1000 Record Covers

by Michael Ochs

Overview

Record covers are a sign of our life and times. Like the music on the discs, they address such issues as love, life, death, fashion, and rebellion. For music fans the covers are the expression of a period, of a particular time in their lives. Many are works of art and have become as famous as the music they stand for—Andy Warhol's covers, for example, including the banana he designed for The Velvet Underground. This edition of Record Covers presents a selection of the best rock album covers of the 60s to 90s from music archivist, disc jockey, journalist, and former record-publicity executive Michael Ochs’s enormous private collection. Both a trip down memory lane and a study in the evolution of cover art, this is a sweeping look at an underappreciated art form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783836550581
Publisher:	TASCHEN
Publication date:	03/15/2014
Series:	Bibliotheca Universalis
Edition description:	Multilingual Edition
Pages:	576
Sales rank:	8,096
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Michael Ochs developed an addiction to rock and roll in the early 50s. To feed his habit, Ochs headed the publicity departments of Columbia, Shelter, and ABC Records in the 60s and 70s. He has also been a disc jockey, taught a rock-history course for UCLA and written for such magazines as Rock, Melody Maker, Cashbox, and Crawdaddy. He established the Michael Ochs Archives in the mid-70s. The archives currently house millions of photographs and over 100,000 albums and singles.

Editorial Reviews

Vinyl revival? This book single-handedly champions the cause.

Inpress

Vinyl revival? This book single-handedly champions the cause.

Melbourne Inpress

"The '45' is here to stay, and let there be no doubt about it!" These were the words of Frank Folsom, the president of RCA Victor, who unveiled the revolutionary seven-inch, forty-five-r.p.m. record in 1949. Folsom may have been guilty of wishful thinking (the introduction of the compact disk in the nineteen-eighties spelled doom for the 45), but his statement remains fairly accurate: vintage singles, made of "indestructible" vinyl, remain the stuff of collectors' avid nostalgia, spurred on as much by the records' eye-catching packaging as by the crackly sounds retained in their microgrooves. The art of the 45 -- which included contributions from Pablo Picasso -- is explored in the forthcoming 45 RPM, a mammoth tribute to the orphaned format edited by Spencer Drate, himself a graphic designer for the music industry.

The consumer-friendly packaging of pop music predates records, as documented American Life In Our Piano Benches, by Jean M. Bonin. This tidy collection of sheet-music art includes everything from the 1882 anti-vermin anthem "Rough on Rats" to the megahit of 1899, "Maple Leaf Rag," by Scott Joplin.

Rock archivist Michael Ochs owns about a hundred thousand long-playing records. A sliver of his collection is reproduced in 1000 Record Covers, a brick-like tome that traces the colorful evolution of the twelve-inch format introduced by Columbia in 1948. From early rock-and-roll covers that actually depicted rocks and kaiser rolls to Roger Dean's "Hobbit"-inspired fantasias to a profusion of "Abbey Road" spoofs (including one featuring the Red Hot Chili Peppers clad only in tube socks), "1000 Record Covers" is a tribute to the days when looking at a record was as exciting as listening to it.(Mark Rozzo)

The New Yorker