Chrome.

Philippe Druillet album covers

Docteur Faust (1971) by Igor Wakhévitch.

Philippe Druillet: album cover artist. As with John Martin, I’m surprised there aren’t more examples. Once again, Discogs.com proves incomplete so I’ve added a couple more including the first on this list, Docteur Faust. If you know of any others, please leave a comment.

Igor Wakhévitch’s berserk masterpiece is a cult item in this house, and something I’ve written about already. The cover art is the icing on an unclassifiable cake.

Grail (1970) by Grail.

The cover is the opening page of The Wild Wind Isles, one of Druillet’s Lone Sloane stories. Produced by Rod Stewart; did you notice? “We are sailing…”

Electric Ladyland (1975) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

A gatefold sleeve for a series of four Hendrix reissues on the Barclay label. The other covers were provided by Moebius, Jean Solé and an artist unidentified on the link above but it looks to me like the work of Philippe Caza.

Black Sun (1978) by Black Sun.

Black suns are a regular feature of Druillet’s work (and mine, ahem) so the artist at least suits the title. The debut album of a short-lived French funk/soul group.

East/West (1980) by Richard Pinhas.

The French equivalent of Krautrock doesn’t have a name but Richard Pinhas is one of its leading practitioners. This is still my favourite among his solo works, not least because it’s more successfully musical than other albums which feature great slabs of guitar or synth doodling. In addition to a cover of David Bowie’s Sense Of Doubt there’s also science fiction author Norman Spinrad ranting through a vocoder on the opening and closing tracks. The great cover art is a page from Druillet’s 1980 adaptation of Flaubert’s Salammbô.

Continue reading “Philippe Druillet album covers”