Horrible 70s album titles like I've Got My Own Album To Do

(Billy Thorpe & the) Aztecs, "More Arse Than Class" (1974)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hpvJfQxkov8/Uj3AENQa-dI/AAAAAAAAB5c/JymEXYc5sp0/s1600/Thorpie+MATC.jpg

... got Poxy Fuled when I tried to post the image I originally wanted to for this album

if poco had released an album with really bad cover art called "one size fits all" would it be on this thread? what about a bread record called "here come the warm jets" or a 10cc record called "never mind the bollocks"?

is it more or less implied that these album covers don't contain discs with "serious" music? or really what i mean is, we kind of pretend that it's lame, indulgent, coked out buffoonery for the sake of making the joke work, this kind of faux-bro rockist lens that we collectively pretend to wear? is that what makes them funny? because they are really funny, the good ones anyway (by which i may also mean bad, i'm not sure).

i kind of feel like this thread might be the equivalent of laughing disparagingly at "the room" and then everybody goes back to watching "dog star man" and "battleship potemkin" in reverent silence.

i love this thread.

https://img.discogs.com/aUoe3IGSOE1czhNIEUnImgyijBk=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-3007268-1413049209-1290.jpeg.jpg

Naw, I've always found all these aspects interesting! It's sort of like recognizing that "The Beatles" is kind of a godawful band name that would be cited as an example of 60s square doofery if it was the name behind some sub-tier knockoff British Invasion band that peaked at #18 with a passable but uninspired song instructing you on how to dance The Beatle.

It's an overall package - title, art, band's image generally, and the music on the disc of course. A lot of times, these titles are actively trying to shape the artist's image as someone who doesn't make "serious" music, and the album's image as a collection of some songs they thought you might enjoy, nothing more. I mean, the Ronnie Woods one for which the thread is named basically comes out and says "I guess I have to make one of these things."

There's also a range of reactions here I think - like, I dig that Wood record cause I just like the sound and the playing and a couple of the songs have reasonable hooks. So it's more of an affectionate eye-roll at the dopey title - to an extent, I'm in on precisely the joke Wood is trying to make, and to an extent I'm also kinda laughing at him and at myself for thinking this was a reasonable thing to spend one's time doing. But some of the grosser ones, with the sex jokes and the really hacky puns and the really lazy/ugly/sexist/whatever cover art, I'm pretty much just laughing at the artist and the label derisively, in a way that maybe risks me ending up snobbishly missing out on some great music that I would perhaps like. I feel pretty confident that Jo Jo Gunne have nothing to offer me though, they seem like real shitheads.

A perennial in 'worst covers ever' lists...

http://dangerousminds.net/content/uploads/images/made/content/uploads/images/worst-album-covers-svetlana_465_465_int.jpg

Svetlana Gruebanotgonnaworkhereanymore: My Lips Are For Blowing

oof

i laugh lovingly at the room fwiw

http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/my_lips_are_for_blowing

"For the record (pun intended), there is no such album. Nor is Svetlana Gruebbersolvik a real person.

The mock cover was created and posted back in September 2010 by "Estancia de la Ding Dong" who runs the Twisted Vintage blog. You can find a more specific confession that the cover is fake posted here on Twisted Vintage."

i have to wonder what else, if anything, "Estancia de la Ding Dong" does to pass the time

I feel pretty confident that Jo Jo Gunne have nothing to offer me though, they seem like real shitheads.

Doctor, you never encountered "Run Run Run" in your thread of listening to classic rock for the first time? (Although I don't know if it still gets played on classic rock radio, maybe it's forgotten.) It's not a bad little slide-guitar rocker, and it's less than three minutes long so it won't take up too much of your time.

No! But if fact checking cuz deems it fit for the list I would consider it! Their mean-spirited and misogynistic album art will be something of a lead weight around the song's neck, though.

That Jo Jo Gunne song is pretty fun

Jack Douglas the famous 70s producer did a great long interview on our local sports talk station & his first job as "assistant engineer" was changing Leslie West's puke bucket as he detoxed off smack. He would sit in chair, shred a hot solo, then puke, repeat

what station was that!

LOL @ Galapagos Duck WTF

i like how the literalized album cover is a running theme here. pairing a visual pun with a bad album title really gives it that cheap, lazy quality.

Jo Jo Gunne would have a better rep if they called it quits after their first album, which had good music and inoffensive cover art. Instead they went on to make forgettable music with really bad album covers. I just learned that Jumpin' the Gunne, the one with an obese naked woman jumping over the band lying in bed attempting to reach a baby pig, has an inner gatefold with, as wiki puts it, 'the same woman with the album credits written on her in black marker as she cavorts with a piglet'.

Like the band's name, i've always thought that Rubber Soul is a horrible pun that gets a pass because it's attached to great music

i laugh lovingly at the room fwiw

These albums titles are nothing like the Room, which was presented as painfully serious but was really unintentionally silly

If "The Room" had been titled "OH HAI THERE!" and turned out to be awesome, then it would be like these records.

