Electric Tangerine Wheel of Cheese
February 16th, 2005I have edited my illustration section and did a “paper edit” of my design section… spinning off a CD and logo section and dropping half of what’s in there now. I haven’t be able to carry it out yet because I’ve gotten murmurs that the Kung Fu Monkeys 7” is getting ready to drop. Or hit the street. Or go to press. Or what have you.
I made a list of all the CD/7” art I’ve done, and there’s a fucking lot of it for someone who doesn’t actively seek it out. I haven’t been pally-pally with the rock and roll kids for like 2 years, but Jonnie Whoa-Oh still hires me out at least once a year. I also did a bunch of stand up CDs that I had forgotten—Marc Maron, Mike Birbiglia, and Matt Besser’s “May I Help You Dumbass” (which had the P. Bagge cartoon cover… it was just layout from me)—and probably was pretty forgettable.
The KFM 10th 7” “Electric Tangerine Smile: Shindig Volume 3 in 3D” was recorded last spring, I think, in LA and then was remastered three times and those master tapes lost and then found again and yet again remastered and all before I got a “soft-hire” from James to do the art for it like ‘Would you have time to do this?” and I said “Gladly” and then it went nowhere for 6 months. I did the center labels in December or so and then heard nothing of it except murmurs that something was wrong with the pressing or the pressing plant or so on…
I’m incorporating two divergent concepts on the art. The songs are Archies-gone-psychedelic and James requested a parody cover of the Zombies’ “Odessey [sic] and Oracle,” which is a good injoke for the record collecting nerds but an absolute nightmare of a design. Chunky acrylic paint + hash bender = this cover. The hardest part though was finding pictures of it to copy. All of the web-ready versions are tiny and the colors blurred out. Tons of people offered to give me the CD reissue booklet of it, but I figured that would still be tiny and hard to work from. I asked around for anyone who had the original 12” platter, but then Mike Faloon (of Go Metric and a former KFMer) offered a reissue 12”, which I didn’t even know existed, to work from and mailed it out. Lucky da!
The colors of the 12” on my desk are extremely different from this shitty little JPG, so that’s been my main reference for the labor-intensive parody (at right). I’ve been working whole evenings for three days now and this is as far as I’ve gotten. I made an executive decision to put the name of the band where the Zombies put their title, because of the length of the title. I think I have to draw the letters by hand and then scan them in and trace them; organic curves that look appropriately chunky and hippish are hard to manage solely digitally.
I’ve started replacing the figures on the original, who all seem to be paint-by-number adaptions of snippets from classic paintings or old tymey photographs (Terry Gilliamesque) with the KFM cartoon style. The last album they did was the split with JV which I did an all cartoon cover for. I can’t find a file of it; it must have been left on the Modern Humorist computer (I did that cover on my work computer—after hours—since I didn’t have a home one at the time). I found this weird thing though—must have been a practice one:
Now the back cover is for the label’s concept of the album being in blue-red 3d and that the collector would buy a red 7” and a blue 7” of the album and use them as 3D glasses to see the art come alive. This is a good sales tactic, but practically, won’t work. Or it will be a long shot, really, since the blue/red vinyl is unlikely to be true-blue and true-red that would make the 3D images, which I will be assembling extremely amatuerishly, on the back. Still, I will press on. In the Art Chantry book (Some People Can’t Surf available on Amazon) he talked about making banners for an Urban Outfitters store campaign in overlapped red and blue. UO passed out 3D glasses because they looked like 3D, but they didn’t do anything… just gave people a headache. That’s probably how the KFM: ETS 7” back will go.