Art of the Book - Sean Wilentz's "Bob Dylan In America" (2010)

This new tome - Bob Dylan In America by Sean Wilentz published by The Bodley Head - has been garnering some impressive praise indeed from an array of stellar sources ....

"A panoramic vision of Bob Dylan, his music, his shifting place in American culture, from multiple angles. In fact, reading Sean Wilentz’ Bob Dylan in America is as thrilling and surprising as listening to a great Dylan song."
—Martin Scorsese

"All the American connections that Wilentz draws to explain the appearance of Dylan’s music are fascinating, particularly at the outset the connection to Aaron Copland. The writing is strong, the thinking is strong – the book is dense and strong everywhere you look."
—Philip Roth

"Unlike so many Dylan-writer-wannabes and phony ‘encyclopedia’ compilers, Sean Wilentz makes me feel he was in the room when he chronicles events that I participated in. Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research."
—Al Kooper

"This should have been impossible. Writing about Bob Dylan's music, and fitting it into the great crazy quilt of American culture, Sean Wilentz sews a whole new critical fabric, part history, part close analysis, and all heart. What he writes, as well as anyone ever has, helps us enlarge Dylan's music by reckoning its roots, its influences, its allusive spiritual contours. This isn't Cliff Notes or footnotes or any kind of academic exercise. It's not a critic chinning on the high bar. It's one artist meeting another, kickstarting a dazzling conversation."
—Jay Cocks, screenwriter for THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE GANGS OF NEW YORK

"Sean Wilentz is one of the few great American historians. His political and social histories of American Democracy are masterful and magisterial. In this work, he turns his attention to the artistic genius of Bob Dylan – and the result is a masterpiece of cultural history that tells us much about who we have been and who we are."
—Cornel West, Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University

"Sean Wilentz makes us think about Bob Dylan’s half-century of work in new ways. Combining a scholar’s depth with a sense of mischief appropriate to the subject, Wilentz hears new associations in famous songs and sends us back to listen to Dylan’s less familiar music with fresh insights. By focusing on the parts of Dylan’s canon that most move him, Wilentz gets
straight to the heart of the matter. If you thought there was nothing new to say about Bob Dylan’s impact on America, this book will make you think twice."
—Bill Flanagan, author of A&R and EVENING’S EMPIRE and Editorial Director, MTV Networks.

"Sean Wilentz’s beautiful book sets a new standard for the cultural history of popular music in America. He loves the music and he loves America, but his loves do not blind him, they open his eyes. In Wilentz’s erudite and lively account, Dylan’s music, and folk music, and rock music, are all indelibly woven into the whole story of an entire country. This book is chocked with new contexts for old pleasures. There are surprises and illuminations on almost every page. A great historian has written a history of the culture that formed him. Like Dylan, Wilentz is a deep and probing American voice. Bob Dylan’s America is Bob Dylan’s good luck, and ours. It is an extraordinary affirmation of singing and strumming and feeling and learning and believing."
—Leon Wieseltier

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Moments In Time - The John Lennon Interview: Larry Kane, Baltimore September 1964

"I once received a bra with 'I Love John' embroidered on it. I thought it was pretty original. I didn't keep it, mind you - It didn't fit."

A fascinating interview with Jack Lennon - sorry John Lennon - during the Beats' seminal 1964 North American tour - via the excellent Beatles Ultimate Experience

Some wonderful, typically Lennon, ripostes and banter! You can see the genesis of John's love affair with the States.

ABOUT THIS INTERVIEW:

On this date, the Beatles arrived in Maryland for their performance at Baltimore's Civic Center. John Lennon was interviewed by Larry Kane as part of an on-going series of interviews with the group. Kane was the only American reporter allowed to travel with the Beatles during their 1964 North American tour, and also accompanied them on their 1965 tour.

Larry Kane has authored the insightful books, "Lennon Revealed" (2005) and "Ticket To Ride" (2003) documenting his conversations with the group and also his first-hand accounts of behind-the-scenes events as they happened.

- Jay Spangler, Beatles Ultimate Experience

Q: "John, occasionally we see magazine articles, like last night, one that had your name as 'Jack Lennon' and all these irregularities. What do you think of this when you look at them?"

JOHN: "Well, I just think the people are stupid, you know, if they're not gonna bother to take enough time to do a job and find out what our names are... and try and get the facts right, you know. They must be a bit soft."

Q: "There are alot of people who have albums out with your music on it, like this 'Chipmunk' album, and the 'Boston Pops.' Do you find this a credit to you, or an abortion of your songs."

JOHN: "No, we enjoy it! We always try to get a copy of these people that do our songs. The thing about the 'Chipmunks' and the 'Boston...' they do it so differently from us and from each other-- it's very interesting. And also we, Paul and I, get alot of money when they make these so it's very good for us, you know."

Q: "There is a cut in it for you when they do record these songs."

JOHN: "Yeah, 'cuz we compose them, you know, so we get the... a good lot of money."

Q: "John, when you were in New York, what did you like best about it?"

JOHN: "I just like cities, you see, and preferably big ones. That's why I liked it. And we met some good people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, you know, and I enjoy meeting people I admire."

Q: "Do you like to play better indoors or outdoors?"

JOHN: "Indoors. I don't like playing outdoors. You can't hear and you get blown to pieces."

Q: "Like last night."

JOHN: "Oh! That was dreadful!"






Q: "John, any particular reason that you chose the songs that you did for the current concerts?"

JOHN: "We took a sort of aggregate of the most popular ones in the States over the last couple of months."

Q: "Your early songs and your latest songs."

JOHN: "Yeah. We missed-out alot of the earlier ones, like uhh... I can't think of any, but I'm sure we missed some out."

Q: "There's so many rumors going around and one of the jobs I like to do is either to confirm them or dispel them. There's a big rumor in alot of magazines and papers that you're coming back (to America) in January."

JOHN: "Well, I don't know... might be true. I haven't a clue. Nobody's told me if we are, you know."

Q: "Everyone asks what you like... What's your pet peeve? What is the thing that you dislike the most in the world?"

JOHN: "Having things thrown at us on-stage. Jellybeans and rubbish and that."

Q: "This is your pet peeve in your whole life."

JOHN: "Yeah, 'cuz it hurts."

Q: (laughs)

JOHN: (giggles) "You can't carry on singing and laughing with things hitting you."

