There’s a lot of seriousness in the art of jazz record covers. Some beautiful works, no doubt, but when weighed against rock or pop, I’d venture to say there aren’t as many humorous and funny album covers. That’s why, while leafing through a book collection of the best jazz record covers of the last 40…
Month: January 2014
Book Review: Rob Sheffield’s “Turn Around Bright Eyes”
In the early 1980’s a short-lived phenomenon burned strong across the country. It was called the lip-sync contest. Basically, it involved a person, or group of people, pretending to sing and play instruments along with a recording of a popular song. There would be organized contests of these performances, as people pretended to be rock…
“You Don’t Care”: Terry Callier’s Enigmatic Song About Apathy
It’s one of the strangest songs of the 70’s, but it’s no prog rock freakout, no barbed Frank Zappa commentary, no underground outsider art music. Rather, it’s a mellifluous tune, bathed in sweet harmonies, strings and horns a la Burt Bacharach. It’s the juxtaposition of the lyrics- a repetition of the phrase “you don’t care”-…
Incommunicado in Cedar Key
Jimmy Buffett’s 1980 song “Incommunicado” contains the line “Travis McGee’s still in Cedar Key / That’s what old John MacDonald said”. McGee was the main character in MacDonald’s series of Florida mystery/adventure books, published between 1964 and 1984. A sort of James Bond/Magnum P.I. type of character, McGee lived on a houseboat. Buffett, however, used…
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