I will admit that this cover was a strategic choice, but it would not seem right NOT to include the very first appearance of the logo I chose to adorn my album cover in some way or another (though as you will see I broke this trend a few times years later). Here it is in as basic and unadorned a presentation as it will ever get (aside from what I did 10 years later on my 77th album: "Decade," in which my first album cover appears as a negative image, drawn in crayon again, of course). Nothing special, really, except trying to establish something as iconic as an 8th-grader could muster. Stylistically it is most similar to Chicago's monochromatic beige 4th album "Live at Carnegie Hall" - an album that left quite an impact at the time when I learned there was more to the band (jazz? long solos?) than the Cetera-sung power ballads then popular on the radio. In that case this was the 3rd incarnation of their "famous" logo, which I would learn decades later - and perhaps you are learning now - was meant to capture the look and feel of the ubiquitous Coke logo. Drawn in pencil and colored in crayon (from a cardboard cutout stencil I had made to keep the logo identical on subsequent album covers), it never got more basic than this. The music, too, was very basic (and poorly performed/recorded) with only drums and vocals. Ugh, I know. Hey, we all had to start somewhere. Although a year or two previously I had "composed" a piece on my uncle's piano in Waco, TX (which would later surface as "Tune No. 1"), it would be another year before I would be presented with a piano of my own. Thanks, mom and dad!
Sadly, this was NOT my first album. There was actually a previous one which for some reason I felt needed to be redone completely (what were the standards?!?!?) so I ended up RECORDING OVER IT! Prior to that I recorded three parodies in the vein of "Weird" Al Yankovic that I did myself or with my sisters: a song each by Michael Jackson, Van Halen, and... wait for it... Barry Manilow. I'll let you wonder what the songs were or how I parodied them. Oh well - such a loss to the music world. There was no cover, for that album, so no lost artwork.
1 comment:
My wife commented that this resembles the now-ubiquitous luxurious mustache seen everywhere (that, or perhaps mine), but I did not grow my present mustache until AFTER my last album, and strangely I never thought of depicting it that way. A future idea!
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