Quiet Riot: Logo #316

 

From the cover of Quiet Riot's third album, "Metal Health," this enduring metal mascot was designed by Quiet Riot and Jay Vigon in 1983. Makes a fairly synchronistic follow-up to the previous entry about Left Insane, really. The album ultimately sold six million copies - how many of those six million people do you know? "Cum on Feel the Noize" was the big hit that everyone knows; its video came from the same cosmos of dread as Greg Kihn's "Jeopardy" video and the clip for Dio's "Last in Line." Each - Kihn's impending marriage; Peluce's menial delivery job; the kid from the Quiet Riot video waking up early and having that mask hanging over his head - seemed to have their respective menaces spawned from a sense of middle-class responsibility that none of the curly-haired heroes wanted to assume or pursue. And here you thought people thinking about heavy metal only concerned themselves with messages playing backwards. Crushing, middle-class fears factor very heavily in the dull, beige, backwards world out of which heavy metal attempts to pull its listeners. Quiet Riot's late singer Kevin DuBrow (possibly the man behind the mask) dressed up in straitjacket and mask onstage, and while that makes for great theatre, it also represents a rare moment of explicit empathy between elevated performer and downtrodden fan. Guitarist Carlos Cavazo recently discussed the album cover: "It was an idea created by the whole band. It's supposed to be a guy who goes crazy banging his head, and they had to put a straitjacket and an iron mask on him, so that he wouldn't hurt himself. I remember the mask was Rudy's [Sarzo, bass] idea. He got the idea from the movie ‘The Man In The Iron Mask."

Here's "Night of the Living Dead," in glorious black&white. Happy Halloween, folks. All Souls' Day is just around the corner!

Left Insane: Logo #315

South Bay avant punk band Left Insane had their logo designed by drummer Tony Cicero - from an original sketch by singer/guitarist Paul Radabaugh - in 1989. A masterpiece of simplicity and perspective, it graced the cover of the band's "Visa Weekend" 7" on No Reality Records, an unheralded record label with a catalog that includes Nip Drivers, Pinhead Gunpowder, and Crimpshrine. Radabaugh: "The rendering in your post is my drawing and that's what got used in most of the fliers and promo materials. Tony and Mark Segal (from the SST band Paper Bag, which hailed from deepest darkest Tarzana) cleaned it up a little for the "Toolbox" album." Cicero got his start in Carson - a suburb between Los Angeles and Long Beach with a really beautiful old movie theatre nearby in Wilmington - in 1979 with a band called The Meathooks (I'm told there are recordings hidden deep in the heart of Lomita). He left when SST superstars Saccharine Trust needed a new drummer; after Saccharine Trust, he played in Vida with Dez Cadena. One of the most complex, driven and creative of all the drummers working in the Southern California punk world in the '80s, he's criminally underrated and I'm not just saying that because he's on the payroll. Now he's in Black Love - my band - and we are absolutely dipped in chocolate gold to have him with us. Someone asked recently what Black Love sounds like. We sound like Nick Cave and P.J. Harvey watching scrambled porn - but not necessarily the same channel at the same time. Also: disorienting hard rock.

This just in: Black Flag / DOA / Danzig / Run-DMC drummer Chuck Biscuits has died of throat cancer at age 44; BrooklynVegan has the most comprehensive tribute to Chuck, including a video possibly from 1988 in which Chuck shows off his collection of cereals (!) including Fruit Brute, Fruity Yummy Mummy, Count Chocula and his favorite: Quisp (?!)

Also just in: Chuck Biscuit death hoax?!?

Update: Yes, he's alive. Move along, people - nothing to see here.

Psychic TV: Logo #314

Designed by Throbbing Gristle / Psychic TV co-founder Genesis P-Orridge in 1981. Deceptively simple and endlessly reproduced in a variety of materials and locations, it is at least a distant cousin to Raymond Pettibon's Black Flag bars and at best a close brother to Jesus Christ's cross - well, wait, let's not talk about that. That cross around your neck? You think Jesus is going to want to see that when He gets back and comes up to shake your hand? So distasteful. The Temple Ov Psychick Youth file declares, "The Psychick Cross is a symbol of TOPY. That is its main meaning. It can also represent a trinity, a reversal of the Papal Cross (i.e. two long crossbars and one short), and a TV aerial (receiver and transmitter of information). No meaning is imposed upon it by the group." Speaking rather incisively in a recent interview, P-Orridge recalls, "One reason we came up with what we called the Psychic Cross was to have a non-verbal icon, where if you saw someone with that on a jacket, or a tattoo, you would think, "They’re probably relatively close to my way of thinking…they're part of my invisible tribe." It doesn’t have a linguistic definition - it's beyond words.

(William S.) Burroughs was really interested in hieroglyphics. One of the things he pointed out was that he believed that the hieroglyphic so-called 'languages' work on the nervous system rather than the intellect because they're pictograms, which are received in our brains very differently to a linear, alphabetic language. And the subtleties and the nuances in this holographic information - of a hieroglyph - is more far-reaching and less specific than an alphabetized language. Whether alphabets go from right to left or left to right or up and down, they're basically teaching the brain to create habitual pathways that are - supposedly - logical…but actually they erase imagination from language. They erase the individual's subtle interpretations of meaning - and therefore meaning becomes very dogmatic."

