With the recent news of an upcoming Zappa release, my thoughts turned to releases of days gone by – in particular, 1975’s ‘One Size Fits All’ and its magnificent album artwork. Zappa fans who only know of FZ’s albums through CDs, missed an era when his album covers were almost as anticipated as was his music. View the album artwork in the video above, along with the album’s first track, “Inca Roads”, or download the artwork here.
Thanks to gvmota.
Now there is a whole generation coming up with mp3s. They won’t see squat except maybe a tiny icon.
The large LP-covers established an artistic connection between musicians and graphic artists. Many beautiful LP-covers are slowly becoming lost, or minimized to icons and thumbnails. Hopefully the originals will be archived.
I’m happy to see that some present musicians are setting up collaborations with graphic artists, by providing extensive digital additions to their music, published as pdf.
It’s not the same as holding an LP in your hands, though…
Have to agree with the above comments. I read somewhere that Zappa himself didn’t bother reading the booklets that came with CD’s because they were too hard to read being so small!!!
One of the biggest victims I think is the sleeve to ‘Tinsel Town Rebellion.’ All that detail and colour seems missing in the little booklet.
Sacrilige!!
Hey, but let us not forget about the back cover with the star map, which was shared by Our Host Here, Barry.
DAVID BOOTIES
Tks for sharing my YouTube video and Flickr picture with your visitors. It´s an honour for me.
Hi Bálint, the beautiful and enigmatic details of the back cover are shown in the above mentioned video.
‘The lost art of album covers’ is, of course, not a lost art.
When the lp->cd transition came about, there were, let’s say “conversion losses”, like the star map. But when an album was first made as a cd, all the advantages of that medium could be explored. I can’t imagine an lp-version of Civilisation Phase III, for instance.
And the moustache on FZ plays the music of FZ is about life size. You want that blown up to lp format? You could wear it as sun glasses.
Hmm, come to think of it. It could have been a new trend …
Sorry as cool as album art or CD art looks, I would gladly trade it for $10 downloads on Rhapsody.