The 25th Anniversary
Limited Edition Of The OFFS First Record
Cover by Jean-Michel Basquiat
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It was summer of 1981 and The OFFS, a San Francisco Punk/Ska band were in New York, deep in the scene swirling around downtown Manhattan. They hung with Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, Debra Harry, Keith Haring and Alice Cooper. They ate dinner at 2am at Max’s Kansas City and slept ‘til early evening when they may or may not have breakfast before once more wandering out into the mad jungle of pop culture.
Everyone had either made it big or was on the verge, or waited patiently in the obscurity that rests on the edge of the next big thing. But it would be three years before The OFFS would get their big break and it was through Andy that it happened at all.
There had been great hope that in ’81 they would get signed. Hell, the band’s friend Jean-Michel Basquiat even did the cover for a first record. But fate and the rock Gods didn’t line up and it wasn’t until Andy finally called his longtime friend David Ferguson in San Francisco and implored him to put the band on his label CD Presents. Ferguson agreed, signed the band and while he loved the Basquiat image he chose to reverse it to white on black in keeping with the Punk sensibility of the times. The Basquiat cover was finally home.
The record was released in ’84 to local fanfare but little else. Oh, Andy Warhol got a great review done by Editor Glenn O’Brien in INTERVIEW Magazine, but the record sold to mostly local fans and friends and with the demise of a band member soon thereafter, the group drifted back into obscurity with the record not far behind.
The career of Jean-Michel Basquiat meanwhile exploded. The New York art and downtown scene swirled around him, and his career roared unabated around the world and back until his own untimely passing in 1988. By 2007, CD Presents was preparing a 1000 copy 25th Anniversary Limited Edition of the original record for release in 2009. But then the 2008 financial crisis devastated many businesses including CD Presents. The release that was to have been celebrated was scrapped and the records remained in the warehouse. In early 2015 Venice Modern Art, agreed to purchase the entire lot and they were moved to Los Angeles.
It was hoped that a campaign to see their release would be forthcoming but the sudden passing of David Ferguson left plans once more at a standstill. But now they are being released; numbered, certified and framed, as the last-of-the-last of this iconic record and cover to be available.
Today an unprecedented resurgence of interest in Basquiat has seen exhibition after exhibition staged, Toronto and Bilbao the most recent, as well as record setting prices for his original works. With the latest Basquiat exhibition set for The Barbican: Boom For Real, the now remaining legendary iconic and rarer-than-rare last copies of The OFFS First Record, cover Jean-Michel Basquiat are available exclusively from Venice Modern Art.
Size: 17.5 x 26.5
Note: Sotheby's Original Art Sale listing includes confirmation of Certificate of Authenticity issued by the Authentication Committee of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
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