Record industry apocalypse – Land of the Lost
Recently I wrote about my Napalm Beach bandcamp account being accessed, songs going missing from the Rock and Roll Hell album, and the digital distribution through CD Baby having been ended for some reason, it turns out way back in September 2013, shortly after I’d published the Napalm Beach article. Right around that time (Sept 2013-Jan 2014) every single one of my social media sites had been hacked. It might have been done then, and I never noticed because things were never the same after that.
Then I couldn’t find the master CD with my others, and I got pretty upset. Since then I realized there was another potential location, and I found the CD, so that is another crisis averted. I will be able to put the songs back into digital distribution. However there was something a bit odd about this – which is, the CD I needed – an album that was engineered and released by Greg Sage on Zeno Records – was in a binder that was in turn in a tote bag, and shoved into the bag, outside of the binder, was another Greg Sage recording – a CD version of 10-29-79. This is the album with a collage-type cover depicting a city (I’ve always assumed it was Portland, since all the bands were Portland bands) being attacked by a swarm of disc-shaped UFOs – but if you look closer you see that the UFOs are actually vinyl records. And then, if you look even closer, you see that there’s one person in the crowd just smiling, not running a way – and that is Portland car dealer Tom Peterson, the same guy on Kurt Cobain’s watch.
One thing that’s interesting about this album to me is it was recorded just a few months before Chris and his band The Goners moved to Portland.
Originally I thought this was just an entertaining 1950s horror movie cover, but now I see more in it – because now I know that record deals are made based on people willing to file defamatory reports with the FBI, and that people are harmed and killed by radiation weapons on starlike drones in the sky (UFOs, basically) – and all of this is financed – and it’s linked to the recording industry, and it’s linked to cars.
From this perspective, it looks really good for Greg Sage that he released his own music (mostly) on his own label.
One thing that’s kind of interesting about this image is it kind of links to the cover Chris painted six years later for Land Of The Lost in which he imagined Portland as a city ruined by some apocalyptic event, with the streets taken over by jungle plants and brightly colored dinosaurs.
