(photo Joseph Hall from sleeveface.com)While going through a room full of vinyl records, music Cd's, cassettes, etc. I was moved to ponder how much music has changed in just the forty plus years I have been alive and by that I am more referring to the change in music product more than anything else.
Of course music itself has changed dramatically over the years prompting the almost useless need for additional genres and in many cases, musical sub-genres. (What happened to the days when you could toss everyone in to a handful of categories? - rock & roll, soul, country, jazz, classical) but what strikes me is how different music LOOKS today than it did even just twenty years ago.
I can remember as a Junior High student shelling out $5 for a new vinyl LP. It was more than just a musical experience; the artwork (and liner notes in some cases) were just as much a part of the thrill of getting a new record as the music itself. Even now when I pick up a new CD I immediately want to tear off the shrink wrap and check out the artwork. My favorites have to be the "essential" or "collection" Cd's that have a decent sized booklet with a bio or track by track info. I have so many KISS "collection" CD's with a booklet containing a band history written by some journalist or another that I probably have the band's history memorized (guilty) but for some reason, they never get old. But somehow, compared to the old LPs, they're just not the same.
So many things have changed about music. It used to be that unless you picked up the latest music magazine or bought the records, you wouldn't visually see too much of an artist. It created a sense of mystery that built up artists to almost larger-than-life proportions. Now with the Internet not only are your favorite musicians visible on a 24-hour basis, so is every band from Los Angeles to Tokyo and in between. Perhaps this explains why the music portion of a released product has pretty much pushed the visual portion aside. Twenty years ago you could slap a record on the turntable and while it was rocking your world, check out the cover art, liner notes, even advertisements for merch if you wanted! Now people are just as happy to quickly download music to their ipod and move on. The artwork has not only taken a backseat (which in many ways it always was the passenger to the music) but in a large majority of cases these days, the artwork has been banished to the trunk with all the other discarded, used, and forgotten Lego's of our adolescence.
Below are just a few LP's that had an impact on my life. Not just for the music but for the visual presentation as well. Some of these had me glassy eyed and staring for hours, some were just really cool. There were surely many more but these are a few I pulled out of a hat for the sake of this written ramble.
AC/DC Highway to Hell 1979
This one is unique to me for the pure fact that I spent much of my time trying to decipher whether this cover was in fact a photo, or an incredibly life-like piece of artwork. Every time I see this cover (or a version on a t-shirt) for some reason i am immediately drawn to the button on Angus Young's shirt. Don't ask me why, it just happens. Throw in some great teen rebel music like "Beating Around the Bush" and "Touch too Much", and the title track and you have a record featuring the perfect match of music and art. Yeah Angus has the devil horns on the cover but shouldn't they really have been on Bon Scott?
Aerosmith Draw the Line 1977
One of the most interesting art interpretations of an album title ever. A line drawn around the cover that makes up a cartoon image of the band! Get it? O.K., so it's much deeper than that but at first glance kind of cool. By the time that "Draw the Line", their fifth album, came out Aerosmith was considered to be so huge that original pressings didn't even feature the band's name or logo. Music-wise this is Aerosmith at their most drug-infested rock & roll swaggering best. The title track is a Steven Tyler/Joe Perry masterpiece and side two opener "Kings and Queens" is a monster track.
Angel White Hot 1977
Like a lot of the bands I enjoyed growing up, I discovered the music of the band Angel via an older kid in our American housing area in Germany. We would wander around listening to tunes on his portable cassette recorder, occasionally partaking in some "herbal" enjoyment. (Unlike the music, that was something I got over pretty fast) One of the tapes this kid would play was called "White Hot" by this band Angel and it had a smoking side two opening track called "Got Love if You Want it" that would turn out to be perfect air guitar material despite the heavy presence of keyboards in the band. The music pushed me to run right out and buy myself a copy on vinyl. The cover painting of the band tied to the stake ala Salem witch trials style is an amazing piece of artwork and features the band's "reversible" logo which read the same no matter which way you turned it. The inside sleeve contains a great picture of the band plus of course all the cool merch advertising that was typical of albums released on the Casablanca label in the seventies (KISS being the biggest example of this).