Q: "How many other instruments do you play if you play any?"

JOHN: "A bit of piano, and a bit of mouth organ."

Q: "Have you played the organ... umm... mouth organ on any of your songs?"

JOHN: "Well, all the... yeah. There's quite a few we did with mouth organ. I played it on the early hits-- 'Please Please Me,' 'From Me To You,' 'Love Me Do,' 'Little Child' from the LP, 'I Should Have Known Better' on the film-- I stuck mouth organ on that."

Q: "When you're over here, do you miss England? Do you ever get a little homesick even though you're achieving great success over here, and you're having some good times?"

JOHN: "Oh yeah. You get homesick, alright. Every other day (laughs) only!"

Q: "What about the gifts? I notice more and more you've been getting more and more gifts from fans. What was the most unusual gift you've ever received? I know there's so many-- Is there one that sticks out in your mind?"

JOHN: (laughs) "I once received a bra..."

Q: (laughs) "You did?"

JOHN: "...with 'I Love John' embroidered on it. I thought it was pretty original. I didn't keep it, mind you-- It didn't fit."

Q: "How did you like Key West?"

JOHN: (jokingly) "It was alright for a swamp. (laughs) No, it wasn't bad, you know."






Q: "When you're out there, you do alot of lead (vocal) on most of the songs. Have you ever had a point during your concerts where you ever had a loss, a mental-block in your head as to what to do next?"

JOHN: "Yeah. I'm the one that often gets it-- suddenly go blank and I don't know what I'm singing or playing or anything, you know. I just forget, and all the rest sort of tell me what's happening."

Q: "You mentioned these jellybeans and everything. Does it hamper your work... besides making you frightened of the fact that it might hit your eye or something... does it hamper your work?"

JOHN: "Yeah. You can't play if they keep hitting you, you know. You keep stopping 'cuz it's natural-- you sort of duck, you know, and you stop playing. But it's been quite good-- it's stopped now. So I suppose we should stop talking about it."








Q: "Here's a question alot of people will think it kind of ridiculous to ask entertainers this, but I'm going to because alot of people are interested in your opinion. So much of these world conflicts going on-- everybody's fighting each other. What would be your personal solution to stopping war? What way or method?"

JOHN: "I don't think there is one, you know. Not if everybody was all rich and happy, and each country had all they wanted, they'd still want the next bit. I don't think there'll ever be any solution... only, just, you know, a sort of power block where everybody's got the same weapons."

Q: "There was a big rumor out around the country-- as you know there's so many rumors-- about Ringo having a throat operation. And this was cleared up last night with this 'tonsil' bit."

JOHN: "Yeah, he's having his tonsils out when we get back to Britain, then go after the British tour."

Q: "Has there ever been one rumor that's particularly peeved you?"

JOHN: "Umm, me leaving the group... and my wife being pregnant."

Q: "You mean, having a baby next month?"

JOHN: "Yeah."

Q: "There's been alot of criticism by Americans of the fact that there's so many groups that are coming out that have no originality, from England, that are all trying to copy you. Now we know there's a handful that are really doing very well over here, as well as you..."

JOHN: "Yeah."

Q: "...Does it ever bother you that certain groups will copy you completely whatever you do?"

JOHN: "No, because everybody knows, you know. Only the dumbest people don't know that they're copying us, you know. So it's just a laugh when you see a big imitation of you going 'round. They never really make it. They might have a hit, but nobody's fooled for long."

Q: "Does anybody ever ask you for advice-- another group, let's say?"

JOHN: "Younger groups, you know, that are just sort of forming. But there's no advice you can give really. Just keep playing and hope for the best."






Q: "I notice that you have this guitar with you, and I notice you strum it quite a bit. Where do you get your ideas for songs? Do you ever get them sitting in a dressing room, or in a hotel room? Is it a planned session, or do you just come across an idea?"

JOHN: "No, I just come across one. I could happen any minute... (strums wildly and yells) Noww-yyo-oumpfff!!! You see... like that!"

Q: (laughs) "Have you written any on this current tour?"

JOHN: "Two."

Q: "You don't have the names or anything like that?"

JOHN: "I know the names, but we don't give them 'cuz people turn out songs with the same name, you know."

Q: "I'm not that familiar with the music business, myself."

JOHN: "Well that's what happens. You think of a name that's original, and you broadcast it, and somebody will make a record with the same name and a different song. And it gets confusing, you know."

Q: "When you first came over to this country in February and I met you briefly in Miami, were you shocked by the reaction? Were you worried about your reaction over here, personally-- the crowds and everything else?"

JOHN: "Well, we never expected to... didn't expect to sell records or anything over here. So we were just amazed. (giggles) And we still are, you know."

Q: "Was the American market your main goal after conquering England"

JOHN: "Yeah, well, every British artist used to imagine trying to get... you get the odd hit from Britain, or you get the odd hit from Germany-- there's alot of freak records. But nobody ever sort of made it in America, and we were dying to be the first."

Q: "I know there's a record over here of 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' in German, or 'She Loves you,' one or the other."

JOHN: "Both of them."

Q: "Have you done them any other languages"

JOHN: "No, the Germans are the only ones that won't buy you in English. You have to kow-tow to the Germans. But after you've made a couple of records they'll buy anything."







Q: "I know the police have generally done a great job on this current tour, but what do you think personally about some of them trying to get autographs and going out of the line of duty? You know, you've seen so many of them come back in the plane-- and to me, this may be a little strong, but it's sort of a bribe. What do you think of this?"

JOHN: "Well, some of the police do sort of-- 'You sign this or we won't help you' but most of them are just normal fellas, and you get sort of lousy people in any organization. You get a couple of lousy cops who sort of threaten you or... not threaten you with violence, but sort of 'Unless you sign me eighty of these I'm not gonna look after you.' But they're no worse than any people in any organization. You get bums everywhere."

Q: "This is your first tour that you've actually seen all of America, and up to now you've seen about every section. Off your role as a performer, what do you think of America as a country-- the cities and the land and the people?"

JOHN: "I think it's marvelous, you know. I like it, and especially places like New York and Hollywood, you know. I like the big places. And it's amazing to see a place like Los Vegas. Who ever thought of building a place in the middle of a desert, (giggles) you know. Things like that are marvelous."

Q: "Do you ever have any differences on-stage or off-stage?"

