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Johnny C’s Great Sleeve Note Challenge

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I love LP sleeve notes, me. They hark back to a simpler, more innocent time before fancy artwork took over and when the record companies felt they had to sell us the music via a litany of painfully earnest (and often painfully untrue) facts and figures about the artist(s) in question. Looking back now, many sleeve notes read like something out of Dickens. Which is why I love them so much.

Here’s some sleeve notes with the relevant identifying words blacked out. All you have to do is tell me who the band or artist is. If you want to be a proper smart arse, you can also identify the LP as well.

This could well fall flat on its bum, but if there’s any interest, I’ll do some more. Can’t say fairer than that.

http://i627.photobucket.com/albums/tt351/mojoworking01/sleevenotes2_zps2w6h9fhy.jpg

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Comments

  7. I’m thinking that the blacked-out (sorry, redacted) word before ‘singer’ and ‘clubs’ is probably ‘folk’. So we’re looking for a pretty 20-year-old folk singer. Anne Briggs? Julie Felix? She was on TV with David Frost.

  8. Julie Felix is a great answer Mike. She did have her own TV series in the late 60s. In fact the Incredible String Band guested one week and parents all over the land watched open-mouthed.

    But it’s not the right one

  24. Oh Gawd, yet again I have to say that the size is way out of proportion to the result. *sighs*

    Obscure, poncey and takes up too much space. [insert obvious comment here]

  26. Some clues in mine: city, rented rooms, sultry girl. ‘Tarantula’ might give you a clue that maybe a member of the band knows his/her pop history.

    I know it’s obscure, sorry, but it was one of the few I had to hand.

  27. One more for your perusal. Never mind the be-rizla’d bollocks about the Third Ear Band above, that merry bunch of weirdos who never got much further than hiding on the Harvest inner sleeve in most people’s collections, here’s a mercifully small section of some Military Grade Class A bullshit adorning the back of an album that everybody surely must have at least heard of, even if only 3 per cent of everybody has actually bothered to sit down and hear it:

    View post on imgur.com

      • Correctamundo. As you can see from the camera-flash sheen, my copy has not spent a lot of time off the shelf. It sits pristine in its mintness, and seldom bothered by a stylus, between the beautifully textured sleeve of the debut from Ride and Rip, Rig & Panic’s even more rarely played “I Am Cold”.

    • Ah, yes. The US spelling of “colors” threw me for a while (even though it’s not a US artist), but now I see there are strong links to your previous effort. Same record label, too.

      That’s all I’m saying.

  38. I’ve got this one somewhere. Blues Helping by Love Sculpture? I thought this was fantastic when I heard it back in the 60’s, especially his version of I Believe to My Soul. When I bought it much later on CD it sounded very thin and generally weedy

  45. “The crowds have moved back off the stage of history; we are left with the solitary human, a single hair on the skin of the earth. ——————— speaks now for that single hair.”

    No cheating, now!

  46. From an internet:

    “Pete Hamill is Editor in Chief of the Daily News, a journalist, novelist, and author. He wrote the liner notes for Bob Dylan’s album “Blood On The Tracks”.

    ….

    The liner notes that Pete wrote for Blood On The Tracks, and for which
    he won a Grammy Award, are reprinted at:

    http://www.slopbucket.com/bob/tbob/bott.html (updated to new URL 30.03.2000 KEA)

    The ironic thing is of course that the notes were only on the first
    printing of the album sleeve, and had been removed by the time Pete
    won his award. They are still not printed on the CD insert, although
    I hope they’ll reappear if Sony do a remastered or gold version of
    BOTT. Clinton Heylin believes the notes were removed because they
    refer to the original “New York” versions of the songs later
    re-recorded in Minnesota. Personally, I can’t anything in them that
    is invalidated by the re-recording.

    Amusingly, the notes are reprinted unofficially on the CD insert
    for the new Blood On The Tapes bootleg.

    There is another (English) Peter Hamill who was the keyboard player
    with the Manchester prog-rock group Van Der Graaf Generator, and is
    now a record producer. Our Peter Hamill is not he.”

  47. Rummages through collection, yes mine has the original liner notes.

    Dylan’s vision is rich and loamy…to enter that envisioned world ,is like plunging deep into a mountain pool, where the rocks are clear and smooth at the bottom”

    No wonder Dylan nixed it – completely over baked . Poorly constructed – are the rocks at the bottom, it reads like they are curved at the bottom.And those commas reproduced verbatim and unnecessary.

  57. “This is an album of greasy love songs & cretin simplicity. We made it because we really like this kind of music (just a bunch of old men with rock & roll clothes on sitting around the studio, mumbling about the good old days). Ten years from now you’ll be sitting around with your friends someplace doing the same thing if there’s anything left to sit on.”

  59. As I sloughed off my vinyl several years ago, it’s difficult for me to join in with my merry pals on this epochal, iconic thread. But this one occurred to me:

    Autoclaving turns this line brown.

