Eat Flowers And Kiss Babies Dept. - Country Joe And His Fishes

From left: Rholonne Déodoranté, Mrs. Myra Nussbaum, Kreemé, Chyron D'Uhme-Schrölle (intern, wardrobe dept.) Foam-O-Graph© selfie taken by Alfred E. Neuman, th' IoF©'s clueless homunculus

Geriatrix's vote for Electric Sounds For The Mind And Body sent me on a frustrating search of th' IoF© for this eggceptional combo's albumens. To rectify this baffling lacuna [Peruvian miniature camel - Ed.] I have pleasure in making available, for the first time ever again, everything they ever recorded (if you know better, wave your copy of Watchtower). In the absinthe of his Holiness The Pope Of Rome, who better to host this legacy FoamFeature® than a chorus line of IoF© equal opportunity diversity hires?

One at a time, then:

 ABOVE: Iconic first album, presented here in head-narrowing mono and with the original (unused) cover.

 ABOVE: Iconic first album, presented here in head-widening stereo, with the groovy original cover as issued. There is no better album. A few as great, but none greater. Fight me.

ABOVE: Nearly-as-great iconic second album, with their breakout Woodstock hit, the Fish Cheer. Original copies came with free Fish Game! [below - Ed.]

ABOVE: Not-quite-as-good-as-the-second-album third album, but still reasonably iconic. Original cover makes me blow bitter chunks, so I crayoned up a replacement. You're welcome. 

 ABOVE: Hope you like our new direction! The band had officially broken up by this point, with only McDonald and Melton ("The Fish") as core members, although Hirsh and Cohen are sitting in. Jack Casady plays bass on half of the album, so yay for that. Ambitious string arrangements and a horn section make for a more polished sound. I seem to remember reading that some of the Basie band play on it, but can't now find anything to confirm.

ABOVE: Not-quite-as-good-as-the-fourth-album fifth album. Weirdly non-titled ("CJ Fish"?), with McDonald & Melton supported by Greg Dewey (drums, ex-Mad River) and a couple of guys who were hanging by the watercooler. It's okay, not a disgrace, but not iconic, either. Sorta kinda country rock, because '71. The confused and foreboding cover art reflects the lack of focus.

ABOVE: In '77, with nothing better to do and alimony to pay, the original band got back together (there's a hint in the album title - can you spot it, readers?) to record the surprisingly slightly better-than-the-fifth-album but still doggedly un-iconic sixth album. Nobody cared about anything much in '77, and this album got lost in the tsunami of cultural disinterest.

ABOVE: One of the finest 'sixties West Coast live albums limped out in Europe in 1994. The rat's ass cover gives zero hints as to the quality of the performance and recording. Consarn it! This is the '69 band, with Casady on bass, and the "friends" include Jerry Garcia, Steve Miller, Jorma Kaukonen and Mickey Hart. I may well spend some time futzing around with a new cover.

ABOVE: This swell curatorial initiative ties up the loose ends, with the Rag Baby recordings, some rare stuff, some live stuff. I doubt anyone will listen to it straight through, but it's good to know it's there.

This legacy FoamFeature© funded in part by Patsy and Polly's Opossum Planet©, Poughkeepsie NY.

The Best Killer Tyre Movie You'll Ever See! Dept. - Rubber

 

I was going to post this as an April Fool's gag, but didn't think of it until just now. It's showing at th' Foamerama®, and all youse bums gots to do is feel around for the link with your crabby old fingers!

 

If you think you've seen this, you probably haven't. 

 

 

 

Pink Floyd Dept. - Special 18th Anniversary Deluxe Edition Of 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition!

Yes, pop music enthusiasts, it was eighteen years ago today [literally not - Ed.] that Pink Floyd released their Fortieth Anniversary Deluxe Edition of their iconic first album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn! To celebrate a momentous marketing opportunity the band is re-releasing this iconic box set of just about everything you already have, remastered exactly as it was last time, housed in a sumptuous cardboard display container that will give you deep consumer satisfaction to file on your special limited edition Pink Floyd Collectors' Shelf™ (available separately)!

To save you the irksome nuisance of remembering what you're looking for while you're searching for it, here's a word-for-word replay of the hi-toned screed what I already wrote about this fine, fine album:

Hard now to appreciate just how wildly experimental and startling that first Pink Floyd album was. It's either patronised as charming but hopelessly dated, or revered as the kaleidoscopic flowering of a madcap minstrel's cracked genius (an aSyd album). That's two blind grabs at the elephant in a dark room.

Pan, yesterday

Start with the title: it's not on the front cover, it's not the name of a song, nor is it referenced in a lyric. It's a quote from The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame, one of the handful of children's classics adopted by the hippies as holy texts. The Piper is Pan, the horned goat-god, bestial, wildly sexual. Pagan. We're not talking Disney here, kiddies.

"This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!"

Meeting Pan is the culmination of the trip back to nature, to the source of magic, to the gates of dawn, or the Doors Of Perception - Heaven And Hell, the Magic Theatre. All this buried in the title to a pop album? Not for everybody - if you knew, you knew. Certainly it was deemed too arcane for the American market - Tower just stripped it right out.

In a radical break from EMI art department policy, the cover shot was lensed [oh very good - Ed.] by fashion photographer Vic Singh, using a prism given to him by George Harrison. No stylists, no special effects other than the lens, and the band in their work clothes - a kaleidoscopic moment captured forever. Today, it seems like just another generic psychedelic cover, but back then it was saturated with aSyd intensity.

The music, for a start, owes nothing to The Beatles, who are widely credited with the invention of the 'sixties. Mostly composed by Barrett, it was a revolutionary clash of fairytale whimsy and cosmic soundscapes, much of it instrumental. Not instrumental as in surf music or The Shadows or Rn'B or jazz or anything else current at the time. Indescribably far out and mind-blowing, it was music of the spheres teetering on the brink of collapse but always underpinned by structure and order, prefiguring Kraut Rock. It's what you might expect when three formalist architectural students get inspired by a whirling dervish shaman. Nick Mason's drumming is supernaturally right, at once powerful and retrained, a tribal metronomic. Roger Waters' bass has that freakbeat power and pulse. Rick Wright is feeling his way, but never hits a wrong note, adding color and depth. Barrett's guitar is a psychedelic pscythe, a slashing blade. And his lyrics are frequently sublime:

Lime and limpid green, a second scene
A fight between the blue you once knew.
Floating down, the sound resounds
Around the icy waters underground.
Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania.
Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten ...

 

 

The freeload, @ an entirely unnecessary 320, includes all the art, with a reproduction of Syd's weird little book [cover at the top of this piece, sample spread below - Ed.] which is really worth having.

 

Internet Slop Dept. - Photo Libraries: AI Before There Was AI

Image copyright Foam-O-Graph© for the Artificial Ignorance Corporation®

 

Big ruckus right now about AI reducing your internest to visual mush. But photolibraries have been doing this for a looong time. Megabuck agencies like Getty Images, Shutterstock, and Alamy have been massaging our responses through print and digital media without much street level pitchfork brandishing for decades. Big corporations have their own stock of library shots, carefully guarded for their own use and "expressing their unique core values". The difference between a photolibrary shot and something conjured up in seconds from an AI prompt isn't that obvious, and getting more blurred all the time. Which is more dishonest?

"We literally get paid for this shit? I'm literally dying here!"

 

"Ever get the feeling we're like, stuck in some virtual reality corporate hell? Just me, then."

Photolibraries, ever keen to make a buck, are now offering their own AI images, to save us the backbreaking work of "creating" one by typing a command into an online AI image generator.

It's not just corporate communications; stock library shots (photography, illustration, and occasionally video clips) appear regularly in news articles and op-ed pieces, correctly credited. Mostly.

It's all illustration, not documentation. Even the starkly realistic photojournalism of Weegee ["Joy Of Living", left - Ed.] was created through his own technique, his own point of view, his own artistic interpretation of reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A contemporary rendering of Lincoln's assassination met with nobody's accusations of artificiality:

Credited to "our special artist illegible"

 

What I'm saying is, only Foam-O-Graph© shows reality unaltered, unfiltered, as it is. Trust Foam-O-Graph© to show the truth!

 

 

Wotta Revoltin' Development This Is Dept. - Wish You Were Here

 

Dem shoits is kinda cute, don'cha t'ink?

By Dark Side, only shadows of what made Pink Floyd so damn fantastic (Syd Barrett, mainly) remained, hidden behind the corporate studio sheen that won them the lucrative middle management market. The formally structured mindset of the architecture school had designed a product to be welcomed into every suburban household, flattering them with its progressive moods and provocative lyrics. Money! Who needs it, right? I mean, apart from the High Street hi-fi in the Scandinavian-style suburban lounge and the stereo system in the company car gleaming in the drive, what is it good for?

The Floyd's new grey suit and breath-mint audience was primed for its follow-up, which, in the natural order of things, had to be even better, right? This idea of artistic progression was so ingrained in the market by then that albums were bought without consideration, without even hearing. It's the New Floyd, man! I'm going to settle back in my World O' Leather© recliner with a glass of chilled Chardonnay and, like, trip out!

By '75 the band was creatively bankrupt, in inverse proportion to their bank account, already swollen by the corporate sponsorship of a French drinks company [left - Ed.] They would later drop all pretense of being anything other than an ugly bunch of fucking capitalists by openly embracing Volkswagen branded sponsorship [below - Ed.]. Making this album was an obligation, a chore, a two-year pain in the arse. They admitted as much, decades later, but their gullible fanbase mistook this grinding tar pit sludge as artistic credibility. This was a serious work of art! An adult album grappling with adult issues, like, er, the grasping capitalists in the music business. And, er, dead friends? The band's hypocrisy was nowhere more blatant than in the heartfelt memorial eulogies to Syd Barrett, inconveniently still alive. Even those Pink Floyd fans who knew who he was spent no turntable time with freaky druggie Syd, but they respected the respect the band gave him, because, you know, sadness. Life's fucking sad, innit?

It was the first Floyd album I didn't automatically snatch from the rack. I'd already offloaded my copy of Dark Side (with the vacuous poster and stickers) with no regrets, and I was baffled by the critical plaudits given its follow-up. What a joyless, miserable, horrible piece of shit. And they would get - incredibly - worse. Duke of Despair Roger Waters led the willing fans deeper into his wrist-to-forehead agonisings about mental illness and, er, war an' shit. War's sad, innit? 

This post fuelled by righteous anger - or as much as I can still muster - at the twats who turned the counterculture into a cash cow, and lost everything.