LP 101

By MICHAEL PERKINS

ONE OF THE MOST FREEING OF TIMES FOR PHOTOGRAPHY occurred  about half-way through my childhood, and it made its biggest impact on me as rock music entered its own first great age. In the mid-1960’s, the cover art for record albums finally became untethered from the contents on the discs, so instead of merely being billboards for the music that lay within the package, photographs for popular releases became free to be created purely under their own aesthetic. The impact of Pop Art and the avant-garde, which was already playing out on the fronts of weekly magazines and advertising campaigns of the day, finally made its way to “the kids'” tunes via the covers of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Axis: Bold As Love, Disraeli Gears and dozens of other iconic albums. The images ranged from solarized color to fisheyes to collage, but one thing was true of them all. As art, they were about themselves, and themselves only.

The great thing about the recent return of the vinyl album is that the rangy 12-inch canvas that was lost to the music world during the cassette and CD eras has finally come back, with artists once again designing visions that define only the work itself, rather than the record’s musical content. It’s allowed a new generation of artists to enroll in what could be called “LP 101”, or the art of getting attention. In too many cases, of course, the covers of albums were of far greater artistic value than the tunes inside, something we sadly discovered after slipping off the shrink wrap and dropping the needle. Even so, the entire movement inspired Baby Photog Me to stop looking for alibis for my own “outlier” visions. A photograph did not have to be anchored to reality! Or better yet, it could be tied to my own, personal reality, something which did not have to be explained or excused, but which merely was.

I don’t know where images like this come from. I never have. The intoxicating thing about them is that there is less delay and fuss between their first popping into my head and eventually landing in my camera. The cover designers of the ’60’s had to urge and conjure their heads off with film-based, pre-computer tech to realize their mad visions. Who knows how close the results were to their original brainstorms? Hey, you work in the world you have. All the same, having lived in both times, I’m grateful for the tools I have at hand now, when the distance between a dream and a deed is measured in inches instead of miles.

Speaking of “Miles”, have you seen that cover for Bitches Brew? Outtasite.