Logo #276: Stukas Over Bedrock

Stukas Over Bedrock had their caveman designed by Art Morales. Pete from the band: "That was drawn by Art sometime between 1982-1984. He also did the first Social Distortion album cover (the skeleton reclining in a chair). It first appeared in an ad we bought to promote one of our records about that time in magazines like Flipside and Maximum Rock'n'Roll and in flyers we made to advertise shows."

Logo #244: Shelter

Shelter's Disc of Vishnu Chakra was adopted by the band in 1990.

Logo #225: The Queers

Drawn by longtime Pictograms reader Christopher Appelgren in 1998. Appelgren: "I did Green Day's "Kerplunk" album artwork including the smiling flower logo and the insert art for their first album "39/Smooth." I didn't do the electrocuted man but that seems to be a wholesale version of a warning sign from England. One of the greatest band logos of all time is the SOUP unhappy face, designed by Richie Bucher, who also created the art for Green Day's "Dookie" album, among others. Have you seen it? Also, Jesse Michaels' Filth, and the Operation Ivy "skanking guy" logo is memorable. I designed the Queers logo and album art for all of their Lookout! releases except one. I also created logos/album art for The Donnas, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, Green Day and a number of others, including my bands The PeeChees and The Pattern."

Logo #221: The Meatmen

These and other cartoon images of the band were drawn by Brian Pollack in 1983 through the majority of the band's history. "Crippled Children Suck" and all that. Not to be confused with another cartoon Meatmen, so if you're looking for that, likely you're in the wrong place!

Why so silent these past couple of weeks, boss? Well, I'm currently musing over an image dump on which you, too, can include pitchers of your tattoos of band logos. Also, I've written a largish article about rock band logos for a publication this summer. It may or may not happen. You know how these sorts of things are. Updates as they reach me, of course.

Logo #218: GG Allin

Created by GG Allin (on a theme by Stanislas de Guaita) in 1993 for the "I'm Your Enemy / War in My Head" CD. You couldn't make alternative music in the '90s without running into some entertaining story about GG Allin (born Kevin Michael Allen; August 29, 1956 – June 28, 1993). On GG's FindAGrave page: "The Virtual Flowers feature has been turned off for this memorial because it was being continually misused." Just like life! As the guy said at the end of the SPIN Magazine article, "With GG Allin you don't get what you expect, you get what you deserve." Just like reality TV! Speaking of which, here's an impossibly young Jerry Springer mining talk-show gold with GG Allin, who was often called the "last rock'n'roller," mostly because he tried to reclaim rock music from the Corporate System. GG's coprophilia did share one insight with that System, though: you don't have to eat shit to know that it tastes bad.

Logo #201: Naked Aggression

Singer Kirsten Patches of Naked Aggression: "Cyrus Highsmith, the drummer from our first two 7" records, designed our band logo when he was 17 at West High School in Madison WI in 1992. We needed a band logo for our new punk band, and he came to band practice one day and showed it to us. We thought it was fucking brilliant; it's so simple yet powerfully striking. Most corporations would kill to have a logo that eye-catching. After a lot of discussion, we decided that it symbolized anger building up in a confined space until it explodes - a metaphor that can carry over to many aspects of our personal lives in politics. It also captures the punk spirit by alluding to familiar logos that punk culture embraces, such as the chaos symbol. I have the logo tattooed on my shoulder - it's so eye-catching that to this day, people in the check-out line at the supermarket ask me what it means. When we go play shows on tour, fans come up to me to show me their Naked Aggression tattoos. It's so cool!"

RIP Naked Aggresion guitarist Phillip "Phil" Suchomel (April 19, 1969 - April 25, 1998).

The Song of the Moment is "Clipper" by Autechre.

Logo #102: Battalion of Saints

San Diego punk rock band Battalion of Saints resident artist "Mad" Mark Rude appropriated this design by a currently unknown artist in 1982. Singer George Anthony, speaking in Flipside: "The original logo came from a religious comic book titled "Signs to Avoid." It had pentagrams and other symbols like that in it. Mark re-worked the sign into - like the B of S, the Bat. We like it. Basically, like Battalion is a band, and we're standing there (on the "Second Coming" EP) as skeletons and skulls and shit because if there was a war that's what we'd be: a pile of skeletons. You're not gonna have time to take a shit...but no horror business here, thank you."

Logo #92: Subhumans

Designed by the band in 1981 for their first 7".

Logo #79: The Turbo A.C.'s

Turbo A.C.'s guitarist and singer Kevin Cole reports, "I drew that on a bar napkin in 1996 when I got the news that the shipment of our first album (Nb. "Damnation Overdrive") wouldn't be delivered in time for our tour - because they were destroyed in a chemical spill at the airport." The band takes their name from a riff on the Turnbull A.C.'s, a gang from the 1979 urban meller "The Warriors," from which Martin Scorsese plucked no small amount of inspiration - beyond the historical - for "Gangs of New York."

