Newly discovered ads featuring Zappa and The Mothers of Invention from the LA Free Press. Some, if not all of these, were designed by Zappa in his spindly lettered, collage style. I’ve featured some of these before but they are generally better quality and some crazy person has gone through all the magazines at the link above, scanning the Zappa/Mothers appearances.
I’ll be at the Leicester Print Workshop this weekend, helping Kvist Studio launch her new Fantasy 45’s screen and riso prints as well as new stationary, Buchla and Galt Toys-inspired risos. These are now online in her shop.
There will be loads of other artists selling and exhibiting with an open evening on Friday to start the weekend. Details on the last image. Come down and say hello!
I’ve just finished Matthew Worley‘s excellent Zerox Machine book about UK fanzines from punk into the late 80’s. It’s opened up a hidden world and had me going down several rabbit holes online.
Above – Irish fanzine Blast #4 with a Savage Pencil cover, below the three covers of Juniper Beri Beri, a Scottish fanzine by Annabel, Peter McArthur, Jill Bryson and Stephen from The Pastels.
Hand-painted cover of Jungleland #9 – produced by Mike Scott of the Waterboys
A collage page from Adventures In Reality – issue G by Alan Rider
An Ian Wright illustration for 80s magazine The Catalogue
Communication Arts, 1966
I think this is the back cover of Morals ’68
A book of experimental music scores, essays and notations – view it on the Internet Archive
Print magazine, US, 1961
Robert Lockhart has nearly a hundred Discogs entries for his design work and could turn his hand to many different styles. Above is his interior gatefold for Gene Harris of the Three Sounds LP from 1971 which displays a fine grasp of the airbrush as well as collage. Below, his Bloodrock sleeve mixes S. Clay Wilson with Milton Glaser and comes up with something in the middle.
Above’s Bob Seger LP back cover displays more affection for the Milton Glaser style that was so popular back in the early 70s and below Lockhart whips up a fine collage for the front and back of Quintet’s ‘Future Tense’ LP, then channeling Michael English/Richard Hamilton for the cover of Steely Dan’s ‘Can’t Buy A Thrill’.
I’ve shown this before; Ravi Shankar goes psychedelic (for the cover at least) and below that an oddity of the Pablo Light Show providing visuals for a ‘Heavy Organ’ recital of Bach in San Francisco with cover illustrations very reminiscent of Victor Moscoso.
Whilst looking for Gene Harris records I came upon this series of Blue Note sleeves by designer, Bob Cato. I’d seen a few of these over the years but didn’t realise how many of them there were. Cato was an art director, designer, painter and photographer for many major US labels who designed over 550 sleeves, with many of them becoming classics. These torn collage close-ups of halftone prints are more punk than jazz but originated in the mid seventies, the oversaturated colours bring to mind Pop Art rather than the classic Reid Miles era of the label.
I was in TenPinRecords in Purley the other day and the owner, Lisa, had this beautiful 13th Floor Elevators 7″ on the counter which I had to take a photo of. It’s a bootleg from 1978 of ‘You Really Got Me’ and don’t all jump at once, that £1.50 price sticker was the original, it’s nearer £50 these days. In a bid to find out more about it, including the cover artist (Michael Beal) I went down the Discogs rabbit hole and found a few more nice 13th Floor sleeve designs, not least this great 7″ picture sleeve for ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ (front and back shown below).
On the reissue front there’s this book cover from the Sign of the 3 Eyed Men compilation, not sure the designer here
1968 poster for the Robert Markham aka Kingsley Amis’ novel ‘Colonel Sun’
Worlds Fair for Youth poster, 1969, art by Kim Whitesides
Poster for Raymond Bertrand‘s Studio 69 book – image also used on the cover of Suck magazine issue #1.
LSD poster, 1969, artist unknown – originally from Acid covers
Nam June Paik exhibition poster, 1965
Martin Sharp – Art For Mart’s Sake gallery show invite, 1966 (upscaled)
The Velvet Underground at the Retinal Circus poster, 1968.
