Random Rules: Poster artist Rob Jones
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The shuffler: Locally based artist Rob Jones, whose work has been commissioned by everyone from the Alamo Drafthouse to Doug Stanhope to locals like Riverboat Gamblers. Most famously, Jones has produced scores of images—including tour posters, record and DVD covers, T-shirts, and websites—for The White Stripes, as well as Jack White’s side projects The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather. He can currently be seen in the documentary Died Young, Stayed Pretty.
David Allan Coe, “I Ain’t Gonna Let You Go Again”
Rob Jones: I like David Allan Coe a lot. I bought all the CDs except for Requiem For A Harlequin, which hasn’t been re-released yet—and I doubt they’ll ever do it. It was this bizarre fucking concept record about “life in the concrete jungle” or some shit. The first six songs are called “The Beginning,” and tracks seven through 13 are called “The End.” It’s all about him gambling, shacking up with some transvestite, yelling at the audience if they judge him and shit. It basically destroyed his career for a bit. They were like, “Dude, you’re fired.” He couldn’t get a record deal to save his life, and he basically had to fucking keep writing songs until enough popular artists played them that Columbia came knocking. Once he got that contract, he went straight country, like, “Fuck it, I’m not gonna experiment anymore.” Wish they’d put it out, though, because it’s fucking awesome, and all the copies out right now are off people’s fucking vinyl.
The A.V. Club: Maybe when he dies?
RJ: Might not be too long! Have you seen him lately? Jesus Christ.
The Dwarves, “Free Cocaine”
RJ: I bought this CD at their show in Tallahassee. That was a fucking bizarre show. There was some opening band with a bunch of fucking fraternity guys in their skivvies doing some ska shit. They all walked up in their underwear and broke out trombones and I was like, “Oh, fuck.” Then there was some sad punk motherfucker who came on after that, and he was talking about how he was gonna “help the kids out” or some shit, and my wife’s buddy kept getting right in the dude’s face, but he wouldn’t do anything. Then The Dwarves came out, and my wife’s buddy tried that shit with Blag [Dahlia], and Blag punched him right in the face. The sad thing was the guy was happy, like, “Finally!”
Charles Manson, “Cease To Exist”
RJ: Even if this wasn’t Charles Manson, even if it was just some random weird hippie motherfucker, I would love this record. This is the one the Beach Boys covered, where they changed the lyrics to “cease to resist” [“Never Learn Not To Love”]. I’ve got a bunch of Manson records, and this is obviously the best one, because it was recorded in a studio—as opposed to, like, the bathroom at San Quentin. I feel bad whenever anyone covers Manson that they feel the need to fucking apologize. Remember all the brouhaha when Axl Rose did it on The Spaghetti Incident?
Captain Sensible, “Lib 2/3”
RJ: He’s my favorite recording artist of all time, but I’m actually not familiar with this song. Everyone just thinks of “Happy Talk” and “Wot?” but his greatest shit came after everyone wrote him off. [Smash] Your Head Against The Wall by John Entwhistle is one of my favorite records of all time, Brian Eno’s Here Come The Warm Jets is one my favorites of all time, but my favorite record of all time is easy: It’s fucking The Universe Of Geoffrey Brown by Captain Sensible. Revolution Now is probably my least favorite Captain Sensible record. I only got to see him solo once, and it was the most depressing thing. It was in this shit hole-in-the-wall club in London, and when he came out everyone threw their fucking cups of beer at him—not just one or two, but this locust swarm of fucking beer cups wailing on him. He was playing his solo shit, but everyone was hoping he’d play some Damned crap. I mean, I love The Damned—they’re my favorite group of all time—but it’s sad when a guy goes solo and all people want to hear is what he did before.