JOHN: "Off-stage are the same differences that normal people have or friends have, you know, but they're never violent or they never last long. We always settle our argument, you know."

Q: "Everybody says you're gonna break up. This is another rumor. It's all over."

JOHN: "That's alot of rubbish, you know. It's just rubbish. We've never even thought of it."

Q: "We were reading those fan magazines, and I plan to show you a few more because some of them are unbelievable."

JOHN: "Yeah."

Q: "I don't know who prints them. I know you laughed when you saw the name Jack Lennon on the page the other night, and I laughed too. Has it ever really bugged you that they get your name wrong?"

JOHN: "No. It's always made me laugh when people get my name wrong. Like, there was one DJ today who said, 'This is so-and-so from so-and-so station, talking to John Harrison here,' and I just creased up but I never told him, you know. He found out by himself at the end. But it's just funny, you know. If they can't get your name right, well, (comical voice) God help 'em, that's what I say!"







Q: "You talked about playing in-doors and outdoors. I noticed the other night, even though you had a forty mile an hour, or thirty mile an hour wind in Jacksonville-- I don't know if you knew it was that high..."

JOHN: (giggles) "It felt like a hundred mile an hour one to me."

Q: "...you still didn't have any trouble getting out the song. Do you try to acclimate yourself to this, or did it really bother you the other night?"

JOHN: "Yeah, you know. We'd never been through a thing like that. We were most sort of awkward with... all our hair was blowing up-- we all looked like four Elvis Presleys or something. (giggles) We just felt uncomfortable with all that wind."

Q: "John, thank you very much. It's been nice working with you."

JOHN: "Great working with you, Larry."

Source: Transcribed by the Beatles Ultimate Experience website from audio copy of the interview

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The Music - A trip on Dylan's magic swirling ship

A new life of Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan In America - is one of the most insightful and revelatory books about the US, its culture and its people

by Philip King
http://www.irishtimes.com
Saturday, October 2, 2010

HAVING WRITTEN and published some essays and commentaries on Bob Dylan, Sean Wilentz was invited by Dylan’s office in 2001 to contribute an essay to accompany the release of the singer’s forthcoming album Love and Death . The Princeton academic, historian and arts writer has since posted regularly on Dylan’s official website and written Grammy award-winning sleeve notes to Bootleg Series Volume 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, The Concert at Philharmonic Hall , an event Wilentz attended at the age of 13 with his father. “I tried to evoke a feeling of being a teenage cultural insider, self-consciously nestled as close to the centre of hipness as possible.” Almost a Simple Twist of Fate.

Sean Wilentz grew up in Brooklyn Heights, and his family ran the famous 8th Street bookshop in Greenwich Village, a place that helped nurture the beat poets of the 1950s and the folk revivalists of the 1960s. “Nothing in that setting was anything I had sought out or had any idea was going to become important. As things turned out, I was lucky.”

He boarded the young Dylan’s “magic swirling ship” early and stayed on board for the voyage. He wandered a little after Infidels, in 1983, when Dylan’s music “seemed tired and torn as if mired in a set of convictions that, lacking deeper faith, were substituting for art”, and returned to Dylan in the early 1990s, with the release of Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong: “When my father fell mortally ill in 1994, having Dylan’s breathy rendition of the 1830s vintage hymn Lone Pilgrim brought tears and consolation.’’ Dylan’s ship is still in full sail, its course impossible to predict with, as Wilentz calls him, the “masked shape-changing American alchemist” at the helm.

An introductory quote from Walt Whitman sets the tone: “Only a few hints – a few diffused, faint clues and indirections. . . ”

Bob Dylan In America is constructed in a seemingly random manner, not unlike Dylan’s own Chronicles Volume One. Over 11 chapters it is ordered in five parts: Before, Early, Later, Interlude and Recent. Wilentz combines his deep musical knowledge with the skills of the fine historian to write one of the most important, insightful and revelatory books about America, its culture and its people, as interpreted through the works of one of its greatest artists. His book is a work both of deep scholarship and profound cultural engagement: a rare and marvellous achievement.

“For a professional historian, it was wildly thrilling to learn that Dylan discovered the cuneiforms of his art in the microfilm room,” Wilentz writes. He understands that Dylan knows his history but that “he does not think about the past with an eye to tracking dialectical abstractions, nor was he interested in looking backwards for pointers about the present or the future . . . What struck him most powerfully . . . was his realisation of the closeness between then and now, especially in America: that the distance was so small that it could fit inside an apostrophe, and that the songs on which he’d wagered his heart and voice collapsed the distance automatically”.

Wilentz recounts Dylan’s notion that the language of folk songs, an old living vocabulary, was a language “that was tied to the circumstances of blood” and of what happened over 100 years ago at the time of secession from the union.

Dylan absorbed more than a century of songs and the history that informed them: standing in an old listening booth, hearing a disc played once and immediately knowing it. Guthrie, Leadbelly, Blind Willy McTell, Doc Watson, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Bing Cosby, Frank Sinatra, Ricky Nelson, Liam Clancy, Thomas Moore and Paul Brady all found homes in his tower of song.

In Chapter 10, “Bob Dylan’s Civil War”, Wilentz writes: “Listening to the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, Dylan hears other kinds of songs drenched in history where even in a simple melodic wooing ballad, there would be rebellion waiting around the corner.” Rebellion spoke to him louder than death: “He wanted to change over songs like The Minstrel Boy and Kevin Barry to have them fit an American landscape.”

And so, searching for “some archaic grail to lighten the way for his song writing”, he went uptown to the New York Public Library and read about America in the Civil War era: “Not just what the historians had to say but the sources themselves” – primary sources, the heart of the matter.

IF YOU want to know the facts consult the history books; if you want to know what it felt like ask a singer: so said the great song collector and archivist Frank Heart, and it is this relationship between fact and feeling that is at the heart of this book, the relationship and tension between the artist and the historian. From the Lone Pilgrim out of the shape note choral music in 19th-century sacred harp tradition, we journey Across the Green Valley , marching through Dan Emmett’s Dixie through minstrelsy, blackface and vaudeville. Wilentz journeys on through the Popular Front, Aaron Copland’s “enforced simplicity”, quoting Stephen Foster’s C amptown Races along the way.