Cheap TrickLive at Budokan 1979
In the 70's live albums not only provided a fan the chance of hearing all of a band's top tunes on one record but also to enjoy the "live" experience through not only the sonic sound that came through on most live records from this period, but also from the great artwork and booklet usually included. These live releases tended to be double albums complete with gatefold cover and a ton of live pictures. That would probably explain why a good bit of the albums in this list are live. In the case of Cheap Trick's Live at Budokan, it's just a freakin' great record! The songs are incredible, the order is perfect, and the crowd is pumped! Toss in the incredible visuals including the booklet which is written in English AND Japanese and you have one helluva album!
Cheap Trick Dream Police 1979
While "Live at Budokan" may be Cheap Trick's all-time greatest album, for my money follow-up "Dream Police" is their best studio release. With tunes like the incredible title track,the rollicking "The House Is Rockin' (With Domestic Problems)" pop gem "I'll Be with You Tonight", lush ballad "Voices", this album is about as complete as it gets and to top it off...the artwork with the guys dressed in white police outfits is incredible. The gatefold art is cool with each member standing next to themselves in a police lineup. Pretty cool and pretty clever for the time. Just a note: Follow-up album "All Shook Up" is also a great record and perhaps one of Cheap trick's most underrated releases.
David BowieDiamond Dogs 1974
This particular album is very personal to me as my late uncle Michele introduced me to the music of David Bowie via this very record on a trip to Italy a year after this record came out. The youngest of my Mom's siblings, I would always get to stay at his house during visits which always meant listening to cool records by such bands as Deep Purple, Bob Dylan, and Michele's fave artist, David Bowie. Michele even had this cool red portable player that played 45" vinyl singles that slid into the side sort of like a CD. To this day I have yet to be able to track one of these down! Of course just one look at the cover and you can tell why a nine-year-old American male in the 70's would dig the art. It was as out of this world as you could get in 1975 (aside of KISS) and making it even more interesting? You could open the gatefold up and discover that bowie was actually half shock rocker-half dog! Well not really but the art was done as to make him look that way. Oh yeah - the music is great to and includes Bowie fave "Rebel Rebel."
Dogs D'AmourDynamite Jet Saloon 1988
I originally picked this release up on cassette through a mail order in a music magazine solely because I thought the ad in the magazine looked cool. Thank God I did as this band (as well as frontman Tyla's solo stuff) has turned out to be a huge influence on my own music. Probably when I started to worry less about the slickness of a vocal production and started to listen more to the feel of vocal presentation itself. No one will ever accuse Tyla of being a powerfully clean singer but that's cool, his artistic vision comes across in his words, voice, AND visuals with Tyla being the main supplier of art for most of the band's releases. This one is catching as it uses two great complimentary colors in black and pink but in a different way than the normal big pink on black letters. Throwing in a second shade of pink would normally be considered a no-no but in this instance works great with the artistic idea. Once I picked up the actual album I was even more blown away by the overall presentation.
Iron MaidenKillers 1981
Another thing that made album covers so important was the influence it could make on whether or not to purchase an album by a band you had never heard of. For me such a band was Iron Maiden and the reason? I saw Eddie staring at me from the cover of the band's second release "Killers" while walking through a German mall. I immediately ran home, begged my folks for some cash, ran back to the mall and bought the record. To this point the heaviest tunes I had regularly listened to were Black Sabbath and Van Halen and from the moment I put this record on I was speechless! I stared at the cover while sitting indian style in front of my stereo, headphones strapped on, tunes just a blasting! "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is still one of my all time favorite metal songs and easily my fave Maiden song. While former Samson singer Bruce Dickinson would replace original frontman Paul Di'Anno just a few months after "Killers" was released and help take the band to new heights, the first two Maiden releases featuring Di'Anno (as well as a more raw sound)stand out as my favorites by the band.