With more than three dozen members coming and going since the group's inception in 1981, Psychick TV is a cross (har) between a symphony orchestra and the Justice League of America. Genesis P-Orridge - now Genesis Breyer P-Orridge - welcomes the publication in November on Feral House of the 544-page "Thee Psychick Bible." Finally - something to read this winter.

:zoviet*france:: Logo #313

One of the greatest musical groups of all time - flat-out, hands down, bar none. They make the mystical and transcendent into something intimate, they make some of the best record packaging ever created and if ever there were a need for meditative drones made of sticks and stones, :zoviet*france: fulfills it. Robin Storey, late of zoviet*france:: "The ZF logo developed organically with input from all the artists involved in the early days (including Lisa Hale). I can't remember when that particular configuration (Nb. the star-crescent) was first used, but it must have been around the mid-'80s." The band is fractured and fractious now, for various reasons - which is sad, but their music is immortal and surpasses the paltry emotional firefights in which mere humans tend to delight from time to time. :zoviet*france: came out of a confluence of avant-garde minds working in northeastern England in the late '70s and early '80s - The Hafler Trio, Metgumbnerbone, Alien Brains, The New Blockaders and various variations of the people in those great creative brain-trusts. Here's :zoviet*france: about 20 years ago. Here's their incredible discography, which is fraught with some of the most luminescent titles ever - including "Shouting At the Ground," which comes from a slightly longer quote, "Shouting at the ground won't make it hear you any better." AMEN TO THAT!

By the way, that comment on the Operation Ivy entry just totally made my week. It's not that I'm running out of logos or affection for the form - I'm just overwhelmed in my current state of human limitation. Further bulletins as events warrant - lightning strike or sudden radioactive mutation notwithstanding.

Operation Ivy: Logo #312

Designed by OpIvy singer Jesse Michaels in 1987. At last report, there are no plans for a band reunion. Simple things are sometimes the hardest to do well. Theirs is a logo (mascot?) that was left out of the recent Yahoo! blog survey that ripped off many of the images and entries of this blog, which is a real shame but no real surprise. The NME did the same thing back in April. Linkbacks are the Internet's equivalent of the reacharound; neither site gave me the profound joy of even that cold comfort. Like that popular band once sang, "That's the price of love..."

Siouxsie & the Banshees: Logo #311

Siouxsie's heroically pharaoic eyes - courtesy of London design house Crocodile - graced the cover of their 1987 LP "Through the Looking Glass." It was the face that launched a thousand shirts and plunged countless young girls into annoying, frustrating conversations with men and family who wondered who the eyes belonged to and why they have to be so weird all the time.

This Day in Death: Leos Janácek (July 3, 1854 – August 12, 1928)
Thomas Mann (June 6, 1875 – August 12, 1955)
Ian Fleming (May 28, 1908 – August 12, 1964)
Philip-Dimitri Galás (July 21, 1954 - August 12, 1986)
Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 - August 12, 1988)
Bernard Kliban (January 1, 1935 – August 12, 1990)
John Cage (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992)
John Loder (Southern Studios; April 7, 1946 - August 12, 2005)

Phish: Logo #310

Created by Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, possibly as early as 1986. More Holist goodness - the whole being bigger than the sum of its parts. Speaking of the sum of its parts, so what must that internal memo have been like about the guy from Phish being beaten up by Hells Angels? The world, like the ad said with the wise old owl, will never know. I don't particularly care for Phish. Too imprecise and meandering and beardy. Their ice cream is fairly good, though.

My ex-girlfriend died last month. She was 26. Her heart stopped. I'll be 39 on Thursday. Do I really have to experience dead ex-girlfriends at age 39? Naturally - naturally - if you want to read about what a godly being she was, you have but to read any of the blaugs out there extolling her virtues and whatnot. "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones," said Mark Antony in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," and much like Mark Antony, I come to bury Danielle - not praise her. Here's the downright lowdown on the latter-day ambient saint: she was a beautiful pain-in-the-ass who had a deathly fear of commitment through her 20s and sought enlightenment and inspiration from one boyfriend after another. Conversely: I was not her star to follow. She wound up with the man she wound up with - and although I thought much of their recorded output were shiny cogs in one vast and endless boredom factory, clearly she was happy; clearly she was at peace. Who am I to begrudge anyone that? I'm just this curmudgeonly scribbler who writes brilliantly about disposable popular culture. Conversely two times: the day she died (unbeknownst to me), I was digging through storage and found a packet of her love letters that I hadn't looked at in years. Someone meant, it would seem, to say something before she departed for the great Beyond. Anyway, he had his time with her - but I got her on the way out. Bye, Danielle.

The Song of the Moment is "Last Day of Magic" by The Kills.