Review: 'Rock Covers'

I used to keep a copy of Michael Ochs’s 1000 Record Covers on my desk. It was a handy reference for cool album art and fit perfectly next to my little dictionary and thesaurus. One thing the 5.5-inch x 7.5-inch book did not do was provide an accurate representation of the scale and detail of those covers. That kind of thing may have cut the mustard during the CD age when we forgot what we were missing, but vinyl has now made a resounding comeback (do I need to refer you to the wild hype surrounding the release of the Beatles in Mono vinyl box a few months ago?). That means the 1-foot-square sleeve has too. For a better idea of how it feels to actually hold a copy of Here's Little Richard or Pet Sounds or Atom Heart Mother or Marquee Moon or Goo or The White Stripes in your hand, dig Busch, Kirby, and Wiedemann's Rock Covers. Like 1000 Record Covers, it is published by Taschen, but it probably won't fit on your desk. Just a half-inch shorter on both sides than your average LP jacket, Rock Covers is surely intended to provide an authentic experience even though every one of its artworks is not presented at full-page size. The editors also fill in a lot of Ochs's blind spots, giving much more space to punk, college, and alternative albums than Ochs did. Not only do we get some classic Vaughan Oliver sleeves but we get a short interview with the man himself, as well as others such as Henry Diltz and Black Crowe Chris Robinson.

That this is a great art book is a given since it contains so much great art. It does lose a few points for authenticity when compared to Ochs's book because everything in it is so straight-out-of-shrink-wrap clean. Ochs did not whitewash what goes down in a real record collection. You could tell his records were used, abused, bruised, deeply loved, and regularly rotated. I also like how he'd juxtapose sleeves that shared some sort of aesthetic trait. Busch, Kirby, and Wiedemann go for straight alphabetical order. Still, if it's between tiny, damaged images and great, big, unblemished ones, I admit size matters. Rock Covers comes out on top.

Review: ‘33 1/3: Marquee Moon'

The late-‘70s punk movement gestated for a long time— some may say it began way back in 1963 when The Stones’ recorded Lennon and McCartney’s “I Wanna Be Your Man” as a hyperkinetic rave barely crossing the 90-second mark. Punk slipped through some unexpected variations on its way to becoming one of Rock’s most dogmatic splinters in 1977, when even the wrinkliest journalists knew the formula: two chords, two minutes, some spiky-haired scuzzo from London or NYC screeching about anarchy. Television did not fit that bill at all, yet they sat among the handful of bands that could really be credited with launching punk. They broke in CBGB for Patti Smith, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, and all the other bands that would establish the former home of country, blue grass, and blues as ground zero for New York Punk. Tom Verlaine’s snotty yowl wasn’t radically different from Johnny Rotten’s or Stiv Bators’s, but neither The Sex Pistols nor The Dead Boys would have ever played a ten-minute anthem streaked with ecstatic runs of psychedelic guitar, nor would they have composed lyrics as evocative and poetic as Verlaine’s.

Television could be transcendent on stage, but harnessing that fluid magic on vinyl was tricky. After a false start recording demos with Brian Eno, who one might think would be a perfect match with Television’s atmospheric sensibility, they tried again with Andy Johns, best known for his work with Led Zeppelin and The Stones. The collaboration was surprisingly right (at least once Johns stopped miking Billy Ficca’s drumkit to sound like John Bonham's). Ambitious and beautiful, Marquee Moon is a rare jewel. Television crumbled nearly as soon as their debut was released, managing one other record, the so-so Adventure, before going on hiatus for nearly 15 years.

Bryan Waterman accomplishes quite a lot in chronicling Television’s bumpy path toward making Marquee Moon in his new book for the “33 1/3” series. His book serves as a well-researched biography of the band’s earliest days, which means it tells the portion of Television’s story that will most interest fans. Waterman maintains focus on the music, so anyone looking for anecdotes about Richard Lloyd’s days as a prostitute or other tabloid tales should stick with their copies of Please Kill Me. Yet we still get a rich portrait of the band because so much of their history is relevant to how Marquee Moon was created: the friendship between Verlaine and bassist Richard Hell and their bitter break, Verlaine’s relationship with Patti Smith, new bassist Fred Smith’s defecting from Blondie, the history of CBGB and the New York punk and poetry scenes. Waterman details the album’s recording before providing individual analyses of its tracks, doing his best in the face of Verlaine’s tendency toward the cryptic. Compact yet comprehensive, Bryan Waterman’s Marquee Moon crams a lot of interesting information and insights onto its 211 tiny pages.

November 17, 2009: What’s My Name? : 20 Great Songs in which the Artists Name-Check Themselves

Since its birth, Rock & Roll has always been about the big boast. “Ooooh, my car is so fast, my dick is so big, my dance moves are so slick, my sounds are so righteous…” and so on and so on. A few artists have actually had the audacity to give themselves props by name—sometimes specifically, sometimes cagily. I can’t explain why, but I love it when singers do this. It gives me the same half-mast thrill as when a film’s title is mentioned in the movie or when a singer mentions an album title in a song that isn’t the title track of the album. Maybe it’s the flash of familiarity that makes these things fun: “Hey… I know who that ‘Bo Diddley’ guy you’re singing about is! It’s you!” So here are 20 little thrills in which the artists name-check themselves in one way or another.

1. “Bo Diddley by Bo Diddley (1955)

When it comes to artists who like to sing about themselves, Bo Diddley is the king. He wrote and sang songs with titles such as “Bo Diddley”, “Hey! Bo Diddley”, “Bo Diddley is a Lover”, “Bo Diddley is an Outlaw”, “Bo Diddley is Loose”, “Bo Diddley is Crazy”, “Bo Diddley Put the Rock in Rock and Roll”, “Bo Diddley Vamp”, “Bo Diddley’s Dog”, “Bo Meets the Monster”, and “Diddley Daddy”. And that’s a mere sampling. Bo Diddley was singing the praises of Bo Diddley as early as his very first single, “Bo Diddley”. Not only is the man’s yen for self-referencing on full display here, but so is the monumental “shave-and-a-haircut” beat he’d recycle as many times as he’d sing his own name.

2. “Pretty Thing” by The Pretty Things (1965)

When Bo Diddley wasn’t singing about Bo Diddley he was giving other artists opportunities to sing about themselves. The Pretty Things pulled the neat trick of naming themselves after an early hit by the Diddley Daddy, then covering that very song for their