Yesterday was a whirlwind of record stores, donuts, theory discussion, fine Bloody Marys and finding some real gems among the lazily-produced xeroxed record covers. Oh – and being woken up at 5 in morning by a co-oper telling me, "the squatter guy," that she's going to begin work on painting her room that I have been sleeping in. Ugh.
Let's talk about record stores first. I realized yesterday I haven't written much about record shops as of late. I believe that it helps to go into record shops with the intent to write about it later in mind, because it keeps my eyes and ears open to anything out of the ordinary. Photographing record covers for hours takes endurance, (quite like the physical stamina needed to beat the heat here) and as I stated the other day, I feel at this point that I'm photographing the same jackets over and over. Sometimes this literally happens, and that occurrence has its intellectual merit because I can now chart geographically where I see the same record.
But this apathy on my part is cause for concern since record stores are the spaces where locals get to represent themselves in an artistic fashion, and impressions of a record store can give insight into the city flavor and sounds as well as the region. Sound on Sound Records had so many CD cases, 12" records and 7" that my camera died before I could document them all. The 12" records were especially striking, so check them out.
End of an Ear's employees sent me straight to the experimental section where I found a few items of note before finding the gems I mentioned, like a foam collaged cover, a letter-pressed jacket from 1985 (which is quite an early example) and another Caroliner album. I'll talk later about this enigmatic San Francisco psychedelic band. One of the older record clerks told me that homemade covers are usually the artistic products of friends of the band who work with layout equipment and design technology. This is not the first time that I've heard of bands finding people in their social networks with special access to production tools not otherwise available.
I also found an incredible 24 hour donut shop near campus. The need to find air-conditioning coupled with the desire to sit down with my book leaves me with no will power when I walk by. Oh dear.
Later last night, I met for Bloody Marys (which are on par with Palmer's!) with David Uskovich, a Ph.D candidate at UT Austin working on his oral history of 80s college radio stations dissertation, and another of his former classmates, Elizabeth, who was involved in the RTF program (Radio Television Film) at UT Austin. We had some very interesting conversation about some of the formal theories behind DIY music, tools of production, and homemade records, of course. One thing that stands out in my mind was the explanation that Third Wave Feminism has influenced the resurgence of craft in homemade record covers. David, a product of the L.A. hardcore scene, explained that back in the early 80s, simply getting your album out was a feat in and of itself. It really didn't matter what level of craft was involved, but as Third Wave Feminists realized that those traditional crafts such as knitting and sewing that had oppressed women in the past were okay to reclaim with the understanding that they had a choice to partake in them, the effort and attention put into record covers increased substantially.
As I review the tapes of the conversation, I'll throw in more insight, but for now, I have to get on with record hunting!
cheers,
James
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Getting a record jacket out in the 80s WAS a feat! Until the advent of the Mac and PostScript and the software to independently create color separations and process images, the designer had little choice but to work with printers and color houses. Cost economies are such that a run of 500 was more expensive than several thousand (per unit). Most musicians were interested in radio play and selling as many records as possible. This, of course, meant having a label and hopefully along with it a distribution deal and some dough to cover production. Right.
No matter how wild or radical the cover art, or its relevance to the music, to be successful you had to have some volume of distribution.
At the front end one had to know the tools of the design trade. In the early 80s that was still an X-acto, drawing board, wax, presstype (unless you could afford real typesetting), burnished-down specialty halftone screens for fades or gradients (that never stayed stuck without bubbles-arghh!), and knowledge of what to do with photographs and how to assemble mechanical art.
One's professional pride was on the line to produce great ideas with a high level of skill with the tools, methods and application of the contemporary attitude to give it credibility. This meant, then, as now, the designers were often part of the scene, not just hired wrists to produce art.
Nowadays, like third wave feminism means women can once again take up sewing having liberated it from its historical oppression, the designer can claim the old tools and production methods. The arrival of PostScript meant that any designer now owned the means to production and thus control over content and process. Some artists are rejecting the tech in favor of creating a different, vernacular look. One has a choice today that extends ones creative range.
The 'net has further eroded control by enabling anyone to distribute their work, evading and changing the old methods that relied on scale, and in general, The Establishment.
There has always been an underground scene that lives at the margins. But, like everything else, it has become a style itself. So does this mean there is a question as to what is authentic? Does it matter?
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