After over a year of doing this column, I’ve finally taken a clue from Mike Carvalho’s Midway series.  I’m going to talk to you about some of my personal musical obsessions and the majority of them come in the form of vinyl.

Don’t worry.  We’re not even going to touch the question of whether pristine virgin vinyl sounds better than a compact disc.  See, my hearing is basically fucked.  I spent many years in front of amplifiers both on stage and off without wearing hearing protection.  Thus, I do have some small hearing loss so the fucking record could be pristine and I couldn’t tell the difference between that and a freshly pressed CD. 

I could care less about what most audiophiles argue about, however I do cherish my vinyl.  The reasoning is even geekier than any argument about audio.  It has to do with album cover art.  If there is only one thing I bemoan about the switch from vinyl to CD, it's that the artwork shrank.  There used to be something I really enjoyed about getting that vinyl album with the double gatefold sleeve and perusing every inch of it for some small clue as to what the band was about.  It was mysterious and it went beyond just getting the lyrics on the album sleeve.  It was about looking for the essence of the music in the cover art itself.   

I’m 39 years old.  I don’t have time for that shit now, but… the albums that impressed me the most still get pulled out and still get perused occasionally.  In this column, I’d like to share some with you. 

The Five Albums In My Collection With The Coolest Art

Miles Davis - Bitch's Brew
Seriously, this is a work of sheer genius both for the content of the album and the artwork on the cover.  Shrinking it down to a five inch by five inch CD booklet is like shrinking down the Mona Lisa to a wallet picture.  Laying on the floor staring at this while Miles Runs The Voodoo Down plays is about the closest you can get to touching God without help from recreational drugs or a life of chastity and meditation.  The inside of the album cover contains one of those awesome old marketing pieces from Columbia where someone tries to explain exactly why this album is amazing.  In this case, Ralph J. Gleason writes everything he needs to in the first paragraph (but of course then goes on to write thirteen more).

"There is so much to say about this music.  I don’t mean so much to explain about it because that’s stupid, the music speaks for itself.  What I mean is that so much flashes through my mind when I hear the tapes of this album that if I could I would write a novel about it full of life and scenes and people and blood and sweat and love.” – Ralph J. Gleason

KMFDM – UAIOE
This one wrapped me up so tight it took years to untangle my brain.  The music is as brutal as any KMFDM album, but it’s that cover art (all black, red and white) that had me lying on the bed, staring at it over and over again.  The island in the background exploding into a blood red sea is freakish enough but the face staring out at you is infinitely scarier.  There’s a look in the eyes that screams anarchy.  There’s the bit of saliva that has escaped from his front right tooth and is sliding over his lower lip.  There’re the small drops of sweat beading down from his forehead and there’s the smile that says, “You can’t trust a man in a suit and tie ever again.”  He is the true face of The X-Files Cigarette Smoking Man.  When the towers in New York went down in 2001, this is the face I thought of, smiling and walking away from the destruction.  I wanted to frame this and put it on the wall in my home office but my wife outvoted me.

Lou Reed – Lou Reed

And of course, all of that is there just to throw you off the trail of the real essence of the album.  Lou Reed’s first album is all about the figure in the lower left hand corner.  The dark bird with its head down, half cast in shadow and ignoring the mystery, wonder and beauty of what’s going on around him is the distillation of the ten songs on this album… and I got all of that from listening to it repeatedly and studying the cover.  Fuck you Compact Discs.  Fuck you in your fucking ass. 

Kraftwerk – The Man-Machine
If album cover art is meant to create an impression of the contents of the album, no other artists may have hit the mark truer than Kraftwerk.  Despite many people trying to get me to listen to Autobahn and Trans-Europe Express, I just wasn’t a big fan.  Which leads me to one day when I was 17 and loitering in Spec’s Music in Lakeland, Florida.  My favorite record store clerk saw I was picking up OMD’s Crush album.  He quickly steered me over to Kraftwerk, which prompted me to explain how much I didn’t like Kraftwerk.

He gave me the record.  Seriously, he must have written it off as stolen or something but he slipped The Man-Machine into the bag and told me to give it a serious listen.  The Man-Machine is much less cold and robotic than some of their earlier stuff and as I stared at the album cover, I realized that they had subtly insinuated that on their cover.  The red shirts, snappy black ties and dynamic diagonal lines of the cover art suggested something that was still regimented but more stylish.  Sure enough, The Man-Machine was only a few steps removed from that OMD album and the cover art was much cooler too. 

Elvis Costello – Armed Forces
I’ve saved the best for last.  When it comes to cover art in my album collection, my copy of Armed Forces takes the fucking cake.  Then, it fucks the cake, bakes another one and takes that one too.

First off, there’s the cover with its herd of elephants standing next to the bones of their fallen.  The painting is gorgeous and the elephants are a symbol of unstoppable power much like the album itself.

Closer inspection of the album cover reveals that this isn’t your normal sleeve.  In fact, to open it, you have to flip it over where you’ll find significantly different cover art mixing images of soldiers, tanks and pop art.  Plus it’s split down the middle allowing you to unfold it. 

Open those two flaps and your brain is assaulted with color.  This time it’s less military (although there are some sailors in the upper half) and more pop.  But like that puzzle in the Hellraiser movies, there’s still more to unfold. 

A visual bomb has now gone off and it’s blowing the rods and cones in your optic fluid through the back of your skull.  Luckily for you, you’ve peeled back the fruit to it’s wonderful nugget of sonic goodness, but inside there’s more than just the album.   

