Logo #45: The Contractions

A power punk trio from the San Francisco of 1979, The Contractions recently reunited to observe the passing of Dirk Dirksen (August 25, 1937 – November 20, 2006), former operator of avant San Francisco venue Mabuhay Gardens and the "Pope of Punk." I wonder if he's hanging out with Esther Wong (August 13, 1917 - August 14, 2005), former operator of weird Los Angeles club Madame Wong's and the "Godmother of Punk". Contractions apostrophe logo: Mary Kelley, singing guitarist, 1979. I realize that the logo is an excerpt from a larger image. I just contracted it. Contractions bassist and singer Kathy Peck founded H.E.A.R. (Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers), which helps musicians who didn't think to use earplugs and are now dancing in their heads to the grim soundtrack of tinnitus, forever and ever. She blew her hearing out when The Contractions opened for Duran Duran at the Oakland Coliseum in 1984 - but where's the high end on "Friends of Mine"? I can understand when the girl says YOW! at the end of "Hungry Like The Wolf," but sheesh. The Contractions have one of the best band names ever, and one of the simplest and most effective - if almost satanically underutilized - logos ever. That H.E.A.R. needs and rightly deserves the support of anyone who has ever played music is the most massive understatement since "Water is wet." Currently they're looking for a manager. I'd so totally do it if I weren't already consumed with all my schemes to improve the world. Hey, I paused "Twilight Zone" by Golden Earring just so I could hear what they sounded like. They're good!

Logo #44: Stiff Little Fingers

A note from Stiff Little Fingers about their 1978 logo: "The band's bass player, Ali McMordie, came up with the design. It was originally a spoof on the Tom Robinson Band's "clenched fist" design as on the cover of their first album. SLF were about to tour, supporting the TRB and this was an affectionate jibe in their direction." A nice example of an instantly identifiable logo springing from social phenomenon that - when it started, at least - could in no way be co-opted by The Man. The double-entendre, at the very least, thrust into pop culture consciousness as it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s by the abundance of “jiggle TV” programs like “Three’s Company,” made what would have been borderline obscene a couple of decades earlier gradually something at which to merely titter - the implicit meaning becoming almost as obvious as the spoken word. For more on how language shapes our experience even more than we possibly know, one can do no better than to read Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature". Recently published, it's deftly adept at simply explaining why we say what we say and thus do what we do.q

Logo #43: Bastard Noise

As pioneering California powerviolence ( a strain of radical street-level politics and hardcore punk) unit Man Is The Bastard wound down in 1997 after seven years, co-founder Eric Wood simply ramped up side project Bastard Noise. Fellow wizards conferring and hobnobbing on this front included Amps For Christ's head seer Henry Barnes, and Bill Nelson, longtime art director at Larry Flynt Publications and later of rhythmic miasma merchants Unicorn. Wood: "It was me that found it an anthropological reference guide in the Claremont Library back in 1989 - I merely "flipped" the image around so that there was an "about-face" version to match and the rest fell into place. This exact skull was the first "modern man" skull found by the species of "Mancruel." People rip off this image so much you'd think we were all dead!" A logical progression to all those nights and noises is Trogotronic, their business of making "analog electronics hand-built in the U.S.A.".

Logo #42: Cut Chemist

Designed by Cut Chemist (née Lucas McFadden) and Keith Tamashiro in the year of our supposed space odyssey. Chemistry: "I came up with it as a temporary logo for the "Product Placement" tour with DJ Shadow in 2001. Flyers and posters were going into production that day and I needed an image to represent me. I scribbled it on a piece of paper and gave it to Keith Tamashiro at Soap Design to clean it up. I never thought it would be permanent..." A fairly good Cut Chemist rundown from the end of 2006 can be found here. A simple rebus (scissors cut + chemist calculates), it is what it is and it holds within the image the simple grace of becoming itself.

Logo #41: .calibre

Daniel Mies, frontman for Belgian hardcore outfit .calibre, designed this attractively simple and immediate logo in 2000. Mies: "We developed it to be an anti-logo, designed to supercede multinational logos. It's a graphic interpretation of the barrel of a gun and the bullet in the chamber. By slapping it on top of a logo (preferably by means of a spraypaint can), it emphasizes the oppressive nature of corporate industries, networks and politics. We were just a band trying to convey the obvious - until we split, that is. I guess internal band politics got the best of us. You should check out the logos of huge multinational corporations and how they are often based on the symbolism described in archaic occult teachings. Quite impressive." Ironically - but likely on purpose - their WEA album was called "Killthelogo." From the phoenix-infested ashes comes their latest band, A School For Quiet.

Logo #40: Allman Brothers Band

Designed by renowned tattoo artist by Lyle Tuttle in 1970 - and still in use as their overriding motif - this logo was given to all members of the Allman Brothers Band and their roadies. Tuttle, speaking to the Columbus Dispatch: "This guy came in - pressed Levis, turquoise jewelry all over him. I knew he wasn’t some street hippie. It was Gregg (Allman), and I put a coyote on his forearm. Then, Duane (Allman) made everyone in the band and the crew get mushroom tattoos on the sides of their legs. I did that up in their room in the Holiday Inn. It was a party. Everyone was smoking so much it was getting to me, so Duane - he was a nutcase - he screamed at everyone to smoke on the balcony so I could work. He insisted I put one on myself, too. The next year, he died." Ordinarily I am loathe to include the lettering with the logo itself, but here we can contextualize and see the letters as a smaller part of a vast psychotropic feverdream. Somewhat sadly, a modern marriage of cynicism and the shock of the new have reduced to whimsy tattoos of anchors on forearms, hearts with sweethearts named above and below the piercing arrow, and giant naval eagles hovering over the navel. I don't have any tattoos simply because a) I revel my position as the Al Capp of outsider culture (sans severed leg to better illuminate the metaphor, though), b) I'm allergic to pain and I break out in blood, and c) because I like to leave the decorating of subway cars to professionals. Conversely, if you or a friend have a tattoo of Tattoo (Hervé Villechaize), we'd love to see it.

Logo #39: Cocteau Twins

Consider the lilies: the beskirted girl springs up on a handstand and becomes, forever after, a simulacrum of the calla lily. It's the perfect way to return to the survey, after these few lamentably lame weeks of turmoil and annihilated love. Such was the traumatic drama from the near past tense from your now happily less-tense narrator. Would that I were just another Watcher like UATU, with no personal struggles to report - just writing about rock band logos calmly through the rest of mine days. But even dictionaries are written by individual adult human beings, each with their own foibles and frailities. Some of them may like chocolate milk. Some of them may have killed. One never knows. At any rate! The Cocteau Twins logo was designed in 1982 by Nigel Grierson, formerly one-half of design consortium 23 Envelope (with Vaughan Oliver), the public face of flashy, filigreed record label 4AD. Grierson: "I designed that sleeve and logo. It was a single called "Lullabies," first released in 1982. However, I'm not sure if the logo first appeared on the album "Garlands," which again I designed and which I think may have come out first. I suppose the girl on the This Mortal Coil sleeves was a logo in this sense. She had nothing to do with the music yet was always on the sleeves - she was just someone Ivo (Watts-Russell, 4AD founder) and I both knew and we both admired her looks!"