Vinyl dreams

Album Cover Album

Edited by Storm Thorgerson

& Roger Dean

157 pages, Collins Design

Available at National Book Store

What did album covers mean to you, growing up in the ‘70s or ‘80s? And what do they mean to you vinyl archaeologists of today, rediscovering the pleasure of gazing into a 12-by-12-inch portal of someone else’s dreams?

We know the album cover is a relic, an artifact, a thing doomed to the past. Hell, without CDs, soon we’ll pretty much be left with postage stamp-sized pictures of our MP3 downloads from here on. And that’s sad.

Tales of topographic cardboard: Roger Dean was the master of trippy landscapes and fonts.

Because visual art was always the flipside to the music, a bouquet of optical stimulation for rock fans well before the invention of MTV. Hell, we needed to concentrate on something as the heartbeat started building to a clockwork cacophony during the first moments of Pink Floyd’s Speak to Me/Breathe. Why not a prism shaft shooting off a pyramid, decorating all four glossy surfaces of “Dark Side of the Moon”? We fetishized over our album covers, some of us keeping them imprisoned inside shrinkwrap plastic for years (though this was ill advised as it warped the vinyl inside). As we got older, album covers became stoner entertainment: the gatefolds of Led Zeppelin’s “IV” or Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Trilogy” were probably never specifically designed for deseeding weed, but seemed to do the job well enough. We studied the trick photography and tinted photos and Giger artwork of ELP records for deep meaning (what were we thinking, really?). We even differentiated the smell of album covers: I distinctly remember my copy of King Crimson’s “In the Court of the Crimson King” smelled like strawberry taffy, though no one else can verify this particular olfactory memory.

Not surprisingly, Roger Dean and Storm Thorgerson, who edited and compiled the album covers in the lush coffeetable book The Album Cover Album (almost as clever a title as Kramer’s Coffeetable Book that opens up to become an actual coffeetable) look to the ‘70s as “The Golden Age” of album cover art: they were, after all, responsible for all the Tolkien-inspired dreamscapes for prog bands like Yes and surrealistic mind-scratchers for Pink Floyd. If you needed a painting of a guy wearing a lightbulb suit, you turned to Thorgerson; if you needed doomy Mordor-ish cliffs and drifting-smoke fonts, you called Dean.

Thorgerson — who truly did amazing work for Hipgnosis — provides a thoughtful foreword to the book: “Album covers… become the aide-mémoire to personal highlights in one’s life, for example, loss of virginity, first pharmaceutical experiences, or even style guides to the era and a monogamous partner to your favorite music… They are also often the first place where pubescents come across the visual arts — being reluctant to visit galleries or read art books while in the throes of hormonal disarray.”

Nice, huh? Rock album covers were our Louvre, our MoMA. Ah, but all that’s in the past now. Album art no longer accompanies our personal growth the same way it did in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. First 8-tracks, then cassettes and CDs, changed it, descaling our vinyl dreams to a reduced capacity. The physical, tangible presence of the album cover was doomed to extinction.

Speaking of physical presence, The Album Cover Album pays special attention to cardboard covers that folded out, or popped up, or were packaged and cut in unique ways. One remembers (again, from the ‘70s, that tricky decade that won’t go away) album covers shaped like Zippo lighters (Bob Marley), pills (Cheech & Chong), whiskey glasses (Rod Stewart), wooden school desks and snakeskin wallets (Alice Cooper), as well as rotating features (Led Zeps’ “III” and “Physical Graffiti,” or The Faces “Ooh La La”). All this adds tremendously to the nostalgia factor.

The book itself is a bit slapdash and limited, but the editors view it as a series: expect to see more of your favorites in future editions. It’s easy to leaf through and, along with touches of nostalgia, you’ll probably encounter annoyance that certain personal preferences are not included (like, where’s “Beck-Ola”’s Magritte-apple-in-a-room cover, for God’s sake?). Oh well, it can never really be the definitive “album cover album,” after all. But where else will you find such a colorful burst of memory tickles from the likes of Uriah Heep, Gentle Giant, and Kingfish? It’s worth noting that our vinyl nostalgia forgives the general crappiness of the previous mentioned three bands (and countless others memorialized in this book) in favor of the mind-expanding freedom of the medium: by the ‘70s, you could literally put any image on an album cover — you were no longer limited to a group shot or even the name of the band — as long as the image drew people’s attention, and people were likely to remember the visual long after they’d forgotten the “music.”

I remember my own “first album” experience: I believe it was Steely Dan’s “Aja” that I first plunked down my own hard-earned money for, just to handle its slick, glossy cover; I must have been entranced by the Hideki Fujii cover photo of an Asian woman bedecked in a white and red kimono shown against a black background; it turned out the music inside was as evocative and entrancing as the album art, but that is a rare experience indeed. Often, album covers are way more exciting than any of the grooves contained inside, a fact that Album Cover Album knowingly celebrates.

From the psychedelic to the sexist, The Album Cover Album takes you back to the LP artwork of yesteryear.

Sure, you could spend hours sifting through your memory, looking up some of these images online and downloading them for perusal at your leisure. But — much as the album cover was a keepsake for us hardcore music listeners back in the day — the physical fact of this book far outweighs the value of any batch of JPEGs you could assemble in a desktop folder. It’s more tactile, for one thing, and that makes all the difference in this less and less tactile world of ours.