Lionel Trilling, Charles Seeger, Pete Seeger, Lonnie Johnson, Kerouac and Ginsberg – Dylan first met Ginsberg in 1963 at the 8th Street bookshop owned by the author’s uncle – contribute to a long list of dramatis personae here. Dylan’s remarkable apprenticeship with Norman Raeben, the Jewish Mark Twain, who taught him “how to see” by putting “my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt”, explains something of Dylan’s creative process.

This book sent me back to the shelves and out to the shed to take down records and songs I have not listened to for some time: the recordings from that period of astounding creative intensity book-ended by Blonde on Blonde, with Dylan beginning to substitute emotion for coherence.

Wilentz reintroduced me to Delia (All The Friends I Ever Had Are Gone) , retuned my ear to really hear Everything Is Broken, We Live in a Political World, Highwater and Arthur McBride . I read this book rolling and tumbling through Dylan’s back pages hearing things I never heard before. I read this book with tunes running through my head; I journeyed all the way back home.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bob Dylan In America By Sean Wilentz, The Bodley Head, 400pp.


Philip King is a musician, writer and film director. He is the series editor of Other Voices and is currently in preproduction on an Irish multimedia cultural project with music at its core. He is a member of the Arts Council and performs regularly with Scullion

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Art of the Cover - Early '60s Album Covers

A Look At Early '60s Album Covers

by Pat Jacobs

Early '60s album covers were pretty much a straightforward thing; you either had the singer or group in a nice pose, or sometimes dancing.

Several of the early Motown albums often featured a picture or illustration conveying the title track, not an actual picture of the group or singer. I understand that this was deliberately done by Berry Gordy in order to gain mainstream appeal for his acts", recalled Pamela Foster.

"You would also see lovely female models dressed nicely or romantic couples on the covers of most of the 'beautiful music' albums. And sometimes you would come across one where the female model was in a rather provocative or 'racy' pose, shall we say, for the 'lounge music' albums."

"I remember the album cover for the 'Love Me Or Leave Me' soundtrack that my mom had. Doris Day was dressed in a shimmering blue gown, her hair in a poodle cut, I think. The dress had a side slit, which showed off Day's legs (The woman had nice gams). She looked beautiful!" I liked the Frank Sinatra covers my mom had as well; He always looked so cool."




"My aunt had a couple of Chubby Checker albums; He always seemed to be in a dancing pose. My aunt also had The Marvelettes' 'Please Mr. Postman' (a mailbox on the cover) and The Miracles' 'Mickey's Monkey' (a giant gorilla or ape on the cover) LPs, both Motown acts. Now buying LPs was a rare occurrence for her; most teens at this time were into the singles only, and my aunt was no exception. She had TONS of them".

"You see, most rock and roll albums at that time were basically 'filler' material. Out of 10-12 songs, you would get one or two big hits; the rest would be the B-sides and anything else that could be slapped on, whether the singer or group could really sing the song or not. A rock and roll album wasn't taken seriously then", Foster said. " 'Good music' was Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, or Nat King Cole and more care was taken in regards to song selection and arrangements for these type of artists (I also happen to like Sinatra, Mathis, Cole, and others like them. I grew up listening to both 'good music' AND 'rock and roll. ) "




And then...1964 happened...and The Beatles. The album cover would never be the same. Even from their early ones ("Meet The Beatles", "A Hard Day's Night", "Beatles For Sale", and "Help!") the art design was very unique and eye-catching. But in my humble opinion, "Rubber Soul" was the first Beatle album cover that was a total art form, still visually striking today (Actually, most of their albums were and remain so). "Revolver" (This was designed by the group's old friend from the Hamburg days, Klaus Voorman) and "The Beatles (White Album)" were other landmarks. The "Yellow Submarine" and "Abbey Road" covers were very good too (I also loved the design of the two Anthology covers that were created much later. It told the group's story and history beautifully!)

But "the one that changed everything" was the concept album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It's the most famous album cover of this decade and possibly in rock history. There simply wasn't anything like it before (It spawned several imitations, most notably "We're Only In It For The Money" by Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention-intended as a parody of Sgt. Pepper-but this cover's also outstanding!).

Sgt. Pepper's cover was shot at Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, in London on Thursday, March 30th, 1967. Its "guests" included: Mae West, Lenny Bruce, W.C. Fields, Edgar Allen Poe, Fred Astaire, Huntz Hall (The Bowery Boys), Bob Dylan, Aldous Huxley, Dylan Thomas, Dion (di Mucci), Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Laurel and Hardy, Karl Marx, H.G. Wells, Stuart Sutcliffe, Marlon Brando, Oscar Wilde, Tom Mix, Tyrone Power, Dr. David Livingstone, Johnny Weismueller, Stephen Crane, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Lawrence Of Arabia, Sonny Listen, Shirley Temple, Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, and the early Beatles, among others.

In 1967, for the first time, albums began to outsell singles. 61 LPs (long playing records) accounted for over $1 million in sales. By 1968, 75 LPs went over $1 million in sales. Albums were now viewed as artistic statements.




And of course, there were covers that had to be pulled and/or redesigned due to their controversial matter (Hey, this is rock and roll, isn't it?).

The Beatles' original cover of "Yesterday ,,, And Today" (1966) featured the group in butcher smocks or jackets, with strips of raw meat and dolls' heads and bodies strewn between and around them. Was this supposed to symbolize something? I don't know. Perhaps the group was just being anti-establishment. Perhaps not.

But nobody got it (maybe the cover designer and group did); DJs and record promoters began complaining and the album was pulled temporarily (Some people were able to buy the original before this happened) and re-emerged with a new cover. This time the group posed in regular clothes, with an open truck; John's sitting on the trunk's top, George and Ringo are standing in back of it, and Paul's sitting or kneeling inside the trunk. That's it.

This controversy may have been only in the States.




Two years later (1968), John Lennon and Yoko Ono created an even bigger flap by their album cover. Why?

"Unfinished Music: Two Virgins" featured the duo stark naked. Totally. Full frontal nudity on the cover, full butt nudity on the back. Never before in the annals of rock and roll had so much been revealed to so many. Some stores wouldn't carry this album; some places did, but it was wrapped in brown paper (and I don't know if this was just in the States or elsewhere as well).




"Electric Ladyland" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1968) also featured nudity. On the original cover, there were various naked ladies strewn about against a black background. (I understand there was a mixup concerning the artwork for this album. I honestly don't know if the "nudie girls" theme was the intended cover.)


