Paper of Record

.
Tomorrow is RECORD STORE DAY 2010. If you have a chance, you might consider heading down to your favorite local purveyor(s) of analog audio goodness to pick up releases produced exclusively for the event. Hit up recordstoreday.com for participating stores.

This year for RSD, Light In The Attic is releasing a special Rodriguez gatefold 7" (which I designed). You can't tell from the image but the type and the frame around the photo are silver foil-stamped.

We also did issue No.2 of the Light In The Attic zine. It's 7" square with a cover illustration of Kris Kristofferson by Drew Christie. The page-count is a little lower than issue No. 1, but it's jam-packed with useful info:

Emily interviews Betty Davis about her modeling career and status as a fashion icon (more about that in a later post).

Charles Peterson talks to Jini Dellacio about her photographs of legendary Northwest garage bands such as The Sonics and The Wailers.

Andy Beta interviews Miss Jane B. about her time with Serge Gainsbourg and what that was like. Light In The Attic has a couple Jane Birkin projects coming up that I'm way psyched about.

Kris Kristofferson and Charlie Louvin have a quick convo about old-time country and being, you know, legends.

There's also an excerpt from Andria Lisle's liner notes for the forthcoming Jim Sullivan release, and articles on or by Lou Bond, Gabor Szabo, Rodriguez, Kearney Barton, and more.

So: look out for that at your local record store tomorrow, and enjoy your weekend.

This Lady Will Tear Your Heart Out.

.
.
.
NPR did a quick feature on the Betty Davis album Nasty Gal today – click here to listen.

[In case anyone can't get enough of me talking about myself, I posted about the designs of Betty's two newly issued CDs here and here. Both Nasty Gal and Is It Love Or Desire are available in stores or directly from Light in the Attic Records. The image at left is a life-size stand-up poster I designed for placement in select retail stores – click to enlarge.]

Antonio's Girl

.
Yesterday I posted about the brand new, previously unreleased Betty Davis CD Is It Love Or Desire, which is now in stores. Here's a sample:

Betty Davis Is It Love Or Desire mp3 [via Light in the Attic]

Today I'm posting about the other new Betty Davis release that came out this week: her third album, Nasty Gal. I didn't do a ton of design work on this one (other than the booklet) because it's a re-issue of a classic album that Betty released in 1975 – but I wanted to post about the illustrator of the front and back covers.

Antonio Lopez in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, ca.1975

Antonio Lopez was arguably the most influential fashion illustrator of all time, inspiring fellow artists from the 1960s up to his death in 1987 (from complications related to AIDS), and on up through the present. Here's a small sampling of his other work:

Antonio Lopez illustrations for British Vogue, ca.1960s

A 1967 drawing, and a 1973 drawing for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine

Brigitte Bardot by Lopez for the cover of Interview, 1975

In the 1960s, Lopez, who had emigrated to New York from Puerto Rico with his family as a child, went to the Fashion Institute of Technology and shortly thereafter rose up quickly as a star illustrator for fashion magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. In 1969 he moved to Paris with his long-time partner and fellow F.I.T. grad Juan Ramos.

Jerry Hall, ca. 1975, by Antonio Lopez

Jerry Hall moved out of the apartment she shared with Grace Jones and in with Antonio and Juan. It must have been quite a scene.

Jacques de Bascher and Karl Lagerfeld, photo by Antonio Lopez

Lopez opened a salon with his good friend Karl Lagerfeld – a hang-out for various models and people in fashion society, and a place where Lopez taught workshops on illustration and American pop art. Somewhere along the line he met Betty Davis. Antonio photographed Betty and worked with her on the album cover for Nasty Gal.

It's crazy to me, imagining this miniature cultural eruption – a gay Puerto Rican artist, an explosive black soul singer ex-wife of Miles Davis, a Texas-girl supermodel with Bryan Ferry in the wings, a German expat fashion genius on the rise, Grace Jones and Jean-Paul Goude doing their thing – all of them trading inspiration and creative pursuits. The influence that emanated out of those years could fill up its own blog, and then some.

Jerry Hall and Antonio Lopez in their Paris apartment, ca.1975, by Norman Parkinson

Eventually returning to New York in the late '70s, Lopez continued to design for magazines, as well as for Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Fiorucci, and Studio 54. He published a few different books, the most sought-after being Antonio's Girls (1983).

