Album Art

I grew up on LPs. Saved my first lawn mowing money for Kansas' Point of Know Return, Rush's Exit Stage Left and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

Part of the enjoyment of the record was the album art. Ozzy's The Blizzard of Oz, I bought that without even having heard Crazy Train. I just knew Ozzy from Black Sabbath and the album cover flirted with exactly the sort of sacrilege I craved when I was eleven. It was Randy Rhoads' guitar playing that made the record the centerpiece of a new religion for me — he took the heavy riffs you might hear on a Black Sabbath record and made them sit up and beg, roll over, speak Spanish and walk like an Egyptian.

But it was the jacket that got my money.

I used to spend the entire time my records played absorbed in the album covers. Frampton Comes Alive, Steppenwolf Live, that ridiculous egg on K-Tel's Southern Fried Rock. For that matter, the hottest porn in my house when I hit puberty was Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream and Other Delights (that and the J.C. Penny catalog's lingerie section).

Maybe it's partly how I became a graphic designer by trade, I've always been fascinated by the package. Even notebooks, steno pads, I was totally geeked out by the stationery section at the drug store when I was eight.

So we were in the thrift store the other day and I meandered into the albums expecting to find real temptation. Should I part with a quarter for this piece of art?

What I found was shockingly un-tempting.

Yes, some of the LP covers of years past were awesome. The other day, I was listening to an interview with Toni Iomi, plugging his memoir, and I thought about how I could be suckered into buying a Black Sabbath boxed set. I would buy such a thing. Then I realized that my daughters' generation wouldn't even know what someone meant by 'boxed set.' They think of music in terms of downloading a tune, not buying a record with a dozen of them even if you only want the one track.

Even CDs are on the way out, which means they miss out on even the album art at a humiliating reduction to less than five inches wide.

Looking at the album covers in the bin I realized my nostalgia has a lot of survivor bias. For every great album cover there were a hundred shitty ones. Guys at RCA and Atlantic and whatnot didn't know if they were shot, fucked, powder-burnt or snake-bit, but they needed a picture on the cover of another godawful record. Wives and girlfriends may have been drafted for models. Uncles with 35 mm cameras and nephews aspiring to careers in the graphic arts collaborated to generate some of this garbage, I'm pretty sure.

Jim Nabors, aka Gomer Pyle, can't even have his teeth cleaned by an airbrush in this throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks world of 33 RPM record production. Surprise, surprise, surprise anyone would want to hear him sing in the first place, let alone see his freakish mug in such vivid detail.

I almost bought the Kate Smith album because I felt it was the most of something: a middle-aged woman in a fashion refugee costume singing songs of the 'now generation.' The copyright date was 1969, the year I was born, but there was never a year when Kate Smith was part of any 'now' generation. At least not in a dress like that.