KissAlive! 1975 & Alive II 1977
Now in a discussion of great album art I suppose that a case could probably be made for just about every KISS LP that came out between 1974 and 1982 what with all the color, bombast, art, liner additions, and fun little extras that came with each early KISS release. Perhaps 1976 triple album release "The Originals" might have the most as it features the first three albums complete with paper replicas of the covers themselves as well as a cool booklet but as far as regular KISS releases go, the two live albums release in the 70's - Alive! and Alive II take the cake. What makes these two releases interesting is how the band used them to bookend different points in their career, Alive! featuring songs off the bands first three studio releases, and Alive II featuring songs from their next three. In these two packages you have a pair of live albums released by the same band only two years apart that feature no common songs between the two! Both releases came in a gatefold presentation. Alive! featuring handwritten letters from the band and a knod to the first three studio albums on the inside, Alive II sporting a great live shot across the entire inside of the gatefold. Visually stunning and filled with tons of color and flash. Toss in the myriad of booklets, cards, tattoos and extras that came out with one or the other and you had rock & roll records that were just as loud and fun visually as they were musically!
Led ZeppelinPhysical Graffiti 1975
Led Zeppelin's great record "Physical Graffitti" was not only loaded with some great tunes, but was also a visual oddity being presented as a double LP in a slipcase. Adding in the fact that while most double albums in the mid seventies were either soundtracks or live releases, Zep's 1975 masterpiece stands out as a ground breaking piece of work featuring fifteen studio tracks scattered over a pair of vinyl records. While mainly known for the 8-minute plus track "Kasmir", Zeppelin's sixth release was chock full of great stuff. That not only included the music, but the cover itself which featured a four-story artful recreation of a five-story New York tenement block with the windows cut out so you could see strategically placed sections of the inner sleeves (4 different sides). In regular setup the windows spelled the album's title, but by switching the sleeves around you could make different "tenants" appear in the windows including Robert Plant and Richard Cole in drag!
Ted NugentDouble Live Gonzo
To say that Ted Nugent's "Double Live Gonzo" was my introduction into a whole new world of wild unadulterated rock and roll would be an undertatement. This double live over-the-top masterpiece left me in awe that something so raw and blunt could even be released legally. The cover with the Nuge on his knees covering his ears just screams "PLAY IT LOUD" and man did I! The inside of the gatefold, with it's multiple live concert shots, was a wonder to behold for a kid rarin' ro run wild but as of yet let loose. On the inside could be found loud sex-driven stories of rock and roll topped with blistering guitar solos. The fury of just the last three songs alone, "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang", "Cat Scratch Fever", and "Motor City Madhouse", possibly contributed to my desire to commit underage acts of filth as much as any of the "foxes" at my school.
Pink FloydWish You Were Here
Yet another group that I was turned on to courtesy of my late uncle Michele. While in later years I would find my desire to listen to Floyd diminish, "Wish You Were Here", with its simple yet stunning cover, remains a time stamp from my youth. The album, in part a tribute to original Floyd member Syd Barrett, is perhaps best known for the title track despite it never having been released as a single. Starting with the flaming businessman on the cover, the artwork is a representation of the four elements,with the other three elements represented by a faceless salesman selling Pink Floyd products in the desert (earth); a naked female figure in a grove, barely visible behind a windswept red veil (air); and a splashless diver half submerged in Mono Lake (water). A postcard with an alternate version of the diver with "Wish you were here" written on the back was also included.
Quiet RiotMetal Health
While musically not one of my favorite albums of all-time, Quiet Riot's major label debut "Metal Health" was a fun hard rock driven album that sat nicely side by side with all the other hair band records of my HeadBanger's Ball youth. Sure it had some classic lyrics like "wanna kiss the lips not the ones on your face" (geez) and the openly naughty words were probably just as responsible for it becoming a best selling album as their cover of Slades "Come on Feel the Noize" but while the tunes weren't all that special (O.K. I'll admit "Slick Black Cadillac", a tune reworked from the days when a young Randy Rhoads was a founding member, was pretty choice) the cover art with the guy who looked suspiciously like singer Kevin Dubrow wearing a straightjacket and Hannibal Lecter style mask was brilliant! I must of recreated that cover in everything from pencil to pen to chalk on paper, walls, and even inside a few yearbooks.
