Buddha (album) - Packaging

Packaging

The photographs in the original cassette release of Buddha were photographs taken by friend of the band Cam Jones. Kerry Kay, guitarist for The Iconoclasts and friend of the band, also is credited with artwork in the original cassette. To produce the artwork, Hoppus and Jones spent an afternoon together taking "artsy" photographs in and around Raynor's backyard. The cover art is a picture of a Buddha statue, which was a present from Hoppus' stepfather that he grabbed it on the way to Raynor's for the photos. After developing the photos, they took them to a copy shop to run off color copies. Afterwards, they cut, pasted and rearranged them until they found something suitable. The lyric sheets were handwritten and photocopied. Hoppus and his family in Ridgecrest would spend hours folding and combining pieces of artwork to compile the Buddha cassette. When this was complete, Hoppus would load the cassettes into his car and deliver them to local record stores around town.

I totally remember driving around to all the record stores to drop off tapes to sell. I'd go to Lou's Records, and Off the Record, and Music Trader. It was so cool because the tapes were actually selling, that's why I had to keep going back every week. Music Trader would have sold one copy, Off the Record sold two, or whatever. But that meant people were actually walking into a music store and buying something we had written and recorded. It was awesome. —Mark Hoppus

Cassette copies of Buddha were also sold at early Blink concerts, as well as homemade T-shirts.