Vinyl Records - A Lost Canvas

I remember when I was a kid laying on the floor of my mom's little apartment in Concord with half her record collection strewn over her 1970's avocado toned shag carpet. She had an old combination unit stereo that had a record player on top, a radio for FM and AM and a eight track tape player- state of the art for the time. My mom was a returning student, having dropped out of high school to give birth to me. Now she was going back to get her high school equivalency certificate and eventually she would go on to get first her Bachelor's Degree from Mills College and then her Master's Degree from UC Berkeley. I would spend hours looking at the covers of the albums while the sounds of Led Zeppelin's grinding guitar or Simon and Garfunkle's smooth harmonizing drifted out over the green landscape.

The Album covers were amazing to me. The pictures and the art work were magical and transported me to whatever mystical land was depicted. It's a ritual that is dying out in the age of digital music. The act of actually holding the large cardboard sleeve in your hand and running your fingers obver the images or feeling the innovative textures that were often incorporated into the sleeve so you could “feel” it as well as “see” it.

On a recent visit to the Nelson Gallery in the art building there was a great selection of these albums as apart of the Merch Art exhibit(See Merch Art Blog previous). Lots of musicians were hiring real artists to design there album covers such as “Sticky Fingers” by the Rolling Stones. The album cover was designed by the excentric Andy Warhol and featured a picture of a pair of jean with a real working zipper that could atually zip down to revel the “naked” album underneath. This haptic/optic approach makes the viewer want to do more than view.  I remember my dad had this album and used to scold me and say I was going to break the zipper.  Plus I think it made him uncomfortable that his child was playing with the zipper on this pair of a stranger's pants.   Big Brother and the Holding Company lead by Janis Joplin came out with an album called Cheap Thrills in which they hired. Local Winters underground Comic book artist Robert Crumb to pen a comic across the cover. An album by the Talking Heads featured a see-thru yellow plastics jacket. The designs and art chosen use several Gestalt principles to draw the eye to images ides.  Isolation of a single subject from the haze and business of the rest of the photo causes you to wonder about the small character in the middle of one Blue Oyster Cult Album.  All these techniques were completey original in their time and they paved the way for artists and musicians to work together to bring us the music in extra dimension. If you haven't been by the Nelson Gallery to check it out make plans to do so because looking at the tiny thumbnail attached to your mp3 file is not the same!