The Story
In March of 1981, my good friend Carmen Borgia—lead singer in our band, Some Ambulants, and co-DJ with me on Friday mornings at KSDT for our radio show, DJ's In The Nude—and I munched a handful of shrooms and then spent the next several hours wandering the beaches and neighborhoods of Encinitas, CA, just mesmerized by it all. Yup.
For a moment (or nine...) in there during our altered adventures that day, Carmen became transfixed by this otherwise nondescript little pink stucco house we wandered past on one of the Tuesday-afternoon-deserted streets of the town. I carried a cheapo GAF SLR with me a lot in those days (but I had a good lens!). I had it with me on this day, of course, so while Carmen stood dazed and confused in front of the house, I shot a picture of him drinking it all in, looking as if he were standing on the edge of... the future. Well, that's what it felt like under the influence of mushrooms when I shot the picture, anyway. You had to be there. That picture went into my archives—a set of Kodak Carousel slide trays I still have to this day—along with the many hundreds of other slides I shot back then (and I shot ONLY slides—Kodachrome WAS in fact THE shit—Paul Simon was definitely right about that...).
When I was pulling together the Some Ambulants website linked above in early 2018 as I was recovering from a broken neck a young lady named Gargie gave to me (the site is still running; the neck is no longer a brokey), I tacked a white sheet to a wall in my studio, set up my Kodak slide projector, grabbed my Carousel trays and displayed numerous slides from the era onto the crumpled sheet, snapping photos of them with my (not cheap) Nikon DSLR (yes, I am too cheap to pay a service to scan them for me!). They were all pretty shitty versions of the pics I got doing it in that lo-fi sort of way I cobbled together, but that didn't matter: it was the time I was looking to capture, not the clarity or perfection of the stills I shot back then (you can see plenty more examples on the linked SA site...).
I have said it before, but sometimes even 'crappy' pictures can lead to more interesting album cover art than that provided by perfectly tack sharp pictures. I think this picture of 'Carmen confronting House' qualifies.
From my dumbed down re-capture process I ended up with the lackluster, off-kilter shot of Carmen in front of the house shown above. But it was nothing a little work in Photoshop couldn't fix up!
You'll note that the final art below is very Pepto-Bismol® pink in hue, which is how I remember it (but the lens don't lie, so maybe that was all in my head at the time after all... or perhaps the slide has faded over the decades sine it was shot and developed... who knows?). All I know for sure is we were on fuego!
As I worked the pic of Carmen into the cover art, it was too wide for me to get all I wanted from it in a square rendition, so I squashed it in from the sides, making Carmen even skinnier than he already was back then. And yes, I did light up the colors! It simply grabs the eye more. Also, I swapped the original house address number of '233' with my preferred number of '2024' (with the 'hanging 4' there to make the edit look REALSY... allowable under edict 2077.43.1 of the fakey laws of editing/creating—that is, do what you wanna do, as long as no one gets hurt, amirite?).
THE TITLE: What is "Michael's Sailboat," and why does Michael have a sailboat sitting on his head?? I've put the whole story in the liner notes for Michael's Sailboat 2024 on Bandcamp.
THE FINAL:
Done. /\/\