"I've Got My Own Movie To Do" surely.

come on, if you think that none of these bands wanted to be perceived as artists who made good music, that's just goofy. i agree with dr. casino's post that a lot of these titles / covers were meant to convey "hey, this isn't serious music! any old joe can get down and boogie with us." but surely part of the fun is that a lot of these titles were intended precisely to be "artistic statements," and the degree to which they fall short is in large part a gauge of how funny and silly they seem now. clapton's "there's one in every crowd" comes to mind. and like, if you were to ask lowell george (which you can't) about "thanks i'll eat it here," i seriously doubt he'd say "yeah, that was some dumb shit i did in the '70s because music is about having fun, not about art."

also, wiki description of cover art:

The album was released just before the death of Lowell George in 1979 and has cover art by Neon Park (a feature of almost all Little Feat albums) containing several pop-/cult references including a picnic scene, mirroring Édouard Manet's "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe", which shows Bob Dylan, Fidel Castro and Marlene Dietrich as Der Blaue Engel with an open copy of Howl beside them.

i mean, references to manet, dylan, castro, and fucking josef von sternberg don't exactly scream "i have no pretentions! this is just good time music you guys"

I've Got My Own Avant-Garde Manifesto to Pen

It's true that ''we're just a bunch of happy rocking layabouts'' isn't the ONLY thing these covers/titles convey. But still, let's not go too far ascribing sophistication to them - where literary/artistic references appear I think they're mostly on the order of high-school or freshman-year references picked up here not by drunken good ole boys but by stoned guitar nerds. They're closer to ''hey woah this concept/painting/book is cool, man'' than ''I've painstakingly constructed a concept album around this.'' Not that I want to hear the concept album - just sayiing that the deployment of Manet on a cover can be as tossed-off and dopey as the visual depiction of a limp pun.

Yeah I think if that Lowell George cover is saying anything, it's saying he knows about all that arty-political stuff but he's not joining that picnic.

dr. casino, i think you're more or less saying what i'm saying. i'm not ascribing sophistication to the lowell george record; i'm asserting that he used certain signifiers in an attempt to appear sophisticated. and yeah, it totally comes across as freshman-year malcolm X dorm room poster, but i don't think that diminishes the sincerity one bit. as i said, it's precisely the way in which those "deployments" (as you say) fall flat that make the cover an object of derision rather than something that might have held up a bit better.

and i think that, to the extent that "thanks" was a kind of "get back" record, it's not outrageous to assume that his "roots" (at least as he saw them; self-delusion may be a factor here) were just as much artsy lit and high-minded political engagement (however half-assed) as they were blues- and folk-inflected rock N roll. i really suspect that "thanks i'll eat it here" reads more like "sorry guys, i need to chill in the forest with bob dylan and allen ginsberg and get away from LA and all the coke and just be myself"

it kind of gets into a broader topic, that i don't really want to get super into, about intelligent musicians (john lennon is the case par excellence) who aren't educated but at some point in their careers feel the need to legitimize what they're doing by name dropping, espousing some sort of radical politics, but really missing the mark in embarrassing ways.

to paraphrase oscar wilde, "all bad poetry is sincere"

I agree that we're not disagreeing on most of that. I just still think it's a dumb, dopey, laugh-worthy cover and not really very interesting, but I'm not hating on Lowell George (or your appreciation for it for that matter).

from least acclaimed thread:

http://cdn.albumoftheyear.org/album/39626-heard-ya-missed-me-well-im-back.jpg

come to think of it kinda has to be somewhere upthread as well

that's
Sly & The Family Stone: Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back

oh, sly

http://covers.discorder.com/fullsize/front/0090431808924.jpg

oh joan

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, June 22, 2014 7:16 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

she blames quaaludes in recent rs interview

found this cuz of the blues rock tolerance thread

Mike Bloomfield - "Try It Before You Buy It"

https://resources.tidal.com/images/79f9ff15/4d08/4de5/ba87/c54a4c4550ad/1280x1280.jpg

here's another blues classic from 1979

http://www.audiophileusa.com/covers400/112974.jpg

contrasting soft sell vs. hard sell blues approaches

was thinking recently that Stephen Stills really blew it in terms of punning on his name -- best he did was a greatest hits called Still Stills

In The Stills of the Night, I'm Stills Here, etc

illegal stills was pretty good (as a title)

haha yeah i guess that one works
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ec/Illegalstillsss.jpg

Would have liked to see Nash Brownies

should have done a play on "Still Bill" by Bill Withers. maybe a picture of Stills sitting at a desk, frustrated, going through a pile of letters. Call the album "Stills' Bills"

or Stills Kills, with Steve aiming a rifle at the camera

A hits comp called "Gold in Them There Stills"

Stilling The Waters, with a shot of Stills in a rowboat or some shit.

Stills Got the Blues

Album of ELP covers: Stills...You Turn Me On

Stills: Crazy After All these Beers

i have nothing to add, but great work all around

Standing Stills

http://www.clashmusic.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_feature/public/legacy/files/Stills.jpg%3Fitok%3DUZGgCk7F

Gah, image didn't work.

http://www.clashmusic.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_feature/public/legacy/files/Stills.jpg?itok=UZGgCk7F

re Joan Baez - fake clouds backdrops are quite a sub-theme in this thread

every once in a while there is a current day album that fits this genre, but Beady Eye's "Different Gear, Still Speeding" is pretty exceptional, every element of this from the photo to the typography to the title to the the design could pass for something from 1974

http://www.allyngibson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Beady-Eye-Different-Gear-Still-Speeding.jpg