    From which album? There’ll be an elliptical follow-up clue if you’re all too sodding thick to get it. Which you will be. Sodding bunch of thickoes.

        • Hand with Hand.

          That’s an amazing coincidence Hubert. Thanks for that.

          I’ve never understood why that LP sells for so much. I listened to it yesterday and it’s as dreary as the cover photo. I can only assume it’s the (tenuous) Martin Carthy connection and the fact it’s an early and hard to find gap-filler for collectors of the Transatlantic label.

            • Yes, there’s lots of standard protest stuff on there about not hating people because of the colour of their skin and how WAR IS VERY BAD.

              A bit like the early Dylan albums in fact. Without the tunes.

                    • There’s a Bert Jansch connection too:

                      Owen Hand’s career in music was relatively brief — he was active as a performer for just over four years, and left behind only two complete albums, but through that small output and short career he became a much-loved figure on the English folk scene. He was born in Scotland at the end of the 1930s, and while he may have had an interest in music as a boy, it had to compete with a lot of responsibilities and necessary distractions. Hand’s mother passed away when he was 13 and he was forced to leave school and take a job as a mine worker. Hand didn’t learn to play guitar until he was in the army in his late teens, but he soon got good enough to pursue a career. He made his public debut in Edinburgh in 1962, and founded the Three City Four a year later with Leon Rosselson, Ralph Trainer, and Marian McKenzie. He remained with the quartet for a year before choosing to embark on a solo career — he was succeeded in the group, incidentally, by no less a figure than Martin Carthy. Hand made an initial solo appearance on record with the Decca release Edinburgh Folk Festival, Vol. 1 (Decca LK 4546) recorded in 1963, on which he performed “One Dime Blues.” In 1964, he recorded his first album, Something New, for Transatlantic Records, which was a surprisingly ambitious mix of traditional and original material, and was well-received within the folk community. His second album, I Loved a Lass (1966), was even more successful, but he never had a chance to build upon it. His marriage broke up around the time of the album’s release, and Hand later left England. He emigrated to Israel for a time, lived on a kibbutz for much of the next year, and then returned to Edinburgh, where he abandoned music permanently in favor of running a retail store. He never returned to performing for the remainder of his life, but his recordings remain among the most beloved parts of the mid-’60s Transatlantic catalog. Additionally, his friend Bert Jansch still performs Hand’s “My Donal” as part of his repertory.

          • That is a pretty spooky coincidence, Hubert. And now that said album has achieved the ultimate accolade of being discussed here on the AW I expect its value has rocketed.

            Your friend may receive an order from an obsessive collector in Texas or Tokyo within the next few days. And within a week or two, we can perhaps look forward to an Owen Hand Unboxing vid on YT?

  65. Here’s one from me (X denotes too-obvious clue):

    If you love not tall pines which touch the beginnings of the sky
    If you have never yearned to leap a mailbox, nor longed to join the street urchins in a game of tag
    If you have not sighed and smiled beyond your mind as sleep creeps out of the abstract and carries you into its endless night
    If violins and cellos harpsichord and piano trumpets, flutes and sounds of rippling scales have never lightened your spirit
    If X did not become so much a name, more a lonely island of song in a sea of human sadness.
    If cool water too long out of reach has never quenched your thirst
    If love comes second or you come first,

    If you have never walked without a destination nor flown without a sense of marvel

    If you have known neither pain nor sorrow nor wept for the joy of release.

    If a baby is not a person until it knows your name

    If your heart has not leapt nor your senses quivered as the conductor’s baton taps the music stand

    If you have not stared at a pretty girl in a vacuum in time across a crowded room and prayed she knew

    If you believe that the essence of a man and his music can adequately be caught and conveyed within an album liner note…

    Then it is likely that the entrapment of music between these covers is not for you and, though it is sad, you should walk on by.

    X, shy, young, handsome, courteous, New Yorker son of a journalist, married to an actress, is more relevantly, a fiery complex ingredient in the exciting cauldron of the musical sixties.

    Put down by no one, whether peers or followers, put on by nothing, whether fame or wealth; put off by neither pressure nor competitor, X is a very special man.

    He bestrides, like Gulliver, the warring worlds of the Establishments’ Academy Award system – from whom he has wrought two Oscar nominations for “X” & “X” – and the contemporary Top Forty scene where the buying power lies in the hands of the very young.

    From Hollywood to New York, across to Europe and to the British Isles in military camps and in brutally sophisticated nightclubs, he built upon his formal training as a pianist by adding technique and style and charm.

    Artist? Album?

  67. Where did these sleeve notes appear. Who wrote them and what was significance of the first line?

    “XXX is an excellent example of the Third Generation of San Francisco bands which gives every indication (as this album demonstrates forcibly) of keeping the strength of the San Francisco sound undiminished.”

  70. Slightly different one here. These are the sleeve notes of Half Man Half Biscuit’s odds and ends compilation “Back Again In The DHSS”. But where were the notes ‘borrowed’ from?

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