Everyone agrees that the graphics on album covers were inseparable from the musical experience spinning on the turntable.
Heck! The Beatles crossing Abbey Road, Andy Warhol's banana cover of "The Velvet Underground with Nico," the Aubrey Beardsley knock-off, black and white, art nouveau image on the first Procul Harum album, the Byrd's "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," Janis Joplin's "Cheap Thrills," the Hindenburg on Led Zep I, —what a long list of memorable images!
But the album covers had back sides, too, and they were part of the 'experience,' as Jimi Hendrix called it. Generally, albums had tracklists and credits, a bunch of them with band photos.
Some, however, like Dylan's 1968 "John Wesley Harding" had long-winded liner notes.
"There were three kings and a jolly three too. The first one had a broken nose, the second, a broken arm and the third was broke. 'Faith is the key!' said the first king. 'No, froth is the key!' said the second. 'You’re both wrong, said the third, 'the key is Frank!'
It was late in the evening and Frank was sweeping up, preparing the meat and dishing himself out when there came a knock upon the door. 'Who is it?' he mused. 'It’s us, Frank,' said the three kings in unison, 'and we’d like to have a word with you!' Frank opened the door and the three kings crawled in."
And so on for another 732 self-indulgent words.
Some of us (or was it just me and Pete Bradley?) spent way too much time in altered states of consciousness studying such incomprehensible blather, like people monitoring cosmic background radiation for messages from intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
Take for example, the liner notes for "The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators," one of the bellwethers of LSD Rock:
"Since Aristotle, man has organized his knowledge vertically in separate and unrelated groups —Science, Religion, Sex, Relaxation, Work, etc. The main emphasis in his language, his system of storing knowledge, has been an identification of objects rather than on the relationships between objects. He is now forced to use his tools of reasoning separately and for one situation at a time. Had men ever been able to see past this hypnotic way of thinking, to distrust it (as did Einstein), and to resystematize his knowledge so that it wouldn't be related horizontally, he would now enjoy the perfect sanity which comes from being able to deal with his life in its entirety."
Did you follow that? Sounds like... well, something, but I can't quite place it.
Johnny Cash contributed what appears to be poetry to the back cover of Dylan's Nashville Skyline. Maybe he shudda stuck to "Boy Named Sue," or maybe it was proto-rap.
This man can rhyme the tick of time
The edge of pain, the what of sane
And comprehend the good of men, the bad in men
Can feel the hate of fight, the love of right
And the creep of blight at the speed of light
The pain of dawn, the gone of gone
The end of friend, the end of end.
But what to make of the cartoons and the liner notes on the Yardbird's "Roger the Engineer?"
"Often criticized for doing something new, we've recorded an LP. At last we've been able to do some things we really wanted to do, and will somebody kindly remove the recording engineer from the third speaker to the left.
"We must acknowledge the great help given us by the Society for Ensuring Christmas Comes But Once A Year (SEXY) without whose LP this would never have been possible.
"I heard the comment the other day about a tennis player that groped for some grapes. He grabbed more than he groped, and at once I recognised a sincere person that was more than just a social failure."
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Ever since CD's have been on life support ventilators, there is no longer any such thing as the album. At least as we experienced them. Gone with that anachronism are the cool graphics and the far-out liner notes.
I miss the images, but not the silly notes you had to be really stoned to bother with.
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