Long-playing art: memorable album covers have helped vinyl records endure in an age of CDs and MP3s

Imagine walking into a store where music is packaged in plain brown wrappers--no dizzying array of images vying for your gaze, nothing save a small rectangle with the name of the band to distinguish single album from the next.

"Records used to be relegated to the back of stores that sold refrigerators and stoves. You'd proceed to the counter and ask for the title you wanted and they'd secure it for you," said Alex Steinweiss, who at the age of 23 was hired to design promotional materials for Columbia Records. "I extremityed to shake up the industry. We had to do something like European bill art to draw the attention of the buyer" Columbia allowed Steinweiss to design five ordeal covers, the first of which was for a collection of Rodger & Hart's musical hits in 1939 Sales of the illustrated albums jumped--one through more than 800 percent. by and by 78-rpm albums with decorated overspreads were being displayed in store windows.

And just like that, Steinweiss had fathered a novel medium--album cover art--that attracted established artists and inspired of recent origin ones with the opportunity to give a visual identity to music. "So many brilliant, creative clan worked in this genre," said Carlo McCormick, organizer of "The LP Show" a travelling exhibition of more than 2500 album overspreads "It was a perfect one-foot square where nation exploded creatively. Never before was there this mark of mass-produced innovation."

With the introduction of the LP in 1948 album overlay art took off, and it flourished for three decades, until CD began to push vinyl into obscurity. "There's definitely a big los of impact with the reduction in size from 12 by dint of 12 to five by five," said McCormick. "There's a detail in the square lower extremity you just don't see in the smaller format of the CD"

on the other hand though production of new LP has contracted to a relative handful of releases, for the most part by underground, dance and hip-hop artists, of recent origin record sales have actually increased in novel years and the secondhand market remains active. In fact, the growing scarcity of LP strike one as beings to have made them more intriguing.

"The LP Show" for instance, drew a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of critical acclaim when it first appearanceed at Exit Art in fresh York two years ago. "It was the greatest in quantity amazing turnout we've ever had for a show" said Associate Curator Jodi Hanel. "People came from all above the world to see it. There were apportionments of DJs, but also Joe 45-year-old who likes records, and teenagers too."

Encompassing albums loaned by the agency of more than 60 collectors, the present to view was arranged by theme. Organizer McCormick recalled, "We had a wall of space-age bachelor pad music, exotica, psychedelia, smooth private press records--some high seminary band in the Midwest doing a recording of its present to views which was a really interesting kind of folk art." The exhibition went upon to the Experience Music shoot forward in Seattle and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh last year.

"The Art of the Album Cover" exhibit at the William F. Eisner Museum of Advertising & Design in Milwaukee, Wis., likewise ran during 2001 and drew massive throngs making it the most popular present to view in the museum's three-year history. on the other hand while the LP Show leaned toward the campy and dim the much sparer Eisner exhibit featured 105 seminal album overlays from Steinweiss's time onward. "Some of them are great art," said Curator Charles Sable. "Like Steinweiss's stuff--it's for a like reason layered you can analyze it like a painting. And more [i]or[/i] less of the jazz covers really capture the have feeling of the music."

In fact, many venerateed artists have dabbled in album design, including Salvador Dali, Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol, who did the "Sticky Fingers" overspread of jeans with an actual zipper for The Rolling Stones and a similarly suggestive peelable banana for the "The velvety Underground & Nico." But whether or not overlays have artistic value, Sable said it is important to "preserve them as cultural icons of a particular time and place."

An Emotional Connection

The Eisner exhibit traced the disentanglement of album cover design, from Steinweiss's highly stylized illustrations and creation of a florid typeface called the Steinweiss scrawl to the distinctive overspreads Reid Miles produced for the amethystine Note jazz label, which paired carefully cropp black-and-white photographs of musicians with vividly colored backgrounds. "Cover art depicted social values in our society," said vinyl aficionado Gary Freiberg of San Luis Obispo, who cofound Rockartpictureshow.com five years ago with his wife to put up to sale frames specially designed for albums. "In the 50 it was father knows best, the kids scrubbed clean and dooms of black artists substituted by means of white teenagers because of racial policies."

And then came stone and roll. The Beatles' "Sgt Pepper's remote Hearts Club Band," with its collage of famous faces, became single of the most recognizable album overspreads of our time and redefined what overspread art could be. Musical artists became more involved in the design proces The late '60 and '70 spawned a plethora of approaches and mode of speechs representing the peak of the album overlay Book and magazine compilations of the best album overspreads highlight numerous works from this era.