Logo #76: ALL

Karl Alvarez, bassist for Descendents and ALL - for which he designed the Allroy mascot in 1988 for their debut "Allroy Sez" LP - recently suffered a mild heart attack. A MySpace page (occasionally the corporation can be used for niceness and not for evil) for his health care fund sits here. It should be pointed out that The Ataris' mega-smash chart-topper "In This Diary" sounds a lot like ALL's "She's My Ex," a song from the EP of the same name. One of the more underrated mascots in the survey, Allroy exists as (not "in") an eternal state of overexcitable bliss and "all", aptly mirroring the manic energy of the band itself.

Logo #69: 999

This ticket logo was designed for British punk band 999 by George Snow in 1977. Formed Sunday the 5th of December 1976 - amidst a cultural maelstrom that included the Sex Pistols scandalizing Britain on Bill Grundy's Thames TV talk-show, the Eagles' "Hotel California" and seemingly endless ABBAmania - here they are now, doing their smash hit "Homicide," which features some of the most ineffectual condenser mics imaginable to capture some of the worst lipsynching conceivable that's only saved by some of the most triumphal harmonies ever delivered by a punk rock band. Another 999 hit, "Emergency," is not to be confused with Motörhead's "999 Emergency." Their newest LP, "Death in Soho," is available now on Voiceprint. Here is where you can buy an original poster on which this logo appeared in 1977. The logo is symbolic of the thought - in those early happy and hectic days of endless energy fueled by both soul and substance (so the books tell us) - that it was all for a lark, any amount of attention came from no small amount of luck, and it could all vanish up into a trivia question at any moment. That it could all come flying back on the wings of nostalgia was but an all-too-distant dream. Like winning the lottery.

Logo #38: Mental Abuse

From a review of "Streets of Filth," the 1984 LP by New Jersey hardcore band Mental Abuse: "Thuddy, mid-rangey hardcore from a band of mental defectives (singer Sid Sludge was autistic) and outlaw bikers controlled by a shady manager with very deep pockets and a bizarre notion that the band could be a commercial success. A Mental Abuse movie exists." The album, with tracks like "Gimme Death," "Sock Woman," and "Security Guard," was heralded by this cartoon version of the lead singer. Sid sings: "The logo was done by Tommy "Gunn" O'Brien, a fan following the band around Dover NJ around 1983-84. I think he based the picture from the living-Sid Sludge who had a mohawk for a while. I think he has more teeth, though! Tommy silk-screened shirts and did flyers with the "Screaming Guy" just as the "Streets of Filth" record got released. Tommy was famous for wearing his black trenchcoat around the Showplace in Dover. He goes by Toxic Tommy now." Back then, like the one-legged lead singer from Texas punks Legionaire's Disease, someone like Sid would have been a curiosity at best and a misunderstood exile at worst. These days, people with whatever we're using as a euphemism for compromised mental state are lauded as "outsider artists" and celebrated beyond death - because, after all, the living death of nostalgia culture is forever.

Somewhat unrelatedly, Claire Forlani is twilight incarnate.

Logo #25: Dead Milkmen

I realize that it may be a tad soon after the Inspiral Carpets cow to include another cow, but it's my birthday and I'm feeling generous. Why couldn't they be best-friend cows? Designed by Dead Milkmen drummer Dean "Dean Clean" Sabatino, it first appeared in 1983. Funny and simple, it suggests a simpler time, during which America was gripped by "The Far Side" fever, and any gag with a cow or a dinosaur was immediately brilliant. When Dave Blood (born Dave Schulthise, September 16, 1956 - March 10, 2004) died, after living an entirely different life in Serbia until the '99 NATO bombing, it was pretty much over for a punk rock band that created about a half-dozen truly great pop songs and made a lot of weird people really happy for over twenty years. Who could ask for anything more? Apart from the thing about Dave Blood still being alive, I mean.

Logo #20: Dr. Know

Drawn by future "Love and Rockets" graphic blandisher Jaime Hernandez in "1981 or early 1982," the good folks at Dr. Know tell us, "The supposed woman he based the girl on is Dinah Cancer from 45 Grave." Jaime's brother Ismael, who designed the similarly seminal Nardcore logo (on a Pee-Chee folder, naturally), plays bass in Dr. Know, a band of many logos: the girl, another girl, the Rx symbol of an understandably mortified pharmaceutical industry, the spider in the "o" in Dr. Know. It wouldn't seem as if Oxnard - town of eternal ridicule on "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" - would spawn that much interesting art, but three musical styles were nurtured within its borders: turntablism (via DJ Babu), Nardcore (via Dr. Know) and literalism (via me, with one convenient location, member FDIC).