Inner Sleeve: Blevin Blectum

Jim Copp & Ed Brown:
East Of Flumdiddle (Playhouse 1961)
A Fidgety Frolic (Playhouse 1962)

Artwork by Ed Brown

Who, or what, is that beady-eyed, almostsmiling, armless stick-figure mascot looking out from the top left corners of these records? Whatever it might be, it presides over the Jim Copp and Ed Brown multiverse – from the forests of Flumdiddle, full of talking tin pans, to the 1960s San Francisco street corners around which fidgety animal parades frolic. Ed Brown did all of the artwork for the Copp and Brown albums, with the exception of this particular character, which is one of Copp’s line drawings. So the armless character is his familiar, and his responsibility.

A couple in and out of the studio, Copp was the writer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, performer (he began as a nightclub piano-comic in New York, sharing bills with Lena Horne, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday), and overall audio production wizard; and Brown (who also shared vocal and sound recording duties) was the whiz at art and design. Their recordings of stories and songs for pre-school kids are meticulous and labour-intensive on every front. The artwork is no exception. Many of the albums involve ornate interactive packaging: a cartoon wheel that illustrates the main events of a particular story, to be turned while listening; a gatefold sleeve that opens into a colourful theatre stage with cardboard-doll actors and scenery; geographical games; colourful slide shows.

I listened to these records a thousand times before the age of six. My Dad commuted to downtown San Francisco in the 1970s, and bought copies from a (now defunct) FAO Schwarz toy store that carried Copp and Brown records every holiday season, so the cover images are deeply ingrained. The colour and clarity betray the underlying joie de vivre. The lower left corner close-up of the irate baby bird with its beak open (on the East Of Flumdiddle sleeve), and that abstract reptilian look in its eye that birds do so well, I have always found particularly appealing. Teenytiny and her Prince are living dangerously out in the open on the daisy dais, with a ravenous young peeper like that around. The garden behind the gate is full of California poppies, sunflowers and morning glories, a Sebastopol summer in old apple orchards before upscale wine country set in.

Copp and Brown describe the cover of A Fidgety Frolic thus: “The band plays and you are marching down the street, you are flying to the moon; see Messy Bess, Little Claude, Bradley the Bottle.” Messy Bess’s house is so messy she becomes trapped inside; Little Claude’s parents make him practice violin eight hours a day and then leave on vacation without him (“I cannot envy little Claude/He never had a chance!/How could they have been so cruel?/Now everybody dance!”); and Bradley the Bottle’s short (if well-travelled) inanimate life ends when he slips from a monkey’s fingers.

For me, these recordings were a huge influence and inspiration, musically, sonically, thematically, visually, personally. I’ve sampled them thousands of times in my own musical work (tweaked beyond quotation but not beyond tribute). I spent many hours alone with a Fisher Price plastic record player between the ages of three and six, in the rural Northern Californian countryside – Copp and Brown basically raised me from a distance. “We toddled about the country/We toddled about the town/I now say good day to you, Mr Copp/Good day to you, Mr Brown!”

Blevin Blectum is an electronic musician. Formerly and futurely one half of the digital duo known as Blectum from Blechdom and co-founder of the band Sagan.