Subjective? Certainly. Personal? Quite. Presumptuous? Indeed! But it’s my blog, after all, and I’m leaving the door open wide for future entries. These are nothing more than the album covers I have looked at over the years that still give me pause. All but one are admittedly from the grand age of vinyl, when the marketing space left so much more room for creativity than the “thumbnail” image on an iPhone.
Byzantine artists sometimes portrayed Christ with two very different eyes – one stern in judgement, the other loving in forgiveness. On the “Heroes” cover, David Bowie manages a similar dichotomy – his brown eye dark and menacing, his blue one illuminated and starstruck. Interesting to note he recorded this album in Berlin (itself a city of dichotomies at the time) to loosen the binds of a heroin (Heroine?) addiction. Who wouldn’t be of two minds?
Miles David had learned his jazz chops a decade earlier with giants like Charlie Parker, and had gone on to form the quintessential quintet offering modern renditions of classic standards. On the Blackhawk cover, a suave Davis lights a cigarette, coat over his shoulders, and a pretty girl looking on. Miles was on the cusp of launching the next movement in jazz – the Birth of Cool.
The art group Hypnosis was responsible for countless great album covers in the 70’s. For Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, somehow a drooling cow looking back at the camera works for a band that would later write poignant social commentary in the metaphors of pigs, dogs and sheep.
Staying with the absurd for a moment, the Grateful Dead’s Europe ’72 double-album is a classic of crisp, stoney animation. Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse created many covers for the Dead, but this was their hippy apex.
OVO is quite possibly the worst of some recent, very bad Peter Gabriel albums, with little that is memorable but the album cover. But it’s a beautiful cover. Alien baby in a crop circle? Moses in the bullrushes? Who knows, but it’s beautiful.
The photo is a tastefully sexy, clever depiction of the album title, Flesh and Blood. Roxy Music covers were not always so tasteful or clever, so this one stands out especially.
Not just a master crafter of cutting-edge music, David Byrne of Talking Heads was, and remains an artiste. This early cover is made from 529 Polaroids – a concept of Byrnes. The back cover is equally interesting and intelligent.
Another Hypgnosis project, Led Zeppelin needed a cover for Houses of the Holy that would match their etherial, other-worldly stardom at the time. A bit over-the-top it was, but so was the band, and there were no apologies.
Granted, I’m influenced by my love for the play/show, the brilliant song writing, and my conviction that Rex Harrison was a man’s man in the British style, but I’ve always loved the drawing of Harrison as puppeteer for Julie Andrews, and the playwright George Bernard Shaw puppeteering Harrison.
My favorite for last. Aja was the pinnacle of a string of unbelievable Steely Dan albums that coalesced jazz and blues without ever sounding silly or overdone. The cover art is as stark as the title, reflecting the Japanese sense of both simplicity and mystery embodied in the song’s protagonist.
Chuck Haddix, music archivist for the University of Missouri at Kansas City, has written a fresh and well-researched biography of local jazz legend, Charlie “Bird” Parker. It’s a short but thorough read about the Kansas City, KS native that transformed the alto saxophone into a juggernaut for musical change. The narrative covers Parker’s formative years in Mayor Pendergast’s rough and raucous Kansas City, MO during the Depression and Prohibition.
berowne.com 