Other notable album covers were:

"The Who Sell Out" and "Tommy"-The Who, "People", "Color Me Barbra", My Name Is Barbra", My Name Is Barbra, Two", and "A Happening In Central Park"-Barbra Streisand, "Cheap Thrills"-Big Brother and The Holding Company, "Gettin' Ready", "The Temptations Sing Smokey", and "I Wish It Would Rain"-The Temptations, "Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger", "Bo Diddley Is A Lumberjack" and "Surfin' With Bo Diddley", "Bringing It All Back Home"-Bob Dylan, "Whipped Cream and Other Delights"-Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass.

"Supremes A Go-Go", "I Hear A Symphony", and "Diana Ross and The Supremes' Greatest Hits", "West Side Story" soundtrack, "The First Family"-Vaughn Meader, "Boots", "Sugar", "How Does That Grab You?", and "Nancy In London"-Nancy Sinatra, "Blooming Hits"-Paul Mauriat, "Time/Peace-Greatest Hits"-The Rascals, "Keep On Pushing"-The Impressions, "King and Queen"-Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, "Switched-On Bach"-Walter Carlos and Benjamin Workman, "The Ice Man Cometh" and "Ice On Ice"-Jerry Butler, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf"-Jimmy Smith, "Going To A Go-Go"-The Miracles, "Ole' " and "Heavenly"-Johnny Mathis.

Most of Frank Sinatra' s 1950s and '60s album covers, such as "In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning", My Son, The Folksinger, "My Son, The Celebrity", and "My Son, The Nut"-Allan Sherman, "Led Zeppelin 1", "Music From Big Pink"-The Band, "Beggars Banquet", "Let It Bleed","Aftermath", "December's Children (And Everybody's)", and "Their Satanic Majesties Request"-The Rolling Stones, "Live At The Apollo"-James Brown, "From Elvis In Memphis", and "Surfin' Safari".

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The Music - Detroit, The Car and Rock n' Roll

Mustang Sally, think you better slow your mustang down.
You been running all over the town now.
Oh! I guess I'll have to put your flat feet on the ground.

- Mack Rice



Now you get off your Mustang Sally.
You ain't goin' nowhere.
You ain't goin' nowhere.

-Patti Smith

If there's one thing that unites the car and rock'n'roll, it is that dream of escape, that desire to be free of place and time and restraint.

by Laura Barton
The Guardian

The Music - Go-go music is the soul of Washington, but it's slipping away

Go-go music is the soul of Washington, but it's slipping away

By Natalie Hopkinson

April 11, 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com

It was just another gig at a D.C. area nightclub, one of several shows the band Suttle Thoughts plays each week, drawing hundreds of young professionals in their 20s and 30s -- a self-proclaimed "grown and sexy" crowd. But a club manager stopped the band at the door when he noticed one of the musicians bringing in a set of conga drums, bandleader Chi Ali told me.

If you are in or near the District and you see a young black bandleader trailed by a horn section, guitars, keyboards, cow bells and congas, that can only mean one thing: They play go-go music, the area's unique style of funk. And if you run a club, having a go-go band perform can be complicated. On the upside, the place is going to be packed, and you will rake it in at the bar. On the downside, the crowds can get volatile, drawing extra police scrutiny.

On that day early this year, the club manager didn't want to bother. So he told the band to get its things and go.

This is what it has come to: one of the city's only true indigenous art forms -- the one generations of Washingtonians have grooved to -- unceremoniously cast away. Not only is go-go being shut out from clubs that could still support it, the retail stores that nurtured the music are fading away.

Cities change all the time, but this is about more than mourning what's gone. As go-go shifts to the margins in the District, we are losing something bigger. Go-go may be invisible to much of white Washington, but it's as much a part of the city as the pillars and monuments of its federal face. On any given day, in any number of clubs, parks, community centers, schools and back yards throughout the region, you can find up to a dozen young musicians on a stage, playing before ecstatic, sweaty crowds.

Go-go is Washington. The music never made a real national splash, but it has come to reflect this city, its artistic pulse and the often painful reality of life for many of its black residents.

Now the place that created go-go is shoving it aside.

The U Street NW and H Street NE corridors have gone upscale, pushing out the places where you could buy tickets, hear go-go music live and purchase your neighborhood's unique brand of embroidered sweats. Ibex, a popular Georgia Avenue NW go-go club, has been transformed into luxury condos. The flagship store for local urbanwear designer We R One on Florida Avenue NW went out of business a couple of summers ago. I-Hip-Hop and Go-Go, a store on H Street NE, has been shuttered. The flagship location of P.A. Palace, a chain of go-go stores, has been bulldozed to make way for a Wal-Mart in Landover Hills.

Before the drive-by shooting in Southeast last month -- one of the deadliest shootings in the District in years -- the city was touting the progress it had made in curbing crime. The murder rate was at a 45-year low. When crime statistics were released in January, one of the factors that D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier credited for the reduction in violence was her department's "go-go report," a list of all the concerts going on around the city. When I asked a police spokeswoman to explain how the "go-go report" works -- and how monitoring cuts down on crime -- she refused to comment, citing "law enforcement sensitive information."

Of course a police presence is needed at any activity that draws big crowds. But how else to interpret Lanier's comments to reporters, other than that the city is safer because it is reining in the music?

"I can't imagine my life without go-go," said DJ Flexx of WPGC (95.5 FM), a popular hip-hop station. But the music "is on life support," he said.

The city needs to be throwing out an oxygen mask. Without go-go, Washington loses part of its soul and continues its steady march toward becoming richer, whiter -- less funktified.

As with many nonnative Washingtonians, my introduction to the genre came from Spike Lee's 1988 film "School Daze," which spawned one of the few mainstream go-go hits, "Da Butt" by the band E.U. I started hanging out on the go-go scene a decade ago, first as a youth-culture writer for The Washington Post and then as an ethnographer earning my doctorate at the University of Maryland. Go-go is played on D.C. hip-hop stations such as WPGC and WKYS (93.9 FM), but the recordings don't come close to translating the joyous, infectious energy of the live shows.

You know it's go-go by its signature, slow-driving conga beat. The music sounds like a grittier kind of funk, with a "lead talker" calling out fans, a rapper and an R&B vocalist singing original songs and go-go versions of hits by artists from Ashlee Simpson to Ludacris. The most popular go-go bands, such as TCB -- a fixture since the early 2000s -- play as many as four gigs a week and easily draw 500 to 1,000 fans per night, with clubs turning people away at the door.