WIth Dust and Grooves ramping up the pressure over the next 5 weeks when Vol.2 and the Portables books are released, today sees the launch of their online newsletter You Dig? A guest-curated monthly round up of all things vinyl associated with the people connected with the book (and believe me, there are a LOT in the new volume) It sports a cover collage by Morgan Jesse Lappin of Brooklyn Collage Collective (spot my cameo) and curation by Rich Headland of Record Shop Stories fame. You can read the first issue and subscribe here and pre-order both new books plus a refreshed vol.1 if you missed it a decade ago here.
Continuing the D&G love, I was the subject of their From Me To You feature recently where they looked by over my original interview on the site a decade ago and cherry-picked some vinyl highlights. You can read it here, with cover collage again from Morgan Jesse Lappin and if you want the full deep dive interview (probably the best one done yet) including an exclusive influences mix then you can read that here.
I found a copy of this at the local carboot at the weekend (with Martin Sharp cover illustration) and had been collecting up other psychedelic book covers around the web, coincidentally most with a Tim Leary connection.
I’ll chuck in this one as it’s in the style of too although not from the 60s or 70s.
Just announced by Castles In Space – Jo Johnson – Let Go Your Fear – a beautiful album of mesmerising minimalist modular in an equally striking sleeve. When paired with the vinyl it just ticks all the boxes for me. I know some people have a problem with coloured/splatter/whatever vinyl but when the disc fits the artwork it creates a unison unlike any other, something we always try to do with the releases I work on for De:tuned, especially as the process is always random for each disc.
Jo was part of 90s band Huggy Bear and has been ploughing the electronic minimalism furrow for the last decade. During the long, 20 minute final track ‘Unfolding and folding’ there are points where the music seems to stumble, different tangents are tried in real time and the flow is temporarily lost. This is something you rarely hear on studio albums, these ‘mistakes’ would be edited out but Jo states that she wanted to ‘drop the perfection’ and left them in. It’s released August 9th and there’s loads of music to discover on her Bandcamp page if you enjoy this.
Another great example is the recently released Nick Taylor-designed Lone Bison 12″.
It’s fair to say that Peter Max put his mark all over popular commerce and culture in the 70s. One of the few commercial artists to fully embrace merchandising and recognise that he had a valueable brand, he was arguably better at it than Warhol and had ranges of stationary, puzzles, book, posters and clothing for sale all with his name emblazoned on them at one point. Here’s a selection of stuff I dug up on the web including magazine covers, cookery books, puzzles and a poster for Mary Quant.
(above) Acid Mothers Temple poster for their Holy Black Mountains Detour tour (below) A tribute to Skip Spence poster by Fez Moreno both courtesy of Neil Rice.
Mike McInnerney prelim poster for the Hoppy documentary screening at the Tabernacle recently (colour to be added)
Holy Man Jam Seven Day Venue original handbill by The Family Dog, 1969 – unsure the artist here.
February – March, 1967 at Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, New York – restored from a faded image found on the web, possibly from the Sterling Morrison collection (see Velvet Underground mentioned at the bottom)
Two Exorcism of the Pentagon Anti-Vietnam posters, 1967 – pink mandala designed by Peter Legeria, black and white by Martin Carey – more information on the event here
I spoke to Rich Headland from Record Shop Stories about design, digging and a few favourite spots both in London and elsewhere.
Give his Substack a follow to view profiles of record shops around the UK and occasional interviews, I’ve already visited several shops after seeing his detailed profiles.
Sculpture – Max Ax (Official Audio) from Sculpture on Vimeo.
Dan and Reuben from Sculpture have announced a new album for release on August 2nd. The 11 track LP appears on 2 x 10″ zoetrope discs (below) and digital via Psyché Tropes and LTR Records.
You can listen to the track ‘Max Ax’ which gives the album its title above and order direct from the labels soon.
