I love that drawing. It's literally gut-wrenching, not only because of the Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter in the foreground but the coldness of the Sunday-drive-by scenario and sarcastic knife-twist of a caption.
Smegma lead vocalist Big Dirty was very specific about what he wanted for the cover. The way the dog looked, the model of the car and the Smegma lettering. He wanted a pastoral background that looked "as if it had been drawn by a children's book illustrator who had once been a hippy" It's great to illustrate for someone who knows just what it is that they want.
Smegma was one of the first "punk" bands I saw play live. They used tape loops, played guitars with the strings braided together, a Moog etc. to make this strange surf-jazz improv rock. I was too green to realize that they weren't really a punk outfit, that the punk scene was just a wave which they could catch and ride for awhile. They had actually been together since about 1971 doing various projects with the LA Free Music Society (LAFMS) Captain Beefheart's Magic Band (sans Don VanVleet) The Residents, Non, etc.
They used video in some of their shows. Sometimes multiple camera people would be taping the band and the crowd, with a cable feed to "the Smegma mobile unit" an old school bus parked outside the venue equiped with 3/4" editing system. There an onboard editor/director would do a live edit and feed it back into monitors in the club while communicating to the camera people via two-way headset.
Their house was interesting.....every surface was decorated and those decorations were decorated. Layer upon layer of adornment, each riffing on the previous layer. Not a bare spot for the eye to rest on. A cobwebbed old mobile made out of slices of wonder bread and velveeta hung in the kitchen above the cactus corpse garden. The slices of velveeta were covered with poetry and drawings done in blue marker. The living room was wallpapered with pages from porno and cooking magazines and festooned with thousands of feet of recording tape. Someone had rigged the wall clock to run backwards. Sitting on the sofa was a guarenteed case of the crabs.
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- tom moody 6-28-2001 12:03 pm
Smegma lead vocalist Big Dirty was very specific about what he wanted for the cover. The way the dog looked, the model of the car and the Smegma lettering. He wanted a pastoral background that looked "as if it had been drawn by a children's book illustrator who had once been a hippy" It's great to illustrate for someone who knows just what it is that they want.
Smegma was one of the first "punk" bands I saw play live. They used tape loops, played guitars with the strings braided together, a Moog etc. to make this strange surf-jazz improv rock. I was too green to realize that they weren't really a punk outfit, that the punk scene was just a wave which they could catch and ride for awhile. They had actually been together since about 1971 doing various projects with the LA Free Music Society (LAFMS) Captain Beefheart's Magic Band (sans Don VanVleet) The Residents, Non, etc.
They used video in some of their shows. Sometimes multiple camera people would be taping the band and the crowd, with a cable feed to "the Smegma mobile unit" an old school bus parked outside the venue equiped with 3/4" editing system. There an onboard editor/director would do a live edit and feed it back into monitors in the club while communicating to the camera people via two-way headset.
Their house was interesting.....every surface was decorated and those decorations were decorated. Layer upon layer of adornment, each riffing on the previous layer. Not a bare spot for the eye to rest on. A cobwebbed old mobile made out of slices of wonder bread and velveeta hung in the kitchen above the cactus corpse garden. The slices of velveeta were covered with poetry and drawings done in blue marker. The living room was wallpapered with pages from porno and cooking magazines and festooned with thousands of feet of recording tape. Someone had rigged the wall clock to run backwards. Sitting on the sofa was a guarenteed case of the crabs.
- steve 6-28-2001 8:49 pm [add a comment]