Two weeks to go: the remaster of Dog Legs and Feet's live album “Bottom” comes out April 21!)
Yes, you can pre-save it - and you should!
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the re-release will have different artwork and a slightly different title than the 1999 CD version. Let's dig into the reasons for this.
A Collection of What?
The original title was “Bottom: A Live Collection of Dog Legs and Feet." Now you may well ask me, Jeremy, why would a person give this name to an album they actually wanted people to listen to? Well, I'll tell you.
I should first tell you where the band name “Dog Legs & Feet” comes from.We got it from a lyric by Cream, the 60s classic-rock power trio. On their album Wheels of Fire, there's a song called Pressed Rat and Warthog, which opens with these poignant lines:
Pressed Rat and Warthog have closed down their shop
They didn't want to, 'twas all they had got
selling atonal apples, and amplified heat
and Pressed Rat's collection of dog legs and feet.
Some other time maybe I'll explain why this became our name, but for now let's just agree that it did. (Fun fact: there are also bands out there called Pressed Rat and Warthog, Atonal Apples, and Amplified Heat.)
But anyway, having done so, it was a bit hard to resist using the phrase “collection of Dog Legs & Feet” in the album title. I mean, look: A Live Collection of Dog Legs & Feet! A live collection! Of Dog Legs & Feet! Once we had the idea, we couldn't pull up from the dive.
The achilles heel of this approach turned out to be that we had included the name of the band in the title of the album. It would have been weird to put both Dog Legs & Feet and Bottom, a live collection of Dog Legs & Feet on the album cover; but you didn't need to. Back in the 90s, album covers allowed for some ambiguity here. If you just put Bottom and A Live Collection of Dog Legs & Feet on there, it would be clear enough what was what, we reckoned.
(Oh yes, we also put the word “Bottom” upside down, so it would look like the top of the album cover was actually the bottom.)
Anyway, that might've worked with a different combination of words, but all this was a bit much to ask of the busy employees of Austin's indie record stores, where we sold these discs on consignment. It got filed under band name: “Bottom,” album name: “A live whatever something something.”
So... that's the reason for slightly changing the name of the remastered album to deconflict with the band name. It will stream as Bottom: A Live Collection.
Beyond the Grave
It's also Reason Number One for changing the album artwork.
Reason Number Two is that we no longer have a digital file of the original artwork. We just have the above scan of the paper booklet, which is not very profesh for your Actual Album Artwork in the 21st century.
Reason Number Three is that the existing artwork is not really what we would have chosen if we'd had more options back in the day. It's black and white only because black and white was cheap. It has a picture of Michael lying down in a graveyard because we had done exactly one photo shoot, and that was the coolest picture from it.
For completeness, here's the back of the CD booklet:
What would we have done differently, if we could have?
Well, I can't remember if we discussed other options back then. But to me, the thing that's always been missing is that there's nothing on the cover that hints at why the album is called “Bottom.”
We were making a reference to Nick Bottom, the character from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bottom is an indomitable community theatre guy, a weaver who acts in his spare time, who embodies the ethic of The Show Must Go On, even when the fairies curse him with the head of a donkey.
Basically, we felt like Bottom was us. We were all up there giving it our best - after work - half silly, and half earnest, and half just trying to get from one end of the show to the other. Nick Bottom embodies the improv comedy ethic of “yes, and…"
When you get right down to it, that was the same thing we were trying to do musically: Yes And.
So this was our vibe; yet there's no explicit reference to Bottom in any of the songs. None of them are about him, or mention him, or are from the play he's in. (There is one song from Two Gentlemen of Verona, though.)
Anyone who knew the band knew that a majority of us had been through the University of Texas' Shakespeare at Winedale program, and we were active in the local theatre scene ourselves, especially with the Rude Mechanicals. So some fans could probably piece together that Nick Bottom was what we were referring to, but we hadn't exactly telegraphed it.
Anyway, in thinking about the remaster, when I started asking myself, “What kind of artwork should this album have, if not the original?” … I kept coming back to the idea that it should feature Nick Bottom. A guy with a donkey's head, on stage, hamming it up. What better symbol for Dog Legs & Feet could there be?
Next time: how we got there.