Gary Panter blog

SUMMER OF LOVE

My family drove to California to visit our cousins who had left Oklahoma for California years before. We hadn't seen them since they left and now we were teenagers, speaking of my sister, brother and myself, and not little kids anymore.

The stuff on the radio at that time was so great. Psychedelic bands had taken over the airwaves. Every new Beatle record took a giant stylistic and conceptual step. Sunny Goodge Street was a hit. As we crossed the vast western desert I heard pop songs I wouldn't hear again for years until I heard them on the Nuggets collections. One of the most thrilling and elusive was "My Clown" by JULY which I heard once on the trip and never forgot.

Along the way signs beckon the weary traveler to stop and have a drink of sodapop and check out the local vaunted oddity. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere my brother wanted to go see something advertised as the worlds smallest bull and so he went in by himself. When he can out he seemed a little sheepish and refused to tell us what he saw in there and to this day still refuses to discuss it.

Our cousins, HotRod, Sonja, Joy and Marvin lived in the town of Shasta on Mt. Shasta. We could see Mt. Shasta from really far away as we neared their town.

Mt. Shasta had a real Head Shop, with smelly hippies doing beadwork and silkscreening posters and incense, gods eyes, posters, comix. pipes, rose-colored-multifaceted granny glasses, hookahs, woven rugs, aromatic oils and candles. Wow, I couldn't have wished for a cooler head shop.

HotRod and Tommy and Marvin and I went for a hike up Mt. Shasta. HotRod was recently real surprised to hear that I don't remember the UFO we saw on top of the mountain, making me wonder if maybe we weren't picked up and examined, and my memory erased. Shasta was famous for UFO sightings. There was a UFO cult that lived up there called the IAMERS that wore bunny suits according to HotRod, but I never saw any.

Near the head shop was a record shop. I bought: The Freak Scene, Jefferson Airplane, The Mothers of Invention and the Electric Prunes.

UPLIFT MOFO

The second time I did a Chili Pepper's cover was their third album, Uplift Mofo Party Plan, and they had become a giant band by then.

This time I met with the band on the parking lot at A&M records and they were in their big green fuzzy pyschofreak pimpmobile and they suggested that the car might be on or inspire the cover. And so it did. I don't know what the car started as. I would guess it was a 1966 Oldsmobile, but really I don't know. They had collectively transformed the car into an elfin glade with matte black and flat green spraypaint, LED twinkle lights, colored plexiglass scrollwork, all kinds of fake fur, monster and alien toys, sewn vinyl, fuzzy stuff, feathers and patterned metal. The art needed to be combined with photos of the band, computer stretched into a circle. They mentioned some imagery from the lyrics and mentioned the desert and I went to work. As before, the illustration had something in common with the paintings I was doing for myself at that time. This time the paint was more opaque and had a lot of blended colors and airbrush effects. Probably the last time I used the airbrush. I did separate line work that got knocked out of the color art and then printed in a metallic ink for a scribbled-on effect.

I tried to imagine the fun and insanity that must have gone on in that car out in the desert and on Hollywood Blvd.