One of Antonio's many "Shoe Metamorphosis" drawings, ca.1978

Antonio Lopez continues to be a major force in fashion illustration. I can't say I love everything he did in the '80s – I just happen to prefer his earlier work – but at this point it's all classic. The cover for Betty Davis' Nasty Gal – similar to the style he perfected for the covers of so many Interview magazines – is a favorite of mine, and there is no doubt Lopez deserves his status as an underground legend.

A memorial from Bloomingdale's that ran in The New York Times when Lopez died, and a drawing for Saks ca.late-'70s.

Visit artnet for more images and info on Antonio Lopez.

Head over to lightintheattic.net for more info and/or to order Nasty Gal and Is It Love Or Desire, the new CDs from Betty Davis.

Viva Betty Davis

.
Today marks the release of two new CDs I designed for Light in the Attic Records, both by the legendary funk queen Betty Davis: Nasty Gal (which I'll post about later) and Is It Love Or Desire, a previously unreleased album Davis recorded in 1976. Here's some info on Betty excerpted from a review in a recent Other Music update:

As a young fashion model in New York in the mid-'60s, [Betty Davis] ran with the cutting edge of black musicians from Sly Stone to Jimi Hendrix to Miles Davis, whom she married in '68. Miles himself says that Betty played a significant role in the development of his groundbreaking electric sound of the period, but the young fireplug was just too wild for the jazz genius (it's also been said that an affair with Hendrix contributed to the breakup), and Betty moved to London, where she began writing the songs that made it onto her self-titled 1973 debut. Everything that made Davis' music breathtaking and beautiful – her raw, outspoken, often shocking lyrical content, her tough-as-nails funk grooves, and her blistering vocal delivery – also ensured that she would be marginalized in the tame pop market of the time.
...
Is It Love Or Desire is every bit as intense and soulful as any of Davis' best work, a heavy, grinding, howling album of sex, wine and deep deep worries that fueled this iconoclast from the beginning, that made her spit blood and fire and ultimately marginalized her art for all these years.

Here's the cover:

When I started working on these CDs, Betty's whole flavor – her personal style, her strength and fierce independence combined with her raw sexuality – reminded me instantly of Viva, "The International Magazine for Women" published between 1973 and 1979 by Bob Guccione (of Penthouse infamy), and edited by his wife, Kathy Keeton. The typography I used on the cover, which is gold and silver foil-stamped, was inspired by Viva's logo.

Viva pushed its sex-meets-sophistication point of view with extremely smart art direction and the use of very high quality photography and styling. Anna Wintour was the magazine's fashion editor, before moving on to Condé Nast.

Click here to read more about Viva magazine in a feature we ran in V magazine a few years ago.

Visit Light in the Attic for more on Betty Davis and to order the new CDs, as well as Betty's first two albums, Betty Davis and They Say I'm Different.

For the Record

.
For the past several months I've been working with Seattle's Light in the Attic Records on a bunch of different projects (including a forthcoming re-design of their website). One of the most fun things I've had the pleasure of designing for the label is this zine, a free promo produced for International Record Store Day, which is tomorrow. The zine is 7.25" square, like a 45 record jacket, and b&w newsprint with a color cover. Inside there are a variety of features on artists that Light in the Attic works with, such as Serge Gainsbourg, Betty Davis, Karen Dalton, Monks, Rodriguez, Doug Randle, Stephen John Kalinich, The Mighty Pope, Kearney Barton and all the artists involved in Wheedle's Groove, the Seattle funk & soul compilations. There are interviews with the label heads and KEXP's Greg Vandy wrote a great piece about re-issues and radio. The cover, above, was illustrated by the very talented Drew Christie. Here are some of the inside spreads:

Karen Dalton (with an article by Lenny Kaye)

Monks (with an article faxed in by Jello Biafra).

Wheedle's Groove (Seattle funk and soul)

Serge Gainsbourg. Actually the bottom two spreads, of Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin during the making of Histoire de Melody Nelson, which Light in the Attic just re-issued, didn't make it into the final zine because of rights issues…oh well.

Rodriguez. I love those photos of him hanging out with kids in Detroit.

Betty Davis, with an article by Jeff Chang. That bottom photo looks like it could be by Scavullo but I'm not sure who took it. I'm also working on two upcoming Betty Davis releases – one with artwork by the famous fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez. More on that later.

TOC/masthead featuring Betty Davis

The back cover features Drew's illustration of Light in the Attic world HQ, which is in an old hotel on Seattle's beautiful/infamous Aurora Avenue. Label founder Matt Sullivan even has a pool and jacuzzi attached to his office through a sliding door – it's pretty fly.

Anyway, there it is – visit your favorite local record store tomorrow and snap it up.