I've been away too long

I wish I was one of those bloggers who post every single day. I give a lot of shit to The Daily Guru but at least he's consistent. I do have an excuse, I guess: I have zero readers. But that could always change. And if someone does start reading RJ Battles, I wanna be ready. Final Girl has been extremely inactive this year and she's probably lost a lot of readers because if you keep going to a page and seeing the same old post you lose interest. Why bother? When there's a new post every day or every other day it's exciting and it feels like there's something going on. When three weeks or a month go by with no new posts the page starts to feel like a ghost town and it's very sad and a little depressing.

Also, I've always suspected that I've had readers all along. A small silent minority that lurks on the edge of RJ-town. They read but don't comment. They keep me writing, just not often enough.

Anyway, the focus today is on cassette sleeves. We've got two Madonnas and one Elvis Costello.

I guess around the time of EC's Brutal Youth album, he and his wife wrote an album's worth of rock songs and he decided to give them all to a singer named Wendy James. He and his wife recorded demos of all them and some of them showed up as Brutal Youth B-sides. I picked up the CD single for "13 Steps Lead Down" and it included "Puppet Girl", "Basement Kiss", and "We Despise You". I've since lost that CD but I always liked those songs- they were good songs and best of all they didn't have those awful keyboards that ruined a lot of EC songs over the years.

Sometime in the mid 90s Madonna was trying to soften her image after Sex, Erotica, and Body Of Evidence so she put out Something To Remember, a collection of her older ballads. "Oh Father" was re-released and this is the sleeve.

Also, after the success of the single "Into The Groove" it was included on later editions of Like A Virgin. They made it the first song on the second side.