Cover Story Dept. - The Frantics

One great album: two free fonts, two free images, two free hours work ... asking too much?

So-called archival releases generally get their shrift shorted, even on so-called major labels, by so-called cover art that makes them look like dump-bin bootlegs. Case in point: the recent issue of Birth, an album recorded in 1968 by The Frantics (not to be confused with the Frantics who morphed into The Jefferson Aeroplanes). They came, as the name implies, from the garage rock scene. The Beatles? The Velvet Underground? Nope - the Stones and the Yardbirds were the most influential bands in America - fight me. Hundreds of spotty, gangly teens thought we can do that! and got together in someone's garage [probably Joe's - Ed.], the Frantics among them.

By '68 they were successful enough and together enough to record an album, at Norman Petty's studio. The contractual kicker was, the studio got to keep the tapes until a label bought them. When a label got interested in the band, they wanted new material, so the tapes remained locked in Norm's archives for fifty freaking years.

The point is, and thank you for bearing with me, is that it's a fully-formed rock album from 1968, impeccably produced, brilliantly played, with only echoes of the raw garage-punk years. So what happens to it?

This.

Or this.

And *ulp* ... this.

This last is the most recent, using Petty's pristine master tapes, mono and stereo, for the first time. It's a shocker, the worst cover yet. Would any of these designs be approved in '68, after the band went to all the trouble of recording a state-of-the-art rock album that owed little to '66?

What's the problem with getting A Designer, as opposed to A Dave down at the copy shop, to come up with a cover that might have done the album justice had it been released at the time? Enough with the rhetorical questions awready.

I've been put off listening to the music by the covers, not being the world's greatest fan of raw garage-punk bands. When I eventually got around to it, I was amazed. Yes, it's a product of the times, but that's what I want to hear. It's full-on psych-rock, experimental, varied, occasionally head-widening, tending to the hard rock that by '68 had largely supplanted the shimmer of '67. Think Clear Light on Elektra, or The Litter's Emerge, although right now I enjoy this more than either. It's tighter, for one thing. These guys stick together through some pretty tricky arrangements. And the production is awesomeness - detailed, subtle, powerful, and imaginative. I listened to this album four times straight through, and my attention wasn't lost once. The lyrics rarely rise above the good enough, but that's good enough.

If the music business, what's left of it, put a little more care into the packaging of archival discoveries they would sell more, so yes, this stuff matters.