The DA Breaks An Egg by Erle Stanley Gardner (Total, 1973, originally published 1956)

More pop art awesomeness here, with a real stunning title/illustration/design combo, serving to make a creaky old Erle Stanley Gardner mystery look a damn sight groovier than I assume it to actually be.

For the sake of metaphoric continuity, poetic justice etc, I hope the book ends with the DA enjoying a nice omelette… in the prison canteen.

Interestingly, this volume contains almost no publication info whatsoever, aside from a simple copyright and year of printing, and correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that “Total Special Edition” thing on the front the logo of the oil company Total? A brief google search fails to shed any light on what the hell they were up to repackaging old crime books in the early ‘70s. There's no price on the back either, so I'm guessing it might have been a giveaway as part a promotion or something..? Who knows.


Beyond the fact that it’s a really cool and distinctive piece of artwork, this cover illustration particularly leapt out at me because I’ve seen it before: on the front of the British psychedelic pop compilation Voyage Through The Sugarcube, a record I’ve been vaguely looking for on vinyl for ages simply because I like the cover art so much.


As you can see, the people behind the LP have retouched it all slightly (or at least, drawn over the lines in Microsoft Paint or something), and have given the girl a bit more of a right hand.

It’s strange isn’t it, that seeing this image on the front of a crime book, we instantly assume GIRL = DEAD, whereas looking at the exact same picture on the front of an album, I’ve always seen her as dancing, or enjoying some kind of music-inspired freak-out. I thought at first that they'd redrawn the facial features on the record cover to aid that impression, but on closer inspection they're pretty much identical.

It’s a brilliant bit of pop-art imagery either way, and given the total lack of info on the book and the grey-market nature of the LP, I guess we can take it as being pretty much public domain, so please, spread it around!

Album Covers by Chris D.

When I moved into my new flat earlier this year, I thought it would be a cool idea to pin some particularly pleasing looking LPs from my collection on either side of the blocked up fireplace in my room. And frankly there’s no reason why anyone else should care what I pin to my wall, so let’s assume that I was right and that it is a cool idea.

One of those LPs is The Gun Club’s ‘Miami’:


Now I don’t know quite what it is that makes this cover so striking, but it’s GREAT, isn’t it?

I mean, on the surface it’s just a shot of some guys who look more or less like you’d expect some guys in a rock band in the ‘80s to look, standing by some palm trees, with some plain text in the corner. But the composition of the shot, the choice of (presumably) slicing it off at the shoulders, leaving acres of hungry sky and those unhealthy looking palms stretching into the heavens, the almost hallucinogenic oversaturated colours, the way the text is set out in the corner in such a low key yet curious manner, with that sinister little cross beneath the album title… how cool is that?

It’s difficult to explain why, but it’s a masterpiece – the kind of cover that draws people with no particular interest in the band to pick it out of the racks, to wonder what it sounds like, but to not doubt for a moment that whatever’s going on inside, it’s fucking cool.

Actually, my copy is slightly different from the one reproduced above. It looks like this, and I think I prefer this shot, maybe just because I’m more familiar with it:


Anyway, it wasn’t that much of a surprise to notice that this cover is the work of Chris D., who also co-produced and otherwise contributed to the first couple of Gun Club albums. Chris D. is best known as the singer/conceptualist behind LA death-punk band The Flesheaters, and a brief google search will reveal that he’s also built up a reputation as a bit of a subcultural renaissance man over the years, working as a journalist/critic (for the seminal Slash magazine amongst others), as a record producer, poet, an all-round LA punk scenester and perhaps most notably as a cult film enthusiast/expert. In that capacity, he’s worked as a cinema programmer, written several books on Japanese cinema, and in 2004 he directed his own intriguing-sounding vampire flick, “I Pass For Human”. Pretty nifty CV, huh?

The overriding interest in horror/b-movies is unsurprising, given that his lyrics and general aesthetic for The Flesheaters consist of a dense catalogue of cult references, even more so than horror-rock contemporaries such as Roky Erickson and The Cramps. What seems to be lacking from any of the online biographies/articles on the man however is an appreciation of his highly distinctive work as an artist/designer, as expressed primarily through record covers for his own bands, and those of his buddies.

Especially awesome is the iconic cover to what is usually considered The Flasheaters’ masterpiece, ‘A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die’:



Musically, the album doesn’t really click with me that much, but you’d better believe I’d pick up a vinyl copy of THAT if I ever saw one at an affordable price.

Amongst his other credits:






What I think is remarkable about these covers is both their comparative subtlety. Given his interests and the scene he emerged from, you’d reasonably expect Chris D. to indulge in a whole loada cluttered kitsch rockbilly/tiki lounge excess, but instead his images – obviously homemade, and influenced by both collage-based punk rock flyers and Warholian pop art – are bold, deliberate, striking and authentically weird, rather than contrived weird.

I’m SURE he must have turned his hand to doing movie posters in this distinctive style at some point, and I’d love to see the results. As I say, surprisingly little info is available online re: his visual art, so if you’ve got any more info or scans, pass it on. Dude’s a master.

