October 10, 2004
The Inner Sleeve.
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TO LOOK AT THESE SLEEVES IN GREATER DETAIL WINDOWS USERS: RIGHT CLICK AND OPEN IN NEW WINDOW. MAC: USERS CONTROL CLICK OPEN IN NEW WINDOW. THIS PAGE MAY LOAD SLOWLY.
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(splutters) What is this crap? Inner sleeves advertising other records. I've met people who actually collect them, record shop owners who ask me if I'm happy for them to keep the original lining. Yeah of course mate. Whatever turns you on. But I suppose they're the mementos of a forgotten time, when the music business wasn't so hopelessly cynical, or perhaps when it was more cynical. Why wouldn't this be possible nowadays? Perhaps now each pop moment is swollen in it's own watertight concept. Companies have worked out that for the magic to really work, for the punter to feel like the band are whispering sweet nothings into their ears alone (Isn't that what The Beatles pioneered, a sense of total intimacy with the group?) then the illusion mustn't be so obviously ruptured. Today's covers are so fucking 'orrible that to tile them up like "thumbs" would be repulsive rather than seductive anyway.
Here's my obvious favourite. A whole sleeve devoted to Andy Williams inside a Mahavishnu Orchestra LP! How did the record company work out that selling William's LPs to heavy fusion heads was a cracking idea. Yet that's one of the things that these inner sleeves illustrate so clearly, how much smaller the market was, how it was arranged in an utterly different manner. UA is one of the best examples: Shirley Bassey on the bumper, and Neu! under the hood.
Nowadays the whole panoply is organised in a much more tribal fashion, so even if Sony do own Underground Resistance, the smaller cells remain autonymous. In the old days the vertical knit was much tighter, a colleague gave the example of Enoch Light (of "Persuasive Percussion" fame). The easy listening pioneer turned his hand to producing underground psychedelia on his Project 3 label. Bands like The Free Design got airy string sections. If there's one reason why underground music is less sexier than it's ever been this might be it. It's been allowed to drift away from the some of imperative, glamourous values of the market which the major labels insist upon.
Look at the Moondog LP nestled in amongst the Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan sleeves on this CBS liner sleeve! Oh and there's the Trees cover and Laura Nyro's "New York Tenderberry." That's quite a sewage flowing out of the gutter. But to foreground another condition of the "scene" take a look at this sleeve by Atlantic:
Wilson Pickett, Roland Kirk, Ornette Coleman, Dusty Springfield and Led Zepellin all sharing the same billboard.
Some wiseguys at CBS clearly thought that the Inner Sleeve was the future in breaking their artists into new markets. These three examples of the "Inner Sleeve" magazine taken from Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew" and a Edgar Varese LP even have an editor in the form of one Paul Merry! It's all so guileless. Nowadays we have music journalism which is insiduous "advertorial" Surprisingly, the blue "Inner Sleeve" throws up quite an interesting column in the form of a piece on "Black Composers Series on Columbia Records." Presumably no magazine would write about it so.....
The major labels had a bit of fun with the form from the mid fifties up until the dawn of the seventies, I guess those Island records sleeves with pictures of Robert Palmer sleeves beside ones by LKJ, John Martyn and the B52s are an anachronism, as are the appallingly tacky Rams Horn electro reissues with their voluminous lists of disco tracks available on the same imprint on the back cover.
It's quite charming to see how elephantine the recording industry was in adapting to the times. All the following records have their idiosyncracies, and this is another area which is highlighted by these Inner Sleeves. The following are amongst the oldest in my collection. The first is from Walt Dickerson and Sun Ra's "A Patch of Blue" LP, the latter the inner sleeve to Julie London's "Julie is her name" and so actually pretty representative of those eras.
But look at this one from the inner sleeve of John Coltrane's "Coltrane"!!! Er hello! The Black and White Minstrel show! The Band of HM Royal Marines "Beating Retreat and Tattoo"! Trane must have dropped like an atom bomb into this environment.
Here's a few more major label efforts. The green Warners one is a complete time capsule.
And the smaller imprints got in on the act too, and funnily enough with greater efficacy. I can quite believe that people purchasing records by Nonesuch, Motown, Elektra, Impulse and Vanguard would be interested in getting hold of other records on those labels, be curious to scope out what else was on offer.
Blah blah blah. Bor-ring. Even worse, deliberately so.
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I quite specifically wanted to round off this auspicious post with a few ruminations about the state of blogs, the state of the network if you like. It's with great sadness that I reflect that that small part of my brain where I'd go looking for the blogging thrill, the part of my cortex which glows in excitement when I ponder the fun I'm going to have writing here, feels like a spent ember. If this particular neck of the woods had a demi-semi-historic moment it lay between the dominance of NYPLM and the ascendancy of the mp3 blogs, pretty much coinciding with the rise of blissblog.
I haven't really remarked on the passing of heronbone, in part because I thought Luke was probably driven away by bloggers praising him to the skies, treating him like a poster boy (even going as far as posting pictures of him!!!!!), that and people biting his style when he's just a punk kid like you and me. I did a fair amount of that myself, praising the dude, but I do believe with a certain amount of tongue in my cheek, and even though I held his writing in as high esteem as anyone else did.
I miss engaging with Luke, likewise I miss engaging with Mark K-Punk who now has such a strong coterie of theorists around him that he doesn't have to muck in and talk music in order to join the party. Sad to report but at the moment I feel like I've had my moment, that at least right now it all seems pretty wearisome. I'm not asking for entreaties to continue (please please no) I'll probably just keep on posting boring shit without much theoretical backbone just for the hell of it. You wonder why bands split up, why scenes crumble, then you find out for yourself.
Posted by Woebot at October 10, 2004 09:13 PM