The "With the Beatles" Cover Problem

"With The Beatles" 1963

 I remember seeing the cover of the Beatles “With the Beatles” as a kid and hating the spacing of the members’ faces. I thought some ad exec had taken cut-out heads of John, Paul, George and Ringo and had laid them on a black background with little to no care or idea how to arrange them in any kind of symmetry, and instead just stuck them all willy-nilly!

John’s head was big, George was OK , Paul was small, and Ringo looked tacked on at the last minute! So uneven, and  I remember thinking if I was the one to lay the cut-out heads, I would have placed them like THIS:

 

See? Oh! So Nice and EVEN! HAHAHAHAHA

LOLOL, what the young me did not realize was that those were NOT cut-out heads of the Beatles, but an actual single PHOTO with the members of the Beatles in black turtleneck shirts posing against a black background, a fact I only discovered when I finally got to see a copy of the original photo in detail:

With it all lighted up properly like this, you can clearly see the silhouettes of the boys' shirts, their arms and shoulders, explaining why their faces were at such uneven positions! NOW it all made sense!! With this detail, I can finally see what a great cover it is, and for one HELL of a GREAT album, besides!!

Sergio Mendez 1941-2024

Just heard the news today that brilliant musician Sergio Mendez has passed away. As some of you know, his seminal 60's band BRASIL '66 is one of my all-time favorite artists, especially their early output (and even some of their 70's releases like BRASIL 77 as well!) 

 Though not any kind of jazz or Brazilian music fan by any stretch, as a kid growing up one of my favorite albums to play from my parents' record collection was Antonio Carlos Jobim's 1967 album "Wave", an album that I feel represents Jobim at his very best (and of which I've talked about here)!

Years later while working at Tower Records, I had a boss whose favorite artist was Jobim and Brazilian music in general, and besides suggesting other terrific Jobim albums (Tide and Stone Flower just to name a few), he asked me if I knew of Sergio Mendez and Brasil 66.

Well, I'd heard of Sergio Mendez, mostly because of his 80's hit "Never Gonna Let You Go", but had not heard of this Brazil stuff at all! Hoping to rectify that at once, he showed up at work the next day with something for me: a CD copy of Sergio Mendez and Brasil 66's Greatest Hits!

I promised to get right on listening to the album as soon as I got home, and what a joy that turned out to be! The collection opened with the awesome "Mas Que Nada", a song that I kind of always knew in the back of my head but never thought about what it was or who sang it. SO! THIS was Brasil 66!!!

But the hits didn't stop there! From that point, track after track I was hit some of the grooviest tunes: With a Little Help from My Friends, Like a Lover, Pretty World, The Look Of Love, etc,  til that Greatest Hits package became one of my favorite go-to discs! And from there I ventured further into their back catalog with EQUINOX and FOOL ON THE HILL, and over time have managed to get just about every release of theirs, including CRYSTAL ILLUSIONS which may be my all-time fave album from them!

My Brasil 66/Sergio Mendez CDs

Brasil 66 Albums I managed to obtain!

Sergio Mendez and Brasil 66 has always been a reliable fave to pick out again and re-explore, and I had JUST been going through their catalog once again when I heard the news of Mendez's passing. A truly great artist who will be missed!

The Mystery of Led Zeppelin's "In Through the Out Door" LP Cover

     

 The year was 1979 and both Led Zeppelin songs "Fool In The Rain and "All My Love" were being played at regular rotation on the radio. Music sounded great, but we all HAD to wonder about the LP the songs came from. The album was called "In Through the Out Door" and what made it stand out was the fact that the entire album was wrapped up in brown paper so you could not see what was on the cover! 

Was it something offensive like profanity on the cover? Something ultra-violent and bloody, or -gasp- overtly SEXUAL? We didn't know,  and the only way to find out was to purchase the thing!

BUY IT I did, and going home and unwrapping it, I didn't know WHAT to expect- but the last thing I could have foreseen was what I saw- a very plain (yet very noir-ish) black and white photo of a nattily dressed man  in white outfit and hat at a bar, burning a letter with a lighter.

EH? THIS was the cover they didn't want anyone to see? Was this depicting some controversial political thing or something? I just didn't get it!

At my father's workplace, there was an older guy working there who was a musician and a great source of rock n roll information to my burgeoning early rock-n-roll dabbling, and I made sure to ask him about it the next time I saw him. "Say, why did Led Zeppelin wrap the In Through the Out Door album with brown paper?" He though about it and shrugged, saying "I think they did it just to be artistic." Well, that wasn't the answer I'd hoped for, but with little else to go on, left it at that!

Some weeks later and I was at my friend Jason's house and his sister has also bought the album. We pondered the many reasons why they might have covered up the LP ( sex, violence, profanity) but it wasn't until I sat back and looked at his sister's copy of In Through The Out Door...and realized something was off! It was the same depiction of the man in the bar burning the photo...but THEIR copy was shot in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT viewpoint from the picture on MY copy at home!

"HEY! I shouted, "My cover is different from yours! Say, I bet  there must be a dozen different covers, and they covered it so you wouldn't know which one you got til you bought it and unwrapped it!" Turning the album around, I realized even the BACK cover was different from mine! This gimmick HAD to be the reason for the wrapping!

Running to that guy at my Dad's workplace the following week, I told him of my discovery, but he didn't quite believe me. "Why would they do that?" he countered, hinting I must be imagining things, but I insisted my copy and my friend's copy were different. "I know," I told him-"Next week, bring your copy and I'll bring mine and we'll compare and see if they're the same!"

Of course there was a chance that his copy and mine might be the exact SAME versions and I wouldn't have proven anything, however, when he brought his LP in, it TOO was drastically different from mine, showing once and for all that the variant covers (Such a new novelty at the time!) was really a thing!

In all there were 6 variations of the albums, each depicting the viewpoint of one character in the barroom, a fact I didn't discover til I saw the complete photos in the "In Through the Out Door" Guitar Songbook. What a cool concept from the geniuses at Hipgnosis!

And of COURSE, the MUSIC itself was a masterpiece, with not only the aforementioned tracks All My Love and Fool in the Rain, but the groovy "South Bound Saurez", the down-home contry kickin' "Hot Dog" and the epic synthesizer masterpiece "Carouselambra", the latter of which remains one of my BIG faves from the band.

As drummer John Bonham died after this release, In Through the Out Door became the band's last official album to be released, with only the odds-n-ends leftovers for "CODA" to follow. A strong album perfectly closing an awesome run!