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Of Tripping Corpses and New Wavy Gravy: Raymond Pettibon’s 80s zines were the best thing ever
03.02.2017
01:05 pm
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Currently the subject of an impressive retrospective at the New Museum, Raymond Pettibon has long had the status of an art master who was hiding in plain sight. When I was learning about punk rock in the late 1980s, there wasn’t a thing on earth as dark, funny, or cool as any one of his Black Flag album covers, which had an obscure, unsettling power at that time that the Internet and other forces have done much to blunt in the intervening years. His single-panel pieces of that era addressed tough subjects like rape, domination, and pedophilia, virtually always with a bitter, knowing caption that had the effect of setting the viewer’s mind ablaze.

The merest glance at 4 or 5 of his album covers was plenty to convince any interested party that Pettibon had produced tons of other work at a comparable level, and thank god, that turned out to be the case. In addition to his album covers, Pettibon made his name in the early 1980s with a series of self-produced zines that were likewise put out by his brother’s label SST and used the same killer comix technique of charged imagery coupled with deliciously nasty text.

According to Brian Cassidy’s online bookshop, who was selling “one of an unnumbered edition of approximately 5000, ‘of which only about 100 found their way into commercial distribution,’” the story of Pettibon’s zines starts with disappointment and failure:
 

They unfortunately didn’t sell well and—according to the artist—he destroyed most of the remaining copies, leaving only a hundred or so copies of each issue extant.


 
That estimation of “a hundred or so” is rather interesting—Booktryst’s writeup of some of his zines include a phrase I don’t recall ever seeing in any other context, that being “Limited edition of 500 (i.e. 100).”

Pettibon was wildly prolific, and there are plenty of titles to ponder, but with so few copies of each in circulation, prices have predictably skyrocketed in the intervening decades—each title fetches hundreds of dollars, and you can buy larger lots for as much as $20,135.

Pettibon, whose characteristic register on Twitter is one of irascible exasperation, spoke out recently against the well-known “fence” known as “eBay” where you can obtain fake Pettibons (or something, he’s not the clearest):
 

 
Pettibon has tended to pooh-pooh his links to punk rock as an influence, citing “Edward Hopper, Goya, John Dos Passos, the Studs Lonigan novels, Saul Bellow, and the Ashcan School of art” as well midcentury pulp comics. Myself, I notice the sly nod to Mad Magazine in the tidy disclaimer “$1.25 INSANE” tucked in the middle of the cover of Freud’s Universe. I also wouldn’t exclude George Grosz from the mix, esp. A Can at the Crossroads.

 

Captive Chains, 1978
 

Pig Cupid, 1985

 
Much more after the jump…...

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.02.2017
01:05 pm
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The wonderful, endless world of ‘Goo’ album remixes
11.02.2016
12:45 pm
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Chronic Youth
 
Raymond Pettibon’s provocative imagery for Black Flag in the early 1980s remains some of the finest specimens of album art ever created. I can still remember seeing those CDs in the store all clustered together, hardly believing my eyes. Slip It In, My War.... I think my favorite cover was Family Man.

After Sonic Youth jumped to DGC after Daydream Nation, they saw an opportunity to give Pettibon a more mainstream platform. For Goo, SY’s first album for DGC which came out in 1990, Pettibon repurposed a 1966 news photograph of Maureen Hindley and her first husband, David Smith, who were witnesses in the Moors murderers trial in the U.K., to create an instant classic, indeed one of the most iconic album covers in rock history. Surely many among the DM readership can recite Pettibon’s ineluctably lurid caption by heart: “I stole my sister’s boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat, and flash. Within a week we killed my parents and hit the road.”

Something about Pettibon’s deadpan use of comic strip tropes and the curiously cocked head angles of the two principals has made the Goo cover a nearly irresistible object of appropriation and parody. The Tumblr Goo Mashups provides a handy collection of Goo-related images. There have been reworkings that reference Star Wars, Breaking Bad, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Adventure Time, Bob Dylan, The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, Tom Waits, and on and on.

Goo mashups are so plentiful that not even the Internet can contain them all. About two months ago I was in Stockholm and a guy passed me on the street wearing a Goo shirt addressing North Korea with its odious dictator Kim Jong Un on it. The banner text was something like “Double Pleasure,” as I recall. Never did find anything about it online. (I don’t think it’s this one.)

Here are a few choice examples:
 

Batman & Robin
 

Daft Punk
 
Many more examples after the jump…....
 

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.02.2016
12:45 pm
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Is Raymond Pettibon’s old band Super Session back together?
08.18.2016
08:54 am
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Raymond Pettibon designed the world’s greatest band logo, which also happens to be the world’s greatest tattoo, and he’s arguably the greatest designer of album covers who ever lived. He did a bunch of Black Flag’s albums, and Sonic Youth’s Goo, and the gatefold images for Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime and countless others. He has a mordant sense of humor that has never been matched in the field of visual arts and if he’s not a hero of yours you’re probably too young or too old for that.

Pettibon also dabbled in music back in the day, and that’s what concerns us here. In 1990 Furthur Records (nice Pranksters reference!) put out an album credited to “Raymond Pettibon with Super Session” called Torches and Standards that was tuneful and quasi-experimental in the Sonic Youth-y sense.

Super Session also put out an 7-inch in 1992 called “Rubbing Souls And Scratching Holes.” It should go without saying that the cover art for both of these releases is first-rate, because they’re Pettibon drawings.
 

This is (apparently) Super Session working on their first album in a generation
 
So why am I bringing this up to you now? On Wednesday bassist for the aforementioned Minutemen and widely acknowledged indie rock hero Mike Watt released this tweet:
 

 
As you can see, Watt included a picture of four older dudes in a practice space, taken recently—Pettibon is identifably on the left-hand side there. Watt also threw in a bit of Super Session promo art.

Watt also links to the intriguing video below, which features some footage of Super Session playing a live show in Long Beach in 1989 or 1990, as the band’s bassist Ray Ferrell confirms in a comment to the video. I believe the video was posted by Jack Brewer of Saccharine Trust, some of whose albums Watt produced. (It’s worth taking a look at the intro text for this video, take my word for it.) Anyway, the video is raw but undeniably compelling and Watt’s saying that “after twentyfive-something years—they’re now making THE album!” so something is going on.

Anyone with “furthur” info is encouraged to keep us up to date.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Art of Punk: Watch great new doc on Black Flag and Raymond Pettibon’s iconic collaboration
Sonic Youth and Mike Watt vs Madonna

Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.18.2016
08:54 am
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Violent hippies, punk rock and Patty Hearst: Four movies by Raymond Pettibon
12.04.2014
11:52 am
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The SST catalog used to advertise four home videos directed by in-house artist Raymond Pettibon, whose name is now arguably more famous than that of his brother, Black Flag guitarist and SST honcho Greg Ginn. The original VHS tapes are all impossibly scarce, and the DVDs are pricey. Fortunately, you can now watch all four movies for free through the good offices of YouTube user Pat Maher, who has posted them with Pettibon’s blessing.

Actually, “home movies” might be a better term than home videos: it looks like Pettibon shot these no-budget, feature-length films on camcorder at his place. For the most part, the playful, amateurish, often ridiculous videos focus on (big surprise, Pettibon fans) the violent side of the hippie era. The cast consists largely of musicians from SST bands and other figures from the LA punk/art scene. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore play members of the Weather Underground in The Whole World Is Watching: Weatherman ‘69; Judgement Day Theater: The Book of Manson stars Redd Kross shredder Robert Hecker as Charlie; and Citizen Tania, with Pat Smear and Dez Cadena, dramatizes the Patty Hearst/Symbionese Liberation Army story. The exception to the hippie violence theme is Sir Drone, in which Mikes Watt and Kelley reenact the birth of SoCal punk. Dave Markey, the director of Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and 1991: The Year Punk Broke, worked on each video in some capacity.

Say goodbye to six hours of your leisure time!
 
The films of Raymond Pettibon, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.04.2014
11:52 am
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The Art of Punk: Watch great new doc on Black Flag and Raymond Pettibon’s iconic collaboration


 
Bryan Ray Turcotte, author the classic chronicle of punk rock handbills and posters, Fucked Up + Photocopied, has one of the largest private collections of punk rock-related ephemera in the world—he’s a one-man Smithsonian Institute of the counterculture, truly a maven’s maven.

When I got advance notice that one of the world’s most prominent archivists and historians on the matter of punk rock’s graphic design had made (with Bo Bushnell) a film about Black Flag and Raymond Pettibon , I was expecting something pretty great and… it’s excellent!

It went live this morning. I got the link a little while ago and promptly sat down and watched the whole thing:

On the first episode of “The Art of Punk” we dissect the art of the legendary Black Flag. From the iconic four bars symbols, to the many coveted and collected gig flyers, singles, and band t-shirts, all depicting the distinctive Indian ink drawn image and text by artist Raymond Pettibon. We start off in Los Angeles talking to two founding members, singer Keith Morris and bass player Chuck Dukowski, about what the scene was like in 1976 - setting the stage for the band’s formation, as well as the bands name, and the creation of the iconic four bars symbol. Raymond Pettibon talks with us from his New York art studio. Back in LA we meet with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, about how the art, the music, and that early LA scene impacted his own life and career. To wrap it all up we sit and talk at length, with Henry Rollins, at MOCA Grand Ave in Los Angeles, about all of the above and more.

What’s so compelling about this piece is how filmmakers Turcotte and Bushnell tell you a story that you haven’t already heard a gazillion times before by focusing in on the graphics and how important an iconic logo was back then for outsider kids to rally around, wear on their chests or have etched into their flesh.

In the film, Flea makes, I thought, an especially valuable contribution, because he was young enough then (like Rollins himself was, of course) to have been in the audience and he speaks to how seeing a group like Black Flag could change your direction in life. From what I have heard from a number of people, Flea’s supposed to have an absolutely first rate modern art collection. He’s really inspired when he speaks here.

A production of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. New MOCAtv  episodes exploring the visual identities of Dead Kennedys and Crass will debut soon at the MOCAtv YouTube channel
 

Above, Flea in his Pettibon-festooned bathroom
 

 
Thank you Tim NoPlace!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.11.2013
01:30 pm
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