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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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" So far on this blog, we've covered artists ranging from hugely successful (T. Rex, Roy Wood) to very niche but still sufficiently well known to warrant their own Wikipedia pages (Rote Kapelle, The Flock). For the next couple of posts though, we'll be venturing into truly obscure territory. The folk group Archaeopteryx released one album in 1976, First Flight - A Collection of Songs About Birds. It was released as a 12 inch vinyl record by a well-known UK charity, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), with some nice artwork of the early fossil bird Archaeopteryx by Peter Martin (an artist about whom I have not been able to find out anything) on the front and rear covers of the sleeve. Archaeopteryx is of course famous as it has generally been considered the oldest known bird, hence the name First Flight (ignoring, of course, that pterosaurs actually took to the skies more than 50 million years before birds, and that the flight abilities of Archaeopteryx are the subject of much debate). I assume that the record was intended as a fundraiser for the RSPB, although there's no information available online to confirm this. The album features classically-influenced folk versions of traditional songs about British birds, ranging from the nightingale to the turtle dove, recorded in a church in Buckinghamshire. The songs are interspersed with snippets of bird song from the BBC Sound Archives. There are no songs about fossil birds, so the link to Archaeopteryx is unclear. If all that sounds like it might be unlikely to be up my street, you'd be correct: as much as I like some British folk music of this era, this is just too traditional and too folk for me. If you want to listen to it yourself then you'll have to buy a copy, because as far as I can tell, no-one has digitised it and made it available. It is a nice sleeve that will frame up well, and copies are available quite cheaply on Discogs and eBay. If anyone knows more about the back story to this record I'd love to hear it. I actually donated a framed copy of this record to the 2017 SVPCA auction, the aim of which is to raise money to support attendance at the conference for those with limited funding resources. I felt slightly guilty when the bidding spiralled out of control, and one of our conference attendees ended up paying £60 for it, but at least the money went to a worthy cause. If the person who bought it is by chance reading this, please let me know what you make of the record... Does it get any better than this? Marc Bolan's glam rock band T. Rex are surely not only the most successful pop group with a palaeontological moniker, but also the best. Hugely influential on everyone from Kate Bush to The Smiths, they were the biggest band in the UK in the early 1970s. Hot Love was their second single after shortening their name from Tyrannosaurus Rex, their first number 1 record, and just one of an astonishing series of perfect pop songs released from 1970–1973 (for my money, Jeepster is the best, but they are all great). Most of the covers for Hot Love featured images of Marc Bolan and percussionist Mickey Finn. However, the Italian release (still using the name Tyrannosaurus Rex) was unique in featuring a rather Godzilla-like creature, presumably supposed to be a dinosaur, on the front cover. It was backed by the track Woodland Rock. You can get a copy fairly cheaply on Discogs. Perhaps surprisingly, very few of T. Rex's record sleeves have images of dinosaurs on them. In fact, I've only been able to identify two others so far in addition to Hot Love: the UK promo, Japanese and French releases of the very first single by the band back in 1968, Deborah, which all feature versions of the iconic life restoration of Tyrannosaurus rex by Neave Parker, and the inner sleeve of their first album, the bonkers folk-rock of My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows, which features the same image. I'd like to cover the former in more detail at some point, but copies currently start at £80 on Discogs, so it probably won't be soon. While we're on the topic of the Neave Parker Tyrannosaurus rex, check out the absolutely incredible poster (below) for the 1969 visit of Bolan's band to the Town Hall right here in Birmingham, hosted by none other than John Peel. I suspect that there may only be one copy of this in existence, but if anyone ever sees one for sale, please let me know. There are some other equally great and rare posters out there, including one to promote the 1969 album Unicorn. The poster was created by Tom Wilkes and features Marc Bolan and early band member Steve Peregrin Took nestled in the antorbital fenestra of a Tyrannosaurus skull. Another marvelous, psychedelic poster was created by George Underwood to promote 1968 album My People Were Fair... Finally, I've not listened to all of T. Rex's albums, so I can't confirm how often dinosaurs appear in song lyrics, but there is at least one example, from 1968's Strange Orchestras: "Saw a face in a conical of lace, it was a strange orchestra Mannequin skin pounding on a bass-drum, strange orchestra Lilliputian, evil in the eyes of the man with the leaf harp He lusts for the urchin hiding under mountains of moleskin A big cat like t-tyrannosaurus going to Lilliput The ensemble make a tiny rumble, the celloist solos The sky blackens and the bass string slackens and they stand statuesquely Then they giggle and they wiggle through the door in the big dark oak tree" Yeah. Make of that what you will... 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. |