David Allan Coe, “Why You Been Gone So Long”
RJ: I just took my wife to see him recently, and she hates him. She hates a lot of my stuff—she fucking hates KISS to death, but she really hates David Allan Coe. It fucking started raining and everyone left, except for me and the diehards, and finally the Stubb’s dude was like, “You gotta cut this shit, because these people are gonna get fucking electrocuted.” When we walked out, it was raining so hard I fucking lost contact with her, and I thought she was going to get the car, so I waited out front, but she ended up walking to the car and waiting for me, because I had the keys. So she was waiting for 20 minutes with some homeless dudes. Suffice to say, I owed her big, so I took her to Jane’s Addiction. Which was actually a good experience for me.
R.E.M., “Wolves, Lower”
RJ: R.E.M.’s a big thing where I come from—I grew up in Albany, Georgia, and R.E.M. was what everybody had to listen to. I had a graduating class of 40, and I was the only punk shithead—and the only guy who listened to Led Zeppelin and fucking Black Sabbath. We had maybe five or six Manchester fucks, and everyone else was fucking R.E.M. and The Allman Brothers, Hoodoo Gurus, Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, other Athens shit like Kilkenny Cats and Time Toy. Everyone in my high school bought a lot of tapes of local bands; there wasn’t a “scene,” but everyone would trade these tapes of bizarre-ass fucking bands no one ever heard of. There was a band called The Piedmont Cooks that played proms and shit, and everyone in my high school had their fucking tapes. We got them for our prom, and they thought they were gonna play covers, but we were requesting their original songs. They were stupefied that anyone had ever fucking heard of them.
AVC: Some people would be envious that you grew up around that ’80s Georgia scene.
RJ: Yeah, if I lived in fucking Athens, but I grew up in fucking Albany, dude! You ever fucking heard of it? There are three reasons you would have heard of Albany: One, because we got our ass flooded hard—like coffins and shit were floating down Main St. Second, we were murder capital of the United States one year. We beat Detroit. We’re in all the sociology books, because for some reason we liked killing each other a lot. And we were the single-parent capital of the world and divorce capital of the world. What a shitty fucking trifecta. The sad thing is, when we were murder capital of the U.S., it was the biggest explosion of civic pride you’ve ever seen. People were making T-shirts with machine guns on them. Any place you grow up you’ll have affection for, but it’s a hard place to love. If it didn’t have good food, I couldn’t think of a positive thing to say about it. Oddly enough, best Chinese food I’ve ever had, anywhere.
Black Flag, “Annihilate This Week”
RJ: When I was kid, I bought Hit Parader and Metal Edge and shit, and there would be ads for SST in there. The album art for Slip It In fucking horrified me—[Raymond] Pettibon’s drawing of a nun holding a hairy leg freaked me out. And when I got older, I was like, “I need to find that fucking record.” I had to drive to Tallahassee to buy fucking records. You know that band Harvey Milk? Steve Tanner, the bassist, would drive with me.
AVC: Was Pettibon a big influence on you?
RJ: Oh shit, yeah. All that stuff for Black Flag, especially the captions, had a big influence on me. A lot of my posters have a caption at the bottom, and a lot of that comes from Pettibon—and probably [Frank] Kozik too.
The Cramps, “What’s Inside A Girl?”
RJ: Can you believe [Lux Interior] died? What the fuck? He and [Poison] Ivy looked like the two coolest people on Earth. In fact, I can’t think of anybody cooler. Even Johnny Cash. That’s right! I said it! Throw some tomatoes at me if you want, motherfuckers! I never saw Lux on late-night TV trying to sell me electronic bibles! I love The Cramps. As hard as it was to buy records in Albany, it was even harder to buy cool rock T-shirts if you didn’t have a Burning Airlines catalog. One of the first shirts I ever made, my mom got some cheap T-shirts and I used to make Cramps T-shirts with Sharpies, copying the logo and the zombie-looking Lux from Bad Music For Bad People onto a yellow shirt with stippling and shit. But nobody in my school knew who The Cramps were, so they were all like, “What, you got cramps?” No, motherfucker! Put that Allman Brothers away and listen to this.
