In the late 1970s and early 1980s, an important alternative music scene emerged from the small college town of Athens, Georgia, including both The B-52’s and R.E.M. Much less commercially successful, but highly influential, was the post-punk of their contemporaries Pylon, a four-piece who released two classic albums before disbanding. Pylon’s second album, Chomp, has an excellent cover that features a photograph of the head of a model of the theropod dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex. The photograph is credited to Lowell T. Seaich, who was a printer based in Salt Lake City who produced souvenir postcards of Utah sites. The T. rex model is the one in the Dinosaur Garden at the Utah Field House of Natural History in Vernal, one of a number of models produced in the early 1960s by sculptor Elbert Porter, who taught art at the University of Utah from the 1940s to 1960s.
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This blog has been dormant for a month, due to a family holiday, work, and life in general catching up with me. But I'm back, with the first appearance by one of the most charismatic and famous of fossil invertebrate groups. The Trilobites were a minor indie rock band from Sydney, Australia, who released three albums and a fistful of singles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Night of the Many Deaths was their third single, and is notable here because it's one of only a few of their releases to feature their fossil namesakes on the cover. The front of Night of the Many Deaths shows what appears to be a train track or rollercoaster, with five trilobites riding in carriages. I'm fairly ignorant when it comes to trilobites, so if anyone can help narrow down the taxonomic identification that would be great. Images of trilobites do appear on at least three other of the band's record sleeves. The front cover of the single Jenny's Wake (1988) features a middle-aged female chef who is apparently horrified by a steaming pan of cooked trilobites, while if you look closely at the cover of the album Savage Mood Swing (1989), you'll see trilobites hidden in the background. The cover of the CD release of the 1989 single New Head features a trilobite sitting on a couch under a lamp - perhaps visiting its psychiatrist? These Aussie rockers are far from the only popular musical link to trilobites. A search of Discogs and Bandcamp reveals multiple others, including Californian punk rock from JJ & the Trilobites, sludge metal band Trilobite from Palm Beach, and a Miami-based Americana group called Trilobites, among others. Maybe we'll cover some of these in more detail somewhere down the line. So far, this blog has been almost entirely dominated by dinosaurs. That's perhaps unsurprising, given how large they loom in the popular consciousness. By contrast, their Mesozoic mammalian contemporaries are pretty much absent from the annals of rock - I'm sadly not aware of any bands named after Morganucodon or Zofiabaatar. There is one exception though. The Early Mammals released a single album, Dinosaur Omelet, in the late 1980s, on Minneapolis's Channel 83 Records, home of the "best new bands in the upper Midwest" (check out the label's website, which looks like it has been fossilised since about 1998). There is almost no information available about the group, although a few details can be found in a web profile of the band's guitarist and singer Leo Whitebird. The front cover of Dinosaur Omelet features artwork by Marlene Morley, with a monstrous, tail-dragging theropod dinosaur, a volcano, and in the foreground, two small mammals chowing down on some dinosaur eggs. There's also something mysterious going on in the top right-hand corner - is this a Neanderthal face in the clouds? I asked my colleague and friend Elsa Panciroli what she made of the artwork. Elsa is currently completing her PhD at National Museums Scotland and the University of Edinburgh on Mesozoic mammals from the Isle of Skye, where she and I have done fieldwork together over several years. This is what Elsa had to say: "It looks like the artist modelled these Mesozoic mammals on a small nocturnal primate, like a tarsier or a galago. Of course primates only appeared around 55 million years ago, so they missed all the dinosaur egg-eating parties... Being generous to the artist, I imagine that when they heard that many mammals in the Mesozoic were likely nocturnal, they probably turned to well known, big-eyed nocturnal animals like the tarsier for inspiration. The massive, forward-facing eyes, rounded-face, and extremely derived arboreal adaptations of nocturnal tree-dwelling primates aren't seen in mammals until well after the dinosaurs went extinct. There is no evidence for massive eyes like this in any Mesozoic aged mammals. Tree-living mammals in the Mesozoic did have longer fingers and limbs, and possibly some had prehensile tails. But the animals on this album cover are sitting in a very 'primate-like' stance, for want of a better term, with much longer hind limbs than forelimbs, and the foot of the one in the foreground is very thin and splayed out, like a tarsier foot. No Mesozoic mammals had feet like this - that we know of so far. I'm sure you know about the old theory that the dinosaurs went extinct because mammals ate all their eggs. But there is evidence for mammals eating baby dinosaurs: Repenomamus is a large Cretaceous Mesozoic mammal found in China, with some species up to the size of a small pitbull. One specimen was found with the skeleton of a baby dinosaur in its stomach. So while this isn't egg-eating per se, it shows that some mammals at this time were eating dino-babies. Those little monsters." The music is raw, hard, garage rock. Elsa and I disagreed on what we thought about it - I'm not keen, but Elsa likes the title track, mainly because of its lyrics, written from the perspective of the chirpy little Mesozoic mammals that are driving the dinosaurs to extinction by gobbling up their eggs, with reference to the oceans filling with "dinosaur tears". The idea of dinosaurs being wiped out by voracious, egg-stealing mammals is an old one, but one that lacks any scientific support.
