This cover of John Fred and his Playboy Band’s Judy in Disguise (In Glasses) is from the second printing of the LP; the titular song is pretty well done, and supposedly a parody of The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” If this commonly accepted piece of pop lore is true, then the song ranks as a massive failure. Nothing other than the mild similarity in titles would indicate its parody status. Not the lyrics, not the music.
The song interests me, but more so the album art. I’m conceptually turned on by design degeneration– the process by which subcultural and quote-edgy-unquote design motifs and elements get absorbed into the mainstream, and there’s no period in which this was more fascinating than the post-psychedelic era of 1968-1969-1970. In America, anyway, this involved biting directly from the 5 or 6 artists who had defined the Filmore/Family Dog era of posters. (Little known truth: by about ‘69 most of the major artists had moved on to other things, leaving a whole new crop to produce successively less experimental posters for successively less interesting bands. For the record, I think the best artist of the period was the great Victor Moscoso.)
As I type this, I’m sitting beneath a framed version of this:
It’s dead on certain there’s no one else alive who loves this poster as much I do. From a design degeneration standpoint, along with cultural ramifications, there’s no better example of psychedelic artwork getting ripped off and abused by the Money Thresher of Mammon. Background: this is from Disney’s 1969/70 re-release of Fantasia, a naked cash-in on the druggie head-and-college crowd.
This particular image is too small to show all the details, but those orange blurs dancing down the yellow path at the left of the image are, in fact, magic mushrooms. Now in stereophonic sound! The function of the poster is a pure, commercial signal to the dope addled youth: this is what you want to see while high.
I believe this poster coincides with the period where Disney were unwilling to let young men with long hair into DisneyLand.