Numerous original acid or hippy badges found around the web, just because…
And finally, something I actually own and scored a few weeks back from a random trawl of eBay – an original Brainstorm Comix badge by Bryan Talbot. Brainstorm was one of the first British underground comics in the 1970s. Talbot’s Luther Arkwright started there and, although the comic was short-lived, it set him up as an artist of some considerable skill which led to him eventually drawing several books of Nemesis the Warlock for 2000AD.
There’s not too much info out there about David Schiller, he was American and produced these posters in the late 60s for Sparta Graphics. The company was born from the successful dance concert series that Dave promoted in San Jose in 1966. Fellow student Jim Michaelson submitted the winning poster in Dave’s poster competition and, in the years that followed from 1966-1968, they published 16 posters. Working with San Francisco promoters Bill Graham and Sid Bernstein they created concert posters for The Byrds, The Bee Gees, Buffalo Springfield and Jefferson Airplane among others. Some were printed with metallic inks and some with vivid fluorescent day-glo inks.
Michaelson obviously had a thing for crazy flying contraptions and the poster above was actually painted on wood and photographed with real flowers, it was one of Bill Graham’s favourite posters. It’s not clear whether this influenced Ron Cobb‘s illustration for the cover of the Jefferson Airplane’s ‘After Bathing At Baxter’s’ LP which was released late 1967 but Michaelson’s first gig poster for the band was made in 1966 (see below).
Michaelson passed away in 2019 but his son, Rob, maintains a website in his memory with many other great examples of his work, including posters for Disney https://jameslmichaelson.wixsite.com/artwork/the-60s
The posters below are from some of the gigs David put on and, I presume, by the same graphic team.
He also had a fine line in posters for cities and states – there are at least two variants of the New York poster in different colourways and with different mastheads. I’ve also seen these posters printed on linen.
Michaelson also did at least two calendars, variants of the same images for 1968 and 1969.
As it says above – Wow and Flutter in Hastings will have the 20 unique LPs for sale that we displayed during our live instore last month. As you can see in the video at the top, each one has a hand-assembled, screenprinted sleeve on a different type of holographic card in a variety of printings (black/white ink and postive/negative image inversions). These were all test ideas for the second print run of the LP and were passed over in favour of the prism effect card we eventually used.
Castles in Space had 20 extra sleeveless copies of the LP left over from the second batch (silver and white swirl vinyl) and so we married them up for this unique final run. Wow and Flutter are the only people selling these anywhere in the world, they will be a highly affordable £25 each and it’s first come, first served plus they’ll let you pick your favourite sleeve from the bunch – a Castle’s in Space completist’s nightmare but there you go.
Here’s a quick blast of a bit of our instore performance which will possibly wind up on the next album in some form or other. Video by Tim Scullion from W&F – also if you’ve not heard the podcast Tim does with Paul Field under the name We Buy Records then check that out too.
I’m constantly saving stuff I like the look of from the web, sometimes I need to follow up on an image I come across, other times it’s inspirational or a better quality version of something I’ve seen before. All these were cluttering up the desktop with nowhere to go and, as I treat this blog as a form of scrapbook, consider me adding these to a page. Above, the poster and some screen shots from Be The Fool, a new documentary about two members of Dutch design group, The Fool. This is currently only doing the film festival circuit but hopefully will show up on streaming at some point. Below, a lesser seen poster by Hapshash & The Coloured Coat for an Italian festival in 1968, this recently came up for auction and went for big money.
The backing card for a pair of op-art tights called Kinkies from the 1960s. Available here from the excellent Division Leap seller on eBay.
From the same seller, a flyer for a 1980s San Francisco punk event, Z-RO G.
An alternate front and back cover for comic book Spectregraph by Tradd Moore
Windy & Carl‘s Consciousness LP sleeve, recently reissued I think.
Which my partner has just indignantly pointed out is a huge rip-off of this Archie Shepp album cover
The Who Sell Out promo poster by Adrian George, printed by Osiris Visions in 1967, another one that recently came up for auction and sells for a fair bit. These came with initial copies of the album and were reproduced a few years back for the reissue.
This last one was part of a magazine article apparently