Only the title track is available on YouTube - to hear the rest of it you'll have to buy a copy of the vinyl. To finish up, here are the lyrics of Dinosaur Omelet in full: "You are a reptile and your blood is cold You may have been around but you're getting old But we got fur and speedy legs Our blood is warm and we eat your eggs I'll have a dinosaur omelet, cheese or plain Dinosaur omelet, the mammals will reign! We'll be human in a million years We'll have fire and clubs and spears Your eggs and young will disappear And the oceans will fill with dinosaur tears The weather's getting bad it's cold and damp Your dinosaur bodies will fill the swamps You'll never survive the coming storm But the mammals will because our blood is warm We'll be eatin' dinosaur omelet, cheese or plain Dinosaur omelet, the mammals will reign! We'll be human in a million years We'll have fire and clubs and spears Your eggs and young will disappear And the oceans will fill with dinosaur tears The ice is coming from the north As from our lairs we scurry forth To pick the meat from reptile bones And colonise your empty homes We'll be eatin' dinosaur omelet, cheese or plain Dinosaur omelet, the mammals will reign! We'll be human in a million years We'll have fire and clubs and spears Your eggs and young will disappear And the oceans will fill with dinosaur tears" Now almost entirely forgotten, Rote Kapelle were part of the Edinburgh indie scene of the mid 1980s, and shared members with several other bands, including the rather wonderful jangle-pop groups Jesse Garon and the Desperados, The Shop Assistants, and The Fizzbombs. Although some of Rote Kapelle's later recordings would have similarly twee leanings, the four tracks on their debut, The Big Smell Dinosaur E.P, are much harder and noisier, more post-punk than indie-pop. I quite like it. The band took their name from the name given by the Gestapo to an anti-Nazi resistance movement (Die Rote Kapelle - the Red Orchestra) operating in Berlin during WW2. In their short career, the band released three EPs, two 7" singles, and a single album. Their first effort, The Big Smell Dinosaur E.P, was self-released (on 'Big Smell Dinosaur Records' according to the cover) and limited to 500 copies. The band designed and printed the sleeves themselves. The six band members then hand coloured all of them, with each sleeve being unique as a result. The cover is graced by two Brontosaurus, feeding on horsetails, with an erupting volcano on the horizon, and some sauropod footprints in the foreground. A tiny Stegosaurus on the rear cover reminds us that, although it is a 7", the record should be played at 33 rpm. Although one of the tracks is titled Evolution, I must admit that the link between the music and dinosaurs isn't particularly clear to me. The artist is not credited, and I assume that the sauropods are redrawings of some 1970s or early 1980s palaeo-art, but I can't identify them. If anyone has an idea of where they are from, please let me know in the comments. All of the songs on this E.P., King Mob, Evolution, Fergus! The Sheep! and A Gasfire, are available on YouTube, and the original vinyl is available via Discogs. When it comes to Australian music, I must admit to being pretty ignorant. I'm a huge fan of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (the best live band I've ever seen), and various associated acts like The Dirty Three and The Birthday Party, but after that I know next to nothing about alternative rock culture Down Under. Before starting this blog I had never heard of Hoodoo Gurus or their seminal 1984 album Stoneage Romeos. I think it is fair to say that I had been missing out. Hoodoo Gurus formed in 1981 in Sydney, and their debut outing is an absolutely cracking blast of new wave, psychobilly and garage rock with some fantastic pop tunes. I have no idea why it isn't better known in Europe. It also has a stunning sleeve - a Day-Glo version of Ray Harryhausen's Allosaurus from the film One Million Years B.C., menacing a cowering cave-woman, while pterosaurs wheel through the sky. Bizarrely, for the US and several other international releases, this wonderful cover art was replaced by bland images of stylised dinosaurs (by Donald Krieger). The band's frontman Dave Faulkner referred to this as "bad coffee table art, very anonymous and boring". I would agree, which is why I recommend buying the original Australian edition. Stoneage Romeos takes its name from a short 1955 comedy film, Stone Age Romeos, featuring the slapstick team The Three Stooges. This takes me back to my childhood years, watching old black and white Stooges films on TV on Saturday mornings. In Stone Age Romeos, The Stooges aim to prove that cavemen still exist, and fake the evidence needed to do so. The artwork for the original Australian release of Stoneage Romeos was designed by Yanni Stumbles, a Sydney-based artist who produced screen-prints in the early 1980s, before moving to move in the areas of management and production design in the music industry. You can read more about her, and see more examples of her work here. Several singles were released from the album, including I Want You Back, which has an excellent music video, stuffed full of wonderfully crap stop-motion dinosaurs. There's lots of other examples of fun dinosaur imagery associated with Hoodoo Gurus, including concert posters, a 2005 tribute album called Stoneage Cameos, and the cover of the 2010 album Purity of Essence. If you want to buy the original release of Stoneage Romeos, you can find it on Discogs here. It comes highly recommended. |