Rolling StonesSticky Fingers
How brilliant was THIS album cover?!?! A shot of jeans with an actual working zipper revealing a set of male underpants? I can only imagine not only the expense of creating the cover but also trying to explain the concept to the A&R guy at the label - "well y'know mate it's a zipper and when you pull it down you see Mick's bulge under his knickers." This at a time when it wasn't unusual to stuff your illegal stash down your pants and now you could hide it in Mick's britches...um record. But not only was the cover cool, this 1971 release chock full of Jagger / Richards nuts, um gems is considered by many to be one of the best Stones records ever released and personally, it my fave Stones platter period. Side one alone contains "Brown Sugar", "Sway", "Wild Horses", and "Can't You Hear Me knockin' for crying out loud! Flip it over and BLAM! "Bitch", "Sister Morphine", and "Dead Flowers', among others. This record is so freakin' rock & roll that it probably needed a zipper just to breathe!!
Rolling StonesSome Girls
Very similar in concept to Zeppelin's "Physical Graffitti" cover wise, the Rolling Stone's "Some Girls" album uses a cutout design which also makes use of the sides of the inside record sleeve to change the faces found on the cover. Those cover, featuring a weird array of faces made up Rolling Stones member and iconic female celebrities, would come under fire when Lucille Ball, Farrah Fawcett, Liza Minnelli (representing her mother Judy Garland), Raquel Welch, and the estate of Marilyn Monroe threatened legal action. Revised future editions found all celebritiy likenesses removed. What makes this record even more interesting in how the band took then popular music forms such as punk, disco, and reggae and infused them into the already legendary Stones sound to oddly enough create music that was for all intents and purposes undeniably Stones. "Miss You", "Shattered", and "Beast of Burden" are all classics that would offer a glimpse of where the Stones would be heading for the following decade.
RushAll the World's a Stage
Next to KISS' "The Originals", this double LP housed in a triple gatefold would turn out to be one of the prized possessions of my youth. While not as spooky as the studio album the band was supporting on this tour, "2112" and nowhere near as mainstream as "Moving Pictures", "All the World's a Stage" stands in a class all its own. Just the tri-fold cover itself is a marvel housing an endless number of live photos on the inside. While never a huge Rush fan, some of the tunes found here in live form are among my fave songs by the band expecially the rocking "The Temples of Syrinx." Many of the numbers fall into a fantasy realm which has never been my norm when it comes to music but overall, a good rocking record with great visuals.
StyxCrystal Ball
Featuring not only a visualing pleasing cover, "Crystal Ball" by AOR / arena rock band Styx not only introduced Tommy Shaw musically but verbally as well. The inner sleeve features not only photos of each member of Styx but also a brief bio for each one in particular Shaw and how he came to not only join Styx but be held in such good faith that the album itself would be named after the Tommy Shaw composition of the same name. Shaw would provide lead vocals for three of the album's seven songs and "Crystal Ball" would become the launching point to the band becoming one of the biggest bands of the seventies.
WhitesnakeCome An' Get It
Way before "Still of the Night", and "Here I Go Again" David Coverdale and Whitesnake were tearing up most of the free world outside of the U.S. with popular bands like AC/DC taggiing along in support. Matter of fact, by the time of the release of 1981's "Come An' Get it" the band already had four releases and all that kept their latest record from reaching number one in the UK was Adam and the Ants "Kings of the Wild Frontier." Featuring Coverdale's bandmates from Deep Purple, Ian Paice on drums and Jon Lord on keyboards, "Come An' Get It" was part Purple style rock part strut cock rock shoved along by ball busting drums and hooky choruses. It was everything I dug about the soulful rocking side of bands like Bad Company but with more balls. But like many records back in the day, I never would have heard the music had I not been inclined to buy the record and I was sold on this one purely on the fantastic art on the cover. The snake coiled up in the class apple on the front and the smashed glass apple sans snake on the back was so visually stimulating I would just stare at it while listening to the record through my huge set of headphones. This is one of those "UHHH!" records that not only makes you feel rockin' but a bit sexy as well!
Those are just a small bit of the records that impacted my younger days not only musically, not just visually, but in complete packages. Some I dug better musically, some I prefer visually but as a whole, each and every one has or still does kick major vinyl ass!