Nico "the Go-Go-ologist" Hobson, a music historian and collector who is a fixture on the scene, says there are more new bands forming than ever. While not a route to the high life or visits to the White House, for many local artists, becoming a go-go superstar is a more attainable goal than being the next Jay-Z.

But Hobson says keeping the music alive is an uphill battle. Not only is go-go fighting economic and political pressures, it is also suffering from self-inflicted wounds. Violence surged around go-go with the crack trade in the 1980s and 1990s, and over the years, several high-profile tragedies have taken place near the clubs.

Marvin "Slush" Taylor, who invented the "Beat Your Feet" dance craze (and inspired the recent MTV reality show stars Beat Ya Feet Kings) was killed at age 19 after leaving a go-go in 2002. In 1997, D.C. police officer Brian T. Gibson was killed outside Ibex on Georgia Avenue. In 2007, high school cheerleader Taleshia Ford, 17, was killed inside a U Street area go-go by a stray bullet.

Ford's death was the fourth killing connected to dance clubs around U Street within three years, and some clubs were eventually shut down. Among them was Club U, at 14th and U streets, which had helped rejuvenate the neighborhood beginning in the early 1990s, transforming the Reeves Municipal Center into a go-go at night. After a fatal stabbing in 2005, the club lost its liquor license and closed.

Go-go music is not any more violent than, say, punk music. But it does reflect what is going on in a neighborhood. Fans sometimes bring their turf battles, which can include neighborhood rivalries, to concerts. These are exacerbated by the competition to see whose crew or neighborhood will be acknowledged on the mike. As one D.C. police officer once said, it's often simply a matter of youth, immaturity and too much alcohol coming together.

Go-go also channels much of the grief experienced in too many parts of our city. At a Haiti benefit concert in January, Peculiar People Band lead vocalist Dre MayDay, 22, explained how people at the show could relate to the hopelessness on the island since the earthquake. "I know we are not strangers to the pain," he said to the audience filled with teens, many of them hoisting "R.I.P." T-shirts to honor fallen friends. "We are not strangers to the struggle. We gon' sing this song so loud that they can hear us all the way in Haiti. We're dancing in the rain. We're dancing through the struggle and our pain."

Such grim eulogies were not what Chuck Brown, the Godfather of Go-Go, had in mind when he invented the sound around 1976. A jazz guitarist, Brown borrowed some elements from the Los Latinos band he played with, giving the music a Caribbean feel with conga drums, timbales, cow bells and a horn section. (The genre was named after a 1965 Smokey Robinson song, "Going to a Go-Go.")

Go-go helped rejuvenate areas such as U Street that for years were deeply scarred by the riots that erupted in 1968 after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Charred and abandoned buildings around the Howard Theatre near Georgia Avenue came back to life as the area filled with go-go shows.

Now, as the city's renaissance approaches full tilt, those venues are being replaced with a new kind of nightlife. The natural ebb and flow of business, fickle youth tastes and the growing incursion of hip-hop are all playing a part. But there is more to it than that: Go-go is also a victim of changing perceptions of what kind of nightlife Washington -- and its developers, business leaders and politicians -- want to have. There is little desire on their part to work with the young, black, sometimes-marginal community that supports go-go. As the authors Kip Lornell and Charles Stephenson wrote in their 2001 book on Washington's go-go scene, "The Beat," the music "wears the mantle of low-class or blue-collar music" and "remains ghettoized."

That's why the D.C. police "go-go report," and the police presence at many clubs, say so much to me about the direction in which this city is pushing the music.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, hip-hop artists were subject to some of the same police scrutiny after a spate of well-publicized killings -- including the deaths of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. After years of denying rumors of a "hip-hop task force," New York and Miami police admitted to the Village Voice in 2004 that they had units keeping tabs on hip-hop artists. At this revelation, everyone from rap mogul Russell Simmons to former NAACP leader Ben Chavis Muhammad to Georgetown University law professors got to howling. "Hip-Hop Behind Bars," blared a Source magazine cover.

So why no outrage when D.C. police mention their "go-go report"? One difference is in the size and power of the targets. Hip-hop is a billion-dollar international industry. Go-go is a network of local black-owned businesses. There are no "go-go intellectuals" in the ivory tower. "Go-Go is an easy scapegoat," said the Rev. Tony Lee, pastor of the Community of Hope A.M.E Church in Hillcrest Heights, who has worked on anti-violence initiatives with groups such as the Go-Go Coalition, the Backyard Band and the W.H.A.T.?! Band. (Last week the District revoked funding for one of these go-go-affiliated groups, the Peaceaholics, because of budget constraints.)

Lee said he has an excellent relationship with the Prince George's County police force, which is busy with its own crackdown on go-go clubs. There are class tensions there, too, since many suburban middle-class blacks are quick to distance themselves from the go-go culture. "We are talking about both generational and class warfare," Lee said.

But "go-go" also means constant motion -- wherever it goes. And lately that means out of D.C. and farther and farther into Maryland. I was recently encouraged by the scene on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at Lee's church. Hundreds of go-go fans, mostly young people, had flocked to the former big-box store in Iverson Mall to hear their favorite bands at the Haiti benefit concert, which raised $5,000 toward relief efforts.

It was go-go at its finest, a night that made it easier to defend the music than it often is. People who've lost loved ones to nightclub violence could care less that the conga player didn't do it; they just want the violence to stop. But despite all the pressures to do so, black people shouldn't walk away from a culture we create. Neither should that culture's city.

Speaking after the show that night, the Peculiar People Band leader, MayDay, told me he is saddened by the plight of go-go. "D.C.-Maryland, we are like our own little island," he said. "We have our own thing. If we were to let it go, we would start to be like the rest of the states."

nhopkinson@hotmail.com

Natalie Hopkinson, a culture and media critic for TheRoot.com, is author of the forthcoming "Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City."

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Lies Beneath - What wasn't shown on the Haiti telethon

What wasn't shown on the Haiti telethon - George Clooney's Haiti ... and Beyond

by Jesse Lemisch
http://www.newpol.org/node/205

George Clooney (currently in "Up in the Air") organized on short notice a technically and musically fine two hour fund-raising telethon, "Hope for Haiti," which was broadcast on January 22 on most networks, many cable channels, on the Web, and both in and beyond the US. Here are two samplers of the music: one and two.

