Maisy and Counter Culture Music
The Inkdwellers cassette tape front
An audio cassette is propped upright. The album art is as featured: Thin, bare trees jut upward from the bottom, drawn in a bold, black ink. Sitting atop this is a pair of gloved hands, stained red as thin strands of red spread and drip from the gloves. The band's name, The Inkdwellers is seen above, written in two contrasting but similarly gothic fonts. The cassette case itself is worn with age, dingy stained, and notably cracked inwards on one side.
One of the most iconic bands of the 70’s Punk movement, The Inkdwellers helped popularize the appropriation of Maisy the Mutt as a counter culture symbol, and their work would galvanize the punk movement to newer heights.
This album was released at the first big peak in the bands popularity and served as a rather stunning display of not only taking Maisy the Mutt and using her for their music, but also was made as a response to the last big band of the Hippie movement known as the Harmonias. The album contained songs such as “Bloody Red Writhing Gloves” and “I don’t wanna go to my room mom!” The latter being one of the above-mentioned songs targeted at the Harmonias, whose music and hippie background the Inkdwellers (and many members of the punk movement) found to be politically shallow and lacking the bones of any real social change.
This music was often distributed unofficially through bootleg recordings and was a practice encouraged by the band themselves, something which likely helped them to become so prolific amongst the population. The album would spark a retaliatory response song from the Harmonias titled “My room is my only home”.
The Inkdwellers cassette tape back
The backside of the audio cassette, featuring the track list. Side A: 1. Grave, Grave Keeper; 2. Bloody Red Writhing Gloves; 3. Shit(s) Disturb(ing); 4. I Dont' Wanna Go To My Room Mom! Side B: 1. As You Are Now; 2. The Good Death; 3. Between The Lines; 4. Fuck Your Flowers. Below this reads “Keith Dòu & The Inkdwellers”
The cassette opened up to show the track list from before and the cassette itself. The cassette is plain, labeled with a piece of paper. It features the band name, the gloves, and reads as Side A.
The inner-sleeve of the album art. It features: A drawing of a small black dog laying next to a tombstone. A bar covers the dog's face, and a long, wavy, but broken chain trails behind.
As for the content of the songs, they ranged a wide variety of social issues from an outcry against police brutality, demand for social change through taking action together, the embrace of death, and again mocking the hippie movement that preceded the punk movement. (To learn about this hostility refer to the history article about the Inkdwellers.)
Their most well known song, “Bloody Red Writhing Gloves,” begins with the following words, “Little Red Bloody Red Writhing gloves, muzzle as white as a mourning dove,” and this obviously is in reference to Maisy the Mutt. The Inkdwellers liked to play coy with their use of the character in their lyrics, never directly naming her but describing her and using references to her older cartoons. It was a method that infuriated Stencil Line lawyers but also shows the subtle unnamed way Maisy manifested within their work.