The History of Album Art
matthewstrom.com
matthewstrom.com
Also Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson of Hypgnosis, who created a long line of definitive covers for artists from the 70s and 80s, including Pink Floyd. (I met Thorgerson once. He was notorious for being a complete arse - and so it proved. Unique talent though.)
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/hipgnosis-lif...
And of course Factory Records and Pete Saville, especially this infamous classic "sample" from an astronomy paper.
https://f.media-amazon.com/images/I/81T-loBJ40L._SL1291_.jpg
He has a story about the cover art for Their Greatest Hits (Eagles)[0].
The bird skull is sitting in what looks like "snow."
Apparently, that's what it was. After the shoot, they snorted it all.
[0] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0566/5105/5295/files/eagle...
But it is necessarily limited in the amount of album covers it can feature from what many would consider to be their heyday, the 1950s through the 1970s.
If you just want to feast your eyes on a lot of great album covers from that period, pick up a copy of the "Album Cover Album" [1] or one of its six (!) follow-ups. Designers Storm Thorgerson (who worked with Pink Floyd) and Roger Dean (who worked with Yes) created these incredibly lush books, with album covers printed nice and large in vivid color, organized in a really insightfully thematic way. A bit more speedy than your average used book, but not by much. Highly recommended, good for hours of reverie.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5304267-album-cover-albu...
And Space Needle, https://store-us.rogerdean.com/products/space-needle-59x86cm....
I find it sad that cover art is reduced/dead due to 12” -> 120mm -> gone (LP -> CD -> mp3/streaming.
I really enjoy my covers for all the ‘old’ music I have.
Thank you Rockaway Records from where I bought > 1.000 vinyls when living is LA in ‘87…!
"In the first half of 2023, vinyl records brought in 72% of all non-digital recorded music format revenues in the US."
It was a "TIL" day, for me.
Vinyl didn't come out until much later. In the early 1900s records were made from acetate, and could shatter.
Is this claim documented somewhere? (All but one of the footnote links are dead for me)
There's a lot of documentation of those players' heroin and alcohol use. Miles Davis' autobiography has a list in it somewhere of all the players that were abusing substances; a lot of it had to do with their need to play gigs back-to-back through the night to make a living. As for the schedules, I think it was Miles' book, but I can't find it exactly ... because they played all night, and rehearsed early in the morning after the clubs closed, it was hard to keep a group on a predictable recording schedule. The majors wanted big names with well-known hit songs, and the loose ensemble nature, original compositions, and unpredictable improv of bebop was pretty much the opposite of commercially viable at the time.
Scott DeVeaux's The Birth of Beebop is a great source, too.
Plus, Bird had many labels release his music, including Savoy, Columbia, and Mercury. Dizzy was notoriously straight-laced, especially because of what happened to Bird. He lectured musicians about this all the time. He also preferred dealing with independent labels as opposed to the majors (although Bluebird was a subsidiary of RCA).
I know you don't include Miles in the list of people that labels avoided, but he didn't exactly have a reputation of being easy to deal with, and he signed with Columbia in 1955.
As for Trane, if I recall correctly, he was constantly panned by critics in the earlier years. He was signed to Atlantic in the late 50s before Giant Steps was released. They were certainly a major, no?