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 The final Fohhoh Bohob 'libretto' covers. |
Knowing absolutely nothing about color separations at the time, I set out to produce full-color front and back covers...I mean, how much could it cost, anyway? An absurd amount of money, as it turned out. The graphic to the lower left was the bottom corner of the original booklet...made from contact paper! |
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The back cover was going to have a color picture of Brian Jones with a tribute placard attached; Brian had died during the making of Bohob, and Jon and I were complete Stones freaks (I actually cut up the insert photo from the first Stones' album to make the back cover with Brian, something I deeply regret doing now, since we never used it). Insufficient funds finally prevailed, and a different (read: cheaper) path was taken. Somehow or other, I came up with the idea of stenciling a peace sign on to a piece of construction paper, which was inexpensive, easily available and came in a lot of colors! I have only vague memories of cutting out the stencil, but I definitely remember spray painting the covers. I went to the hardware store, bought a few cans of gold spray paint and stenciled a hundred covers on the garage floor and driveway. Take it from me, gold paint does not dry quickly in the middle of July! When that was done, it was time to type the lyric sheets. Since page layout with computers was way in the future, I tried to find a typewriter with an interesting typeface. Someone knew someone who knew someone who had a typewriter with an unusual, script-like font, so I drove over to the owner's house to borrow it. Just to put the whole thing in a time perspective for you, I typed all of the lyric sheets on the afternoon of July 20, 1969...that night, we all watched the first moon landing. After cutting up the lyrics and pasting them on music paper (almost as cheap as construction paper!), the next step was duplication. Jon and I went down to New York City and found a place that would Xerox and collate one hundred copies for us. For the next few days, whenever I had a few spare minutes, I stapled together a booklet. Staples were a great idea, weren't they? Not! For years now, I've heard about how they dig into people's Bohobs. It was that fifth middle staple that did the damage; removing it was the only concession I would agree to on the reissue. No more dented Bohobs, I say! |
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 Bohob Babies (clockwise, from top: Eric, Paul and Jon). |
At one point, instead of a group shot, we considered including baby pictures of us. Yikes! Good sense won out again, but unfortunately, we never took a real group photo, so I guess the graphic to the left is as close as we'll get. As far as I know, there is no photograph of the Patron Saints from 1969. With all of the expensive ideas deep-sixed, we were left with the problem of how to print the album covers. Once again, it turned out to be ridiculously costly venture. Well, what now? We came up with a plan to print Jon's artwork on crack-and-peel panels, black ink on white stock (the cheapest, of course!), and we'd put them together ourselves. How long did it take? Hours and hours and hours. Based on the amount of time it took to put those stinking covers together, these albums should be worth $2500! The indomitable Heather Sadlo Palkewick put together almost all of the five hundred reissue covers herself...I just couldn't face it again, times five. Thank you, Heather Leigh! |
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 An original Fohhoh Bohob LP label, in stunning blue and silver. |
How did we pay for all of this? Aside from the requisite begging, borrowing and stealing, a few band gigs helped. But ultimately, it was the incredible hospitality of the D'Altons, $100 from Jon's father and $100 from my mother that sealed the deal. Ah, the days of making an LP for about $500 are long gone! Charles Cameron, a local engineer, transferred our 1/4-track master tapes to 1/2-track. Unfortunately, the quality of tape he used wasn't as good as ours, so the record sounds kind of dull and muffled (The best thing about reissuing Bohob is finally getting to hear it as it should have been be heard all along!). Cook Laboratories in South Norwalk, Connecticut handled the actual record cutting. I don't recall a test pressing...we probably couldn't afford one! I believe we were offered a selection of about five or six different color possibilities for the label; we thought the silver on blue looked the least offensive. We had no say in choosing the label design, only the content. How an album that was supposed to be numbered PS-1001 became JT-1001 is beyond me. I guess I must have been out of the room during that little decision making process. Somewhere, Jon must be grinning! |
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 The whole 1969 Fohhoh Bohob package.
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So here we were with one hundred assembled Fohhoh Bohobs...new, pristine and completely unheard by anyone but the three of us and our pals. How did we distribute them? It was very scientific: "Hey, we just made an album! Want one?" I know that makes collectors cringe, but that was roughly how it went. We each kept one for ourselves, my brother Tom got one, our parents got theirs, friends got some and we used a few for promotional purposes. Future Patron Saint/Garrison drummer Joe Ivins and I went down to New York City and left a few Bohobs at record companies and radio stations. At WNEW-FM, Zacherle, a popular DJ at the time, took us into a listening room and was extremely encouraging. Before he came out to see us, we hung out in the lobby with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. A fairly cool experience, I must say...
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