I’ll never get back the hours I’ve spent staring at this creepy album cover. Is there a better album cover? the late 1940s, when the LP medium was still new, record covers were considered blank canvases; a kind of collaboration with the music they housed. And so, in this era before LP jackets always depicted the artist whose record you were buying, a Ray Anthony or Sarah Vaughn album sleeve was more likely to feature a color- ful abstract than a portrait of the performer. For a while, abstraction in the age of Pop Art was the rule. For Command Records, Bauhaus artist Joseph Albers did a series of covers with repeated shapes meant to describe the sound of per- cussion or what the bleat of a trumpet might look like. Closer to high art was David Stone Martin’s 1955 primitive watercolor por- trait of Stan Getz on his At the Shrine sleeve. Occasionally the artist himself got involved, as when Jackie Gleason created the concep- tual acrylic painting on the cover of his 1959 collection titled That Moment. By the early 1960s, studio photography had replaced much of A 20 this high art, but still the artists themselves were usually nowhere in sight. A Dick Hyman disc was less likely to offer Mr. Hyman’s smiley mug than it did a portrait of a beautiful young woman. Female models — sometimes chastely clad, other times wearing little more than a smile — were a key selling tool during the early days of stereo albums. That’s because, according to cultural histo- rian Rob Chapman, it was mostly men buying records during the long-player’s artistic heyday. Stereophiles tended to be early-mid- dle-aged males whose hobbies included showing off their hi-fi, a handful of people I’ve told this to get it; usually they’re other record collectors. Eric Kohler cer- tainly understood. In his groundbreaking survey of midcentury album cover art, In the Groove: Vintage Record Graphics 1940-1960, Kohler explains how in new post-war permutation of phonograph that played music ste- reophonically. The records of this pre-rock ’n’ roll era were there- fore marketed to guys with pictures of comely young women posing beneath bold STEREO! banners on their covers. So: Organist Ken Griffin’s hit version of “You Can’t Be True, Dear” was sold by a portrait of a lovely female face; Jonathan Ed- wards’ many piano collections were illustrated with evening- gowned lovelies. If you didn’t know better, you’d think Frank Comstock and His Orchestra were a group of raven-haired, bare-shouldered beauties instead of a roomful of balding East Coast session guys. “Who’s David Carroll?” my husband asks, waving a bright or- ange record album cover in my direction. “Orchestra leader,” I reply from behind a mountain of 45s. “Nineteen-fifties cocktail music. Mercury Records.” We are in our den, where I keep my record collection. He’s flip- ping through a stack of albums over in the corner, I’m alphabetiz- ing singles into a clever plastic-handled paperboard box. “Is he any good?” I shrug in response. “Oh, okay,” he says. “This is one of those records you bought be- cause you like the cover.” It is. I own an inordinate number — several hundred? a thou- sand? — long-players I’ve never heard and have no intention of lis- tening to — mostly jazz, swing, and Latin recordings of the 1950s and early 1960s. Sometimes, I have tried to explain to tell people, you buy a re- cord album because the cover is beautiful. And maybe you do this during that gloomy era when vinyl records are considered passe, when everyone is dumping theirs at thrift stores that then sell JAN 20TH– JAN 26TH, 2022 PHOENIX NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | NEWS | OPINION | FEEDBACK | CONTENTS | phoenixnewtimes.com
