Hot Poop

Santa Barbara has spawned several ground-breaking artistic creations, such as Kinsey Millhone, Lew Archer, and Jack Johnson. In the late sixties and early seventies, it also incubated a strange crew of people that started a band called Hot Poop. Though they were living in Isla Vista, which was churning in the wake of the burning of a Bank of America, they were not hippies, as they explained to WFMU's Beware of the Blog:

We were never hippies. We were much too cynical. We could see where it was all headed. People don't change and you can only run around waving flowers for so long. In retrospect I really wish that whole movement had figured out a way to get some real power and had changed society. There's too much war, too much violence, too much fear. Whatever happened to make love not war? [....] That [having his head bloodied by police] happened when I was learning about the deep corruption in law enforcement and government up close and personal. I was cooking a baked potato and was dragged from my house and beaten by riot police and then charged with felony attack on a police officer performing his line of duty. A campus newspaper photographer got the picture. I appear so much the martyr in this shot that it appeared in many books, etc., about the Isla Vista riots. Did I mention that this all had to do with a bunch of boneheads burning down the Bank of America?

They also explained the "remarkable" album cover, shown above:

The album cover was my concept. I'm surprised that more people don't get the front cover. It seems rather simple. Hot poop, poop also meaning crap. So Larry's taking a crap, it's being carried over to the others by Jim, Lisa is heating it up (cooking it) in a spoon, I'm shooting it up (doing it) and Bruce is passed out. Hot Poop, doing their own stuff (shit). The photograph was taken in an empty building in Isla Vista. The building actually had no front on it but the photographer drew in the front window shadow to give the allusion that it was a complete building with four sides. The back cover concept I came up with in it's entirety. I wanted us standing in a field of donkeys (I get donkeys and mules mixed up. I said a field of donkeys but I meant a field of mules) with two pictures, one clothed and the other with switched genitalia. In one more amazing Hot Poop moment I stumbled on a field of donkeys/mules almost the second I came up with the idea. We got the photographer and drove out there. The mules were nice enough to crowd around us for the pictures. As we were wrapping it up a helicopter started flying over as I think the land belonged to Union Oil.

(Link, via BoingBoing)