Rock and Roll part 2

At the time I bought the book I posted last week I also bought this book.  Diane and I would drive around Mass. on Saturdays and just stop in small towns and look around, then drive on to the next town. It was a fun way to spend a day.  At a store that sold odd lots of things they had a pile of books, and I bought these two because I like the genre of music.  But also because they were sewn bindings so I could do something with them.

This one is called The Book of Rock and was published by Rolling Stone magazine.  It's pretty small, 3.25 inches tall and 2.75 inches wide.

I thought it would be fun to make a decorative box for it, and decided on an amplifier.  I wavered between spending a lot of time making an accurate model of one using Sculpey or something like that but that didn't really interest me.  Lugging amps around was never the most fun part of playing music, so maybe I had issues.  So I made this, which I liked because I thought the cartoonish nature of it suited the content more.

The box is leather with silk over where the speakers would be and painted super glued down where the controls are.

The front cover is the same scans of ticket stubs I used in the other book.  Concerts mostly seemed to me to be about the joy of music, the fun of enjoying something with a crowd, and spontaneity of the show and feeling like you learned something about the artist just by watching them perform.  So, thus the stubs to commemorate the best thing about rock music.

The back is money, which is what everything ends up being about in the end.  By the way, the name on the amplifier is sort of the Swedish word for money.  The endbands were money as well.

Here's the whole thing:

I did it as an onset board binding, where the leather was on the book before the covers were attached.  It allows for a very clean edge where the cover meets the leather.

It was an interesting project, because it's outside what I normal do but it's something I wanted to try and I'm happy with how it came out.  

Book Fun

Several years ago I bought a book that had something to do with rock music.  It was a sewn, softcover binding so I bought it thinking it might be fun to do something with it.  Other than read it, of course.   

It was produced by, I think, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, probably the most disappointing place I've ever been to.  Really.

I hemmed and hawed over what to do but finally settled on doing something iconic.  For the front I modified a picture of Dave Davies and for the back a picture of Pete Townsend.  For editorial reasons, of course.  They are leather onlays, thin pieces of leather pasted over the cover leather.  I decided to stick with black and red, two perhaps too obvious choices but I really liked the red skin.

Here's the front:

Here's the back:

For the end bands I used zippers:

And, for the endpapers I scanned ticket stubs from concerts I've attended.  I challenge you to find how many Kinks stubs you can see.  I should add that I placed the Bob Marley stub prominently because it amazes people twenty years younger than me that I actually saw him at the Paramount.  It was an amazing experience for several reasons I don't have time for right now. 

I encourage you to also look at the prices.  What's funny is that I don't have any stubs from Bad Company (!), or Johnny Guitar Watson or other shows I remember so well.  But I did still have my stub from a show at the Whiskey in LA, hopefully I get some points for that.  I just won't tell you who I saw, I'd be deducted points for that.  

(Clicking the pictures enlarges them.)

I did another book about rock, that I bought at the same time.  I'll put that up later.  Probably.