Here’s a small grab-bag of things from my hard drive — post and purge!

The first two images were sent to me recently by BrendanDeVallance. To promote our first album, we apparently took a bunch of our drawings, typed on them, addressed them and had SST foot the postage bill. Admittedly, this isn’t a very stunning example of the Puppets D.I.Y. ethic, but we’d pretty much run through all our notebooks the previous year for hand drawn inserts to our “In A Car” EP. (What’s odd about this item is that it’s postmarked Oct 11, 1983, and it says we have an album coming out in September. But our first album came out in fall of 1982, and “Meat Puppets II” came out in the spring of 1984.)

The next picture jumps ahead more than a decade for Polygram’s 1994 “Too High To Die” “munchies” tour. When that album out, we spent a couple weeks doing promtional acoustic shows for press and retail people all over the country. This was the custom swag bag attendees got. The art is by Cris and me, based on a series of comic jams called “Pot Comics,” which we were doing at the time.

The coloring contest ad for “No Joke!” features a Cris drawing. Polygram also put out a small promotional coloring book of Cris art. (“Be young. Have fun. Color with Cris.” WTF?)

The next three images are from the Ryko reissues campaign. The first two are a postcard and a poster. The third is a special print you got if you bought all 8 albums directly from the company. I believe most of them were autographed. (The drawing from this print was taken from a Curt drawing which had been previously used as a tee shirt we sold at concerts around 1990.)

The keychain and button are items I don’t know anything about. They are either bootlegs, stragglers from the final days of our relationship with Polygram, or side licenses driven by management that I was never told about.

Posted by Derrick Bostrom on Saturday, November 26th, 2005 at 4:11 pm.