Sonic Temple – Album Art

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billy duffy, cassette tapes, music, rock and roll, sonic temple

In 1989, the Cult’s Sonic Temple was probably my favorite album, and it was well-loved by many of the wildly disparate groups of people I hung out with. Metal heads liked it. Punks liked it. New wavers liked it, even if they preferred the Love album. Even the mainstream liked it. Singles from Sonic Temple enjoyed massive airplay on commercial radio, but even my friends who preferred underground music thought it rocked.

With Billy Duffy’s iconic black-leather, guitar-god pose on the cover matched by insanely catchy riff-rock on the tracks, Ian Astbury’s passionate vocals, and a cameo appearance by Iggy Pop, Sonic Temple embodied all that was awesome about rock’n’roll.

These days, I tend to prefer the Electric album for classic Cult, maybe because my high-school self played Sonic Temple so many times on cassette that I wore out the magnetic tape. But if you were to hand me a beer and tell me were about to listen to the entire Sonic Temple album from start to finish, I’d be all aboard.

Last year, I tried to find a t-shirt that featured the killer cover, but what bugged me was that I couldn’t find anything with an image from the inside of the cassette sleeve.

So, I went to eBay and picked up a copy of the original cassette for about five bucks to scan all the artwork. Yes, piracy is alive and well in the twenty-first century, but I doubt the Cult is going to send me a cease-and-desist order for making my own shirt for personal enjoyment. No one has arrested me for wearing my pirated Parasauralophus shirt I had made from a scan of Topps Dinosaurs Attack cards last year.

Collector’s Guide: Sonic Temple is available in a wide variety of formats on Amazon.

cassette tape nostalgia

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1980s music, buzz factory, cassette tapes, do it, memoir, music, rock and roll, rollins band, Screaming Trees, tapes

Although you can now download these two albums in mp3 versions which sound better than my old cassettes, I’ve held on to them sentimentally. They are among my favorite hard rock albums of the 1980s, along with 13 Songs by Fugazi, Bleach by Nirvana, and Louder than Love by Soundgarden.

Here are the Amazon download links.
Rollins Band: Do It
Screaming Trees: Buzz Factory

I don’t have any certification or evidence that Henry Rollins really did sign this copy of Do It. I can’t prove its authenticity. But I can tell you that in the mid-to-late 1990s in the rock-and-roll blur that was my twenties, I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I heard Rollins come and speak at the amazing Michigan Theatre several times. On one of his tours, he did a book signing right across the street at the Borders bookstore. I went to that signing and asked him to sign my copy of Do It, which was and still is my favorite Rollins Band album.

The inlay to the Screaming Trees tape has obvious wear. You can see the dirt and what appears to be moisture damage to the paper. That’s exactly what it is, and the same goes for the Do It inlay. I never spilled anything on these but they did endure some humid and inclement weather in my old truck when I was travelling back and forth across the country for fifteen years as if there was actually something out there worth driving to. Now I am a cynical old bastard who doesn’t even have a cassette player.

The last time I played these tapes was 2009. I played them on a dual cassette deck with a USB output and digitized them into glorious mp3 files. Yeah, it was kind of a waste of time since I could download them now from Amazon or something, but it verified they play. Since then, for six years, they have been stored indoors, free from inclement weather, on my bookshelves with the rest of my pirate treasure. ARRGH! You can see there is a little wear to the text on the cassettes, but you can easily read all the song titles and stuff, and the tapes themselves are in amazingly clean and solid shape for being more than twenty or thrity years old now.

“It’s a one way ride to the end of the universe.” — Mark Lanegan