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LP covers should be on the walls
By Deborah Taylor-Hollis
Many of us have art on our walls. Things, such as beautiful sunsets, Georgia O'Keefe watercolors and photographs of our kids, are framed and under glass on all kinds of walls. But not all great artwork hangs on walls. Some of the best can be found in the stereo cabinet: 12 1/4 inch squares of cardboard. There's nothing like the world of album art from 1955 to 1985.
When my husband received a Christmas gift Classic Album Covers of the '60s, I started looking at our old collection with a new idea of what might be framed.
We already have one of the most collectible items: a poster advertising a Grateful Dead show at the Avalon Ballroom, one of the band's haunts during the '70s. That was one of the Family Dog concerts, and the artwork by Mouse eventually became a regular icon on the LP art of the Grateful Dead. I'm debating about putting all of the Dead's LP art in frames around it, as a showcase to the era.
Embarrassingly enough, I also have wondered about framing the three-part foldout cover of Bobby Sherman. Yes, I have to admit it, I loved Bobby Sherman in my early teen years. Meeting him two summers ago and finding out that the former teen heart throb became a police officer/paramedic in Los Angeles didn't tarnish my feelings for him one bit.
Recently a friend unearthed a crate of LP's from the late '60s and early '70s, and, rather than immediately putting them on the old turntable, the first thing we did was stare at the cover art. Both of us had forgotten just how wonderful it was. Jethro Tull's Aqualung oils beg to be hung next to the Dutch works of the 1550s, and Joni Mitchell's watercolors for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young are just as vital as anything Picasso painted in the blue period.
The photographs that jump out at you are just as astounding. James Taylor's Sweet Baby James album is all the sweeter staring into his blue eyes from 30 years ago, and Judy Collins' Judith can bring you to your knees looking into that eternal gaze. That just doesn't happen when you look at a CD cover.
Art in miniature, while exciting from the antique standpoint of cameos and whalebone etching, doesn't hold the same appeal in musical decoration. A CD jewel box does not give enough space to spread the inked collage of Revolver over without a magnifying glass, nor does it allow the pop out windows of Houses of the Holy to ever be born.
Cheech and Chong's free rolling papers in every Big Bambui, the real zipper on the cover of the Stones' Sticky Fingers, the brown paper wrappers on more than one "adult" oriented cover--each is worthy of a spot in a museum.
Of course, at the time I collected all this great art, I was schlepping it all over in open plastic milk crates, tossing them across the room for friends to read the liner notes, and stacking them in every configuration possible. The telltale round wear line on most of my LPs attests to being kept in piles that were WAY too tight. It was the tragic fate of so many albums to end up unreadable from that kind of use, even when the vinyl inside remained playable.
Most of my foldout LPs have major wear at the fold hinge-some are hanging on a thread and I have banned playing them to preserve the case. Hopefully, I can preserve the covers indefinitely with care and plastic slipcovers.
The records themselves are another story. Years ago we recorded everything we owned on cassette to save on the wear and tear of playing them over and over. During the late '80s there was even a push to kill the turntable industry, making care and maintenance of the stylus/needle housing on our record player a high priority. Without a good machine to play those beauties on, what would be the point of keeping them around?
Luckily, artists such as Neil Young spoke out about the flat quality of CD recording, and encouraged the industry to continue producing high-quality, full-bodied vinyl for the true audiophiles. Those kinds of statements brought the record industry back--in a smaller, more streamlined form.
We can still get a new turntable, or needle, now, and that probably won't change. But encouraging the artists at recording studios to package their music in something that doesn't require reading glasses could take a while. In the meantime, I scrounge Al's Record Barn and Rasputin for clean LP covers these days. I enjoy the art as much as the tunes that inspired it.
Contact Deborah Taylor-Hollis at DTHollis@metronews.com.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
