HEY, ROY, LOOK AT JEFFREY MORGAN’S MEDIA BLACKOUT #277!

SIZZLING COMBO PLATTER OF THE WEEK: John Tefteller’s Blues Images – 2012 Classic Blues Artwork Calendar including 1920’s Blues Classics Volume 9 (Blues Images) :: Once again it’s time to make the most important purchasing decision of the entire year: choosing which 2012 wall calendar you’re gonna hang in your hovel to cover that unsightly patch of peeling, water-stained wallpaper.

Well, you’ve got two choices: you can either be a right chump who saves up his hard-earned shekels all year long, only to blow them by buying something feeble like a transitory multi-month memorial to your favorite cult television show; or, you can choose wisely instead and spruce up your humble haunt with the latest educational calendar and accompanying classic blues album, both of which have been expertly complied with an unreasonable attention to detail by eminent blues historian and collector John Tefteller.

Tefteller, who specializes in preserving the hot 78 rpm sides that Paramount pressed in the late ’20s and early ’30s, has been putting his coveted collection to excellent use by restoring a heapin’ helpin’ of the thousands of priceless sides he’s acquired over the decades—many of which are so scarce that Tefteller’s got the only copy in existence—and then reissuing the remastered results every year on a bonus nineteen track long player that provides the perfect aural accompaniment to each month’s advertising graphic on his annual Blues Images calendar.

And, boy howdy, what images they are! Fellow 78 collector and pioneering underground comix legend Robert Crumb ain’t whistling in Dixie when he waxes rhapsodic about the superb source material from which the visuals are derived: namely, Paramount’s profusely illustrated Race record catalogues.

Even better, every calendar page depicting sob songs of wanton wimmens and griftin’ gents is just loaded with licentious lyrics and an insightful explanatory section that puts both the artist and the song into historical context—not to mention the detailed day by day delineations which mark the secular arrivals and spiritual departures of all the blues greats.

You better listen to me ’cause I’m tellin’ you what’s being put down so you best pick up on it: at a mere twenty bucks a pop for both the big twelve inch twelve month calendar and the accompanying nineteen track compact disc—which comes complete with color graphics and annotations—you can’t afford not to ring in 2012 with over a dozen deified Delta denizens ranging from Ida Cox (“Fogyism”) and Charley Patton (“Jesus Is A Dying Bed Maker”) to Blind Blake (“Rope Stretchin’ Blues”) and Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band (“Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Riders Here”).

And even if you really can’t afford it, go here and buy it anyway; that way you’ll have something suitably salacious to spin at your next rockin’ rent party—like Jenny Pope’s ribald record “Rent Man Blues”!

Peter Fonda & Dennis Hopper – Easy Rider (Columbia) :: What did you think the title referred to? Motorcycles?

Be seeing you!