Listening to Richard Brautigan.

All good people dig Richard Brautigan.

They just might not all know that all the other good people do yet.

Whilst I was growing up, working my way through as many canonically ‘weird’ mid-20th C. books as I could lay my hands on, as scattered references and recommendations led me on a merry path from one ‘cult’ author to the next, nobody ever bothered to hip me to Richard Brautigan.

In fact, I’d barely even heard of the guy when I happened across a few of his books in the always reliable charity bookshop on Queen’s Road in Leicester, and thought “hmm… these look interesting”.

I have neither the time nor the eloquence to attempt to encapsulate the man’s work here, but needless to say, within ten minutes of getting stuck into those two paperbacks, I knew I had a new favourite writer all to myself.

I’m not usually a big re-reader; the vast majority of books I read get ploughed through once, and sooner or later end up shelved forever back in my old bedroom in my Mum’s place, in waiting for the day when I fulfill my dream and open a lending library for weirdos. Not so “Revenge of the Lawn” and “A Confederate General at Big Sur” though - they travel with me. I return to them whenever I feel the need, almost like music albums. I’d feel uneasy deeming a place ‘home’ were they not within easy reach.

In subsequent years, happy shadows of Brautigan have started popping up all over the place, much like a style of architecture or, I dunno, a fashion accessory or something, that you don’t notice until someone points it out to you, and then you start to see it everywhere.

I’ve still never actually read any tributes to Brautigan on the printed page, but all of his books have been republished with garish new covers (I much prefer the lovely old ‘70s Picador editions, most of which seem to feature a photograph of the author standing near a pretty girl, looking confused), and you can probably find one or two of them on the shelves of your local Waterstones for £8.99 a pop, which speaks of a certain ongoing popularity.

I’ve also bumped into various other Brautigan fans, most of whom seem to have independently discovered his writing in much the same way I did, and all of whom have been united by the fact that I have found them to be thoroughly decent, friendly, upstanding folks. One of my favourite bands, Comet Gain, sang a song about Richard Brautigan on the b-side of a recent single.

From once briefly thinking of him as a lost luminary whom I’d haphazardly rediscovered, I now tend to accept the possibility that EVERYBODY reads Richard Brautigan…. but they just don’t think to mention it to each other all that often.

ANYWAY, point of this post is: a while back, I was having an online forum type conversation about Richard Brautigan, with some fellow fans who were lamenting the lack of any but the barest scraps of audio/visual documentation of the author’s life, and in particular, the complete unavailability of “Listening to Richard Brautigan”, an LP that he initially recorded for Apple in 1969 (The Beatles were quietly busy being big fans of his too, it would seem), but that actually only saw the light of day a couple of years later on Harvest/EMI.

Quickly dropping out of print, and having never been reissued on CD, it’s a tough one to track down, but I came across a rip of the LP on a download site a few months back, and I guess it’s my duty to pass it on to all the other good guys out there, so, here goes:

Listening to Richard Brautigan (120mb .zip file).
[Link updated 03/11/12.]

It’s a pretty fun listen all in all, although perhaps not the best introduction to RB’s work. He reads extracts from “Trout Fishing In America”, “Revenge of the Lawn”, "In Watermelon Sugar" and “A Confederate General..”, along with a whole swathe of pomes from “The Pill vs. The Springhill Mine Disaster”, in addition to which you get to hear the great man goofing about the house with some friends, discussing how one guy has an obsession with making really strong coffee, and what they’re gonna have for dinner. He records some “sounds of my life in California”, answers the telephone, and somebody decides to subject the world to a couple of post-Revolution No#9 type “sound pieces”. Unsurprisingly, Brautigan sounds like a really nice, easy-going guy. His voice is a kinda half Kermit, half Stephen Hawking monotone that I’d imagine could get real whiny real quickly if he was in a bad mood, but thankfully here he’s in a good mood, and everything is cool.

I think this would be a perfect record to put on on a spring afternoon, at the weekend, whilst you’re, say, carving something out of wood, or rewiring a hi-fi. Or perhaps in the early morning, laying in bed with a headache. Yeah!

The Life Story of Nikola Tesla in International Morse Code (Epsilon Records, 1961?)

I found this (just the .jpg of the cover sadly, not the actual record) somewhere or other on the internet years ago, and since then the multitude of questions it raises have never ceased to be an inspiration, reinforcing my faith in the bewildering mysteries of human creation at every turn.

What could conceivably be the point of making an LP of morse code, when it's broadcast would presumably require the kind of direct playback equipment that would render morse code obsolete?

Why, assuming you WERE going to make some LPs of morse code, would you choose to render the life story of Nikola Tesla, of all godforsaken things, in dots and dashes?

I would guess that it would be difficult to fit that MUCH morse code on to a 30-40 minute LP... it must be quite an abbreviated life story they're working with here, surely?

And most importantly, did Tesla really so closely resemble a young Christopher Lee at any point?

I'm sure a brief session of googling could help shed light on all of those issues, but.... I'm happier not knowing.