Cool Cartoon Record Sleeves and Art #2

BATTLE OF THE GARAGES Voxx Records: VXS 200.006 (1981)

Here’s my second-in-series of Blog posts about records* in my collection with cool cartoon art.**  Check out the companion series of posts about rock 'n roll comics.***  Make with the clicks if you want to see all of the posts.

The Art/Artist:

This record was a keeper from my retail days, coming to me in a large collection of garage-punk type records that I got on-line. (You used to be able to cruise ebay for cool record collections and get them cheap enough to resale.  I think that’s no longer a thing.)  It was definitely the jacket art that tipped the scales in favor of this being a keeper:  A cartoon of a street full of suburban garages that’s been turned into a WWI style trench warfare landscape.  Torn basketball nets,  broken mailboxes, and blood spattered guitars litter the barb wired ditch separating the open doored band practice space.  A machine gun blasts from the closest one on the right.  The two things that really make this jacket land as a cartoon are the lettering and the coloring.  The ginormous title/logo would make Gaspar Saladino gasp in jealous appreciation.  The Pop!, Krak, Blam sound effects, as well as the buddabuddabuddabudda of the machine gun are effectively drawn and placed in such a way as to direct the “story” of the battle.  The colors could be a classroom example of the difference between chroma and saturation: The yellows. pinks, and oranges are dim in terms of brightness (i.e. low chroma) but distinct in terms of how they stand out as representatives of their place on the spectrum. (i.e. high saturation)  The result is striking.  I also like that the smoke plume that starts on the bottom left of the jacket front actually creeps around to form a design element on the back of the jacket.  A copy with split seams at the top and bottom could easily be turned into a cool 24” wide poster.

The cover was designed and drawn by graphic designer Diane Zincavage. Zincavage was a prolific graphic designer of album covers as well as print publications, but not a cartoonist per se. That makes this cover all the more striking to me, because she absolutely nails the language of comic art, something that a lot of graphic designers charged with using cartoon art usually miss.

I would definitely like to know more about Diane Zincavage. I’m a little surprised that I can’t find a tribute web page or some such for someone with so many album art credits, especially given how popular the bands are within their niche. 

The Record/Band(s):

This was the first of the “Battle of the Garages” series from Voxx records. (The subsequent also good LPs had a different jacket artist with a less comic-book-more psychedelic style) I gather that there was some sort of call put out for artists to participate in this battle, winner to be decided by popular vote via a ballot included with the record.  My copy doesn’t have the ballot and I hope that’s because the original owner voted.

When I think of Voxx records, I usually think of bands who mimicked a pretty specific type and era of American garage rock: the post-British invasion raunchy Yardbirds, Stones, Kinks, (et al) influenced stuff. That is definitely an over generalization as they had acts that had more of a hard psychedelic bent or that fell into the realm of power pop, but it’s bands like the Telltale Hearts, Grave Digger V, and Miracle Workers that stand out to me. You’d expect that a comp produced by Voxx would have a similar bias, but actually Battle of the Bands shows that Voxx had bigger ears and recognized that garage rock wasn’t a punch out template.

I don’t wanna do a deep dive on the 16 songs/bands that appear on the record, at least not in this space at this time. I think what’s notable is that there isn’t a stinker in the bunch.  All 16 tracks rock the fuck out.   Songs I like a lot:: 

• The Stepmothers cover of Bobby Fuller’s “Late Her Dance”

• The Slickee Boys doing a dual cover of the Squires’ “Going All The Way” and the Downliners Sect’s “Glendora”***

• The Wombats’ “The Reason Why”

• Deniz Tek (of Radio Birdman fame)’s cover of the Super Stock’s “RPM”

• The Chesterfield Kings’ cover of the Chocolate Are You 

Duh Moment: Never really realized that this whole album was (at least mostly) comprised of covers until I started researching this post. I can’t find any info on the Wombats’ song, so maybe that’s an original? Somebody smarter than me let me know!

Who would I vote for if polls were still open,  I think the Slickee Boys for the clever mash-up of two delightful obscurities.

Footnotes:

*By "records" I mostly mean vinyl. 12"s, 10"s, 7's, shaped picture discs, et. al. I do reserve the right to include flexi-discs, CDs, Cassettes, 8-Tracks, or whatever medium. 

**by "cartoon art" I mean art that uses images to tell a narrative and somehow relates back to the American tradition of comic strips or comic books. By telling a narrative, I mean the image can't be summed up without using a complete sentence, going beyond simple portraiture, graphic design, or illustration.

***Defined separately, though in similarly obtuse terms. 

****Well… a cover of the Sect’s version of Glendora. Not long ago I was enlightened to Glendora actually being a freakin’ Perry Como song originally!  Who knew???