After a few discouraging attempts to get into various tepid indie rock acts, I recently retreated to some guaranteed good times by listening to lots of Lee “Scratch” Perry productions. Finally, someone who isn’t trying spin a whole album and/or career out of one or two catchy ideas. Generally when you’re dealing with somebody who crossed out every vowel in his recording studio, then later burnt the studio to the ground in an acid-induced conviction that it had become inhabited by Satan, it stands to reason that there’s a fair amount of legitimate inspiration involved along the way.
It occurred to me at some point that there’s probably about 50 fascinating Perry-produced albums, another 50 utterly horrible ones, and I’ve only explored about 15 of them to date… so feeling out some of the remaining 85 might be more fruitful then listening to the latest highly-recommended release by the Purple Monkey Dishwashers or whoever.
This got me thinking about whether Perry is legitimately the weirdest person involved in the entire music industry, before eventually realizing that Phil Spector could probably give him a good run for his money:
Taking this a little further: it occurred to me that, in the great tradition of dub comic book battle covers …
… I would have loved to see a dub clash album between Perry and Spector and the cover art that would result from this showdown. How would the Perry’s Kung Fu / Super Ape persona defend himself from Spector’s crushing Wall of Sound (and multiple handguns)? Best of all, how would the wall of sound be portrayed? Like a tidal wave, with various amps and men wielding tire chains in its wake? Or would it be portrayed more abstractly, like how Marvel comics artists used to show Banshee?:
Would Spector be drawn as the classic Diminutive Evil Mastermind? His hair and short stature would make this approach pretty irresistible… but for some reason, I imagine him getting the Dr. Octopus treatment, with multiple arms twiddling various knobs and whatnot.