Performers included Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Bono, Rihanna, Madonna, Beyonce, Jennifer Hudson, Mary J. Blige, Sting, Shakira, Alicia Keyes, Dave Matthews, Justin Timberlake, Sheryl Crow, Coldplay, The Edge, Wyclef Jean, and many others. Strangely, most were not named, and your recognition of who was performing depended on how deeply embedded you are in current popular music, e.g. whether you can tell Madonna from Lady Gaga (who wasn't there.)

This was a worthy and well-intentioned endeavor, and we ought to be grateful to Clooney and the performers, who raised money for such good organizations as Partners in Health, and Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres). As for the content, people with Movement experience will be particularly struck by Bruce Springsteen's adaptation to the Haitian context of "We Shall Overcome," with guitar, accordion, and trumpet. Jennifer Hudson sang a gospelized version of the Beatles' "Let it Be"; and Wyclef Jean Gave an exhilarating performance, taking off from "Rivers of Babylon" (I'll discuss this below).

But, in most of the show, politics were verboten, as was anything about the history of the place. This left the audience to think that a terrible natural disaster had befallen Haiti, but ignorant of: the country's origins in a successful slave rebellion (with US support for French efforts to crush it); more than a century of French draining the economy for the money value of the slaves they had lost; nineteen years of occupation by the US Marines; US complicity with the Duvaliers; after earlier support, exiling of Jean-Bertrand Aristide on a US plane; the banning of the left party, Lavalas; the crimes committed against the Haitian economy by neoliberal economics via such institutions as the IMF (which, amidst the earthquake announced a wage freeze for public employees in Haiti.).

This all added up to an unnatural disaster: enormous poverty, flight from the countryside to the city as the result of the destruction of Haitian agriculture by US dumping (rice) and the promise of low-wage manufacturing jobs (which didn't materialize); once crowded in the city, they put anything over their heads that they could, and of course these poor structures easily collapsed. Cutting down trees to make charcoal was one of the few ways of getting money, and that produced deforestation which produced floods. It denies history to see the US as free of responsibility for these things.

Historians are coming to realize that very few things are simply "natural disasters." Famines, for instance, can be made or exacerbated by governments. (Consider the English role in the 19th century Irish famine.) The earthquake would have been terrible anyplace, but because of Haiti's impoverishment by the West, its impact on life went far beyond 7.0 on the Richter Scale. The horrors visited upon Haiti are no more an "act of god" than were the horrors of Katrina.

Instead of the quite visible underside of the US role in Haiti , Clooney's telethon gave us Anderson Cooper patting on the heads of little black children who had been pulled from the rubble, expressing genuine affection for them but offering a classic tableau of white paternalism: as in Hollywood, so on TV, the experience of the Other has to be passed on to us by Somebody Like Us (as in "Schindler's List," or "Amistad" as described in my "Black Agency in the Amistad Uprising: Or, You've Taken our Cinque and Gone."). But most notable was the relative absence of Haiti itself from the music and sets (missing the color and wonder of Haitian art), conveying the accurate impression that this was something done for rather than by Haitians. There were a few Haitian performers including Jean and Emeline Michel (who sang Jimmy Cliff's "Many Rivers to Cross."). I was struck by the sight of Haitian singers singing (well) songs of Jamaicans Jimmy Cliff and Boney M., which reminded me of Ronald Reagan's discovery of Africa: "You know, they're all different countries down there."

The show came to a powerful and moving conclusion with Wyclef Jean singing the mournful "Rivers of Babylon" (video on the above Urban Daily site). Midway, he switches to Creole. Then, in a moment reminiscent of "Freunde, nicht dieser tone," he brings the music to a stop and cries out, "enough! Hold up! Let's show them how we do it where we come from,." followed by tooting horns, drums and Jean bobbing, wrapped in the Haitian colors. A mournful song becomes a song of resistance to the fate seemingly laid down on Haiti.

***************

The US continues to view Haiti through a racist lens. This was shockingly clear in David Brooks's January 14 New York Times column, "The Underlying Tragedy." "It is time," Brooks writes, "to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty." What follows is pure culture-of-poverty blame-the-victim stuff, reminiscent of, among others, Moynihan on the "pathology" of the Black Family: "Haiti ... suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences," including Voodoo and "high levels of social mistrust." "Responsibility," he froths,"is often not internalized." Brooks has all but told us that they are a nation of welfare queens.

A different manifestation of this kind of thing appears in the portrayal of Haitians as constituting an unruly mob amidst "anarchy" and "chaos." This has been reflected in a shameful US policy of giving preference to the military over relief (food and medicine) on the assumption that the military is needed to keep order. The US simply occupied the Port au-Prince airport, set up their own air traffic control to replace the damaged original and proceeded to one of the great atrocities of this period: with priority given to US military flights, they turned away eight planes with field hospitals etc. provided by Medecins sans Frontieres. (They also yielded to high-level string pulling for the Pennsylvania governor's plane, and, incredibly, gave priority to two planeloads of Scientology healers paid for by John Travolta).

The claim that an armed military is needed before food and medicine takes us back to the era of Gustave LeBon and the even more ancient idea of ordinary people (especially non-whites) as animals, mindless and selfish, predisposed to riot. This may yet happen, but only because authority has demonstrated again and again how unworthy it is of popular trust. Meantime, belying the stereotype, most Haitians patiently queue.

This takes us a long way beyond George Clooney. But both in popular culture and in foreign policy this country desperately needs to re-examine the lenses through which it views the non-white world.

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Art of the Cover - Album Covers Early to Late '60s

A Look At Album Covers - Early  to Late '60s

by Pat Jacobs

Early '60s album covers were pretty much a straightforward thing; you either had the singer or group in a nice pose, or sometimes dancing.

Several of the early Motown albums often featured a picture or illustration conveying the title track, not an actual picture of the group or singer. I understand that this was deliberately done by Berry Gordy in order to gain mainstream appeal for his acts", recalled Pamela Foster.

"You would also see lovely female models dressed nicely or romantic couples on the covers of most of the 'beautiful music' albums. And sometimes you would come across one where the female model was in a rather provocative or 'racy' pose, shall we say, for the 'lounge music' albums."

"I remember the album cover for the 'Love Me Or Leave Me' soundtrack that my mom had. Doris Day was dressed in a shimmering blue gown, her hair in a poodle cut, I think. The dress had a side slit, which showed off Day's legs (The woman had nice gams). She looked beautiful!" I liked the Frank Sinatra covers my mom had as well; He always looked so cool."




"My aunt had a couple of Chubby Checker albums; He always seemed to be in a dancing pose. My aunt also had The Marvelettes' 'Please Mr. Postman' (a mailbox on the cover) and The Miracles' 'Mickey's Monkey' (a giant gorilla or ape on the cover) LPs, both Motown acts. Now buying LPs was a rare occurrence for her; most teens at this time were into the singles only, and my aunt was no exception. She had TONS of them".

"You see, most rock and roll albums at that time were basically 'filler' material. Out of 10-12 songs, you would get one or two big hits; the rest would be the B-sides and anything else that could be slapped on, whether the singer or group could really sing the song or not. A rock and roll album wasn't taken seriously then", Foster said. " 'Good music' was Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, or Nat King Cole and more care was taken in regards to song selection and arrangements for these type of artists (I also happen to like Sinatra, Mathis, Cole, and others like them. I grew up listening to both 'good music' AND 'rock and roll. ) "




And then...1964 happened...and The Beatles. The album cover would never be the same. Even from their early ones ("Meet The Beatles", "A Hard Day's Night", "Beatles For Sale", and "Help!") the art design was very unique and eye-catching. But in my humble opinion, "Rubber Soul" was the first Beatle album cover that was a total art form, still visually striking today (Actually, most of their albums were and remain so). "Revolver" (This was designed by the group's old friend from the Hamburg days, Klaus Voorman) and "The Beatles (White Album)" were other landmarks. The "Yellow Submarine" and "Abbey Road" covers were very good too (I also loved the design of the two Anthology covers that were created much later. It told the group's story and history beautifully!)

But "the one that changed everything" was the concept album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It's the most famous album cover of this decade and possibly in rock history. There simply wasn't anything like it before (It spawned several imitations, most notably "We're Only In It For The Money" by Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention-intended as a parody of Sgt. Pepper-but this cover's also outstanding!).

Sgt. Pepper's cover was shot at Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, in London on Thursday, March 30th, 1967. Its "guests" included: Mae West, Lenny Bruce, W.C. Fields, Edgar Allen Poe, Fred Astaire, Huntz Hall (The Bowery Boys), Bob Dylan, Aldous Huxley, Dylan Thomas, Dion (di Mucci), Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Laurel and Hardy, Karl Marx, H.G. Wells, Stuart Sutcliffe, Marlon Brando, Oscar Wilde, Tom Mix, Tyrone Power, Dr. David Livingstone, Johnny Weismueller, Stephen Crane, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Lawrence Of Arabia, Sonny Listen, Shirley Temple, Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, and the early Beatles, among others.

In 1967, for the first time, albums began to outsell singles. 61 LPs (long playing records) accounted for over $1 million in sales. By 1968, 75 LPs went over $1 million in sales. Albums were now viewed as artistic statements.




And of course, there were covers that had to be pulled and/or redesigned due to their controversial matter (Hey, this is rock and roll, isn't it?).

The Beatles' original cover of "Yesterday And Today" (1966) featured the group in butcher smocks or jackets, with strips of raw meat and dolls' heads and bodies strewn between and around them. Was this supposed to symbolize something? I don't know. Perhaps the group was just being anti-establishment. Perhaps not.

But nobody got it (maybe the cover designer and group did); DJs and record promoters began complaining and the album was pulled temporarily (Some people were able to buy the original before this happened) and re-emerged with a new cover. This time the group posed in regular clothes, with an open truck; John's sitting on the trunk's top, George and Ringo are standing in back of it, and Paul's sitting or kneeling inside the trunk. That's it.

This controversy may have been only in the States.




Two years later (1968), John Lennon and Yoko Ono created an even bigger flap by their album cover. Why?

"Unfinished Music: Two Virgins" featured the duo stark naked. Totally. Full frontal nudity on the cover, full butt nudity on the back. Never before in the annals of rock and roll had so much been revealed to so many. Some stores wouldn't carry this album; some places did, but it was wrapped in brown paper (and I don't know if this was just in the States or elsewhere as well).


"Electric Ladyland" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1968) also featured nudity.

On the original cover, there were various naked ladies strewn about against a black background. (I understand there was a mixup concerning the artwork for this album.

I honestly don't know if the "nudie girls" theme was the intended cover.)



Other notable album covers were:

"The Who Sell Out" and "Tommy"-The Who, "People", "Color Me Barbra", My Name Is Barbra", My Name Is Barbra, Two", and "A Happening In Central Park"-Barbra Streisand, "Cheap Thrills"-Big Brother and The Holding Company, "Gettin' Ready", "The Temptations Sing Smokey", and "I Wish It Would Rain"-The Temptations, "Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger", "Bo Diddley Is A Lumberjack" and "Surfin' With Bo Diddley", "Bringing It All Back Home"-Bob Dylan, "Whipped Cream and Other Delights"-Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass.

"Supremes A Go-Go", "I Hear A Symphony", and "Diana Ross and The Supremes' Greatest Hits", "West Side Story" soundtrack, "The First Family"-Vaughn Meader, "Boots", "Sugar", "How Does That Grab You?", and "Nancy In London"-Nancy Sinatra, "Blooming Hits"-Paul Mauriat, "Time/Peace-Greatest Hits"-The Rascals, "Keep On Pushing"-The Impressions, "King and Queen"-Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, "Switched-On Bach"-Walter Carlos and Benjamin Workman, "The Ice Man Cometh" and "Ice On Ice"-Jerry Butler, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf"-Jimmy Smith, "Going To A Go-Go"-The Miracles, "Ole' " and "Heavenly"-Johnny Mathis.

Most of Frank Sinatra' s 1950s and '60s album covers, such as "In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning", My Son, The Folksinger, "My Son, The Celebrity", and "My Son, The Nut"-Allan Sherman, "Led Zeppelin 1", "Music From Big Pink"-The Band, "Beggars Banquet", "Let It Bleed","Aftermath", "December's Children (And Everybody's)", and "Their Satanic Majesties Request"-The Rolling Stones, "Live At The Apollo"-James Brown, "From Elvis In Memphis", and "Surfin' Safari".

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