About this design
Ray Charles said there were just two types of music: good music and bad music. Somewhat out of time, the designer Ben Turner was raised on a strict Chess Records' diet by his parents. He has delivered five shirts, four with line drawings of four of his favourite artists: Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Howlin' Wolf and one featuring all four with the old Chess logo as a background.
In the 1950s the likes of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Chester Arthur Burnett aka Howlin' Wolf, J B Lenoir, Buddy Guy, Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Etta James, Sonny Boy Williamson, Eddie Bo, Big Bill Broonzy John Lee Hooker and many more were all signed to the label. What happened? If you had a label with half this talent signed today you would dominate the music business and deserve to be bigger than Wal Mart.
We have a popular t shirt: Money Killed The Beautiful Game. It is hard to conclude money did not kill beautiful and original music. An extrapolation of the mindset money talks and therefore comes first is that quality expression and music must come second. Certainly money brings all those spivvy pretentious types for whom music was a means to an end rather than an end in itself. This focus is antithetical to quality innovation and creativity although it does not have to be so. Indeed you will tend to find quality and monetary success are bedfellows provided you put quality first.
It seems to me the Chess Records' legacy and example of outrageous creativity and the spontaneity of its artists was finally dissipated by the late 70's. By the 80's The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Thin Lizzy, Bob Marley, and a whole raft of great American bands had come and gone.
Looking back it is natural to be troubled by the thought that the apparent lack of anything really compelling now is a generational thing - that people older than about 25 do not understand you have to be on something to get off on a continuous, metronome accurate, computer generated beat that goes on and on and on and on. But there can be no doubt quality is permanent and trends in music are temporary, and in my view marketing led. Or as Ray Charles put it there really are only two types of music...
Express your admiration and celebrate Chess Records and some of the artists who made the label what it was. Buy our Chess records t shirts by Ben Turner.