Welcome to the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year’s day. This is kind of an odd week of the year when lots of people are still on vacation, there’s not a whole lot going on at work, and it’s hard to get motivated after a few days of feasting and opening presents.
As such, I’m one of the few people at work and not a whole lot of missile engineering is happening. So I just spent half my lunch break looking at Google images of bad album covers. Why? I don’t know. But I’m certainly glad I did. It’s given me something to spend the next fifteen minutes writing about. And maybe even a source for more fun future posts. Here are a few I came across today, and my thoughts on them.
First up (pictured above as I had to make this the highlight of this post) is Orion, with his LP titled “Reborn.” It turns out this dude was a legit musician. Even has his own Wikipedia page. Background: Orion was the stage name of Jimmy Ellis, a rockabilly singer who started channeling Elvis after the King’s death in 1977.
According to his manager, Jimmy was exactly like Elvis except he was five-two and his face didn’t look like him. And his voice, that was different too.
Next up is Freddie Gage’s landmark album titled “All my friends are dead.” He was going to call it “I don’t have any friends because I wear white dress shoes and I hang out in graveyards” but his publicist talked him into the shorter, more succinct, “All my friends are dead.”
Just last week my wife said to me, “You know what we don’t have enough pictures of?” I said, “Yeah, 1970s soul singers riding on giant rats.” She said, “I was going to say pictures of the kids together. But now that you mention it, we don’t have any pictures of giant rats.” Thank god I came across this one today. It’ll make a great Valentine’s Day present. Thank you Swamp Dogg.
I don’t know what it says about our culture, but about 80 percent of the worst album covers I came across are from gospel or religious groups. Here’s the conversation I envision happening as the Christian Crusaders were posing for this picture.
Photographer: Okay, okay, looks good. You, chubby guy on the left, shoulders forward a little. Now slouch down. Good, good.
Photographer: Now, you in the back, get up on the ledge and squat down so nobody can tell how short you are.
Short dude: I’m not short you bastard!
Photographer to short dude: Okay Peanut, can I call you Peanut? Hold that pose and stop looking down the hot chick’s shirt.
Short dude: That’s my mother!
Photographer: Whatever. Just take your hand off her breast so I can get this picture and get the Hell out of here. You people scare me.
Dude on the left: I’m hungry.
Okay, I could write all day about crappy album covers but I’ve already gone over the 15 minutes I allot myself during my lunch breaks to write stupid crap. I’ll have to pick this topic up again though. Oh yeah…
Image source: I believe all these came from coverbrowser.com which is actually a pretty cool site if you’ve got a few minutes of time to waste.
Thanks, you just ruined my surprise for Valentine’s Day.