PRINTThe art of vinyl
A journey through musical decades
Released in 1967, designed by Andy Warhol
The Velvet Underground by The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967).
March 26, 2009 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Imagine it’s pre-MTV, video has yet to kill the radio star, and the MP3 hasn’t destroyed the craft of the album cover. This was an era when people entered record stores bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and were excited to see what new creations covered the albums of their favorite musicians — at least that’s what we’ve heard.
It was the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and let’s get real, even into the late ’80s, and then something happened. Cover art went from being a 12-by-12-inch masterpiece to a 5-by-5-inch disasterpiece and is now microscopic on iTunes. A few of Columbia’s music junkies are left reminiscing about the nuances of what makes a good, no great, album cover.
Kevin Walsh, a KOPN radio host and former owner of Kevin’s World of Popular Music, has spent his entire professional life, the past 30 years, watching the transition from vinyl to digital download. What makes vinyl so great is its iconic appeal. Think Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours or the old Harry Belafonte images. The classics tend to have a portrait of the idolized singer on the cover; they’re very straightforward. “You knew what you were getting musically with those album covers,” Walsh says.
Tony Layson, a supervisor at Slackers, echoes this nostalgia for the classics. “The old Blue Note Records, you can tell just by looking at them they are going to be good, monochromatic,” he says. “They usually have a picture of a solo musician, an instrument or a woman, just really simple, and when you see that monochromatic, you know. They don’t make covers like that anymore.” Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is Layson’s all-time favorite album cover.
The most popular covers were “funny, eye-catching and garish at times,” Walsh says. “The mass-marketing campaign of the ’60s is what really got things going. There was an attempt to merchandize the product with the album, and with that there came a counter culture, which is where you start seeing album covers that go against what is expected.”
With the realization that album art could be aesthetically satisfying came the era that turned Walsh into the ultimate music junkie: the ’70s and on into the early ’80s. “The most successful albums are the ones where you see collaborations with the cover artist and musician on the packaging,” Walsh says. He quickly identifies Andy Warhol’s work with The Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones. “Those covers were interactive and way before their time,” he says.
Musicians soon began bringing in famed photographers. “Robert Mapplethorpe’s cover for Patti Smith, it was a black-and-white photo, and she was as down and dirty as they come,” Walsh says. “But he really managed to capture her and make it beautiful.”
Although record stores are on their way out, Walsh describes a time when people used to walk into a record store as if it were an art gallery just to shuffle through the racks, a time when kids came in to check out the new Prince and Madonna covers just to see what they looked like.
“I think that most people are pretty visual,” says album artist Matt Taylor. “They hear this amazing, groundbreaking music, and then they begin to associate this cool image with what they’re hearing.” Taylor owns Varnish Studios in Los Angeles and won a 2006 Grammy Award for his work on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium limited edition box set. “As an artist, ideally you get into the head of the band,” he says. “By experiencing them and listening to their music, you try to figure out what they’ve been going through.” Taylor says the most important aspect of memorable album art is when you hear the music, you inherently think of the cover’s art.
“Album artwork was really coming into its own right in about the mid-’80s when CDs killed them,” Walsh says. “When the switch came to CDs, people said they wouldn’t do as well, and honestly, they didn’t.” He believes it’s the total package that sells and that vinyl just feels more real. Taylor agrees. “There are always the big-time music lovers who desire something more than swiping their iPod touch,” he says. Just when it felt abysmal, Taylor sheds a bit of Cali sunshine. “You know, there are companies that I work with that are releasing vinyl editions, and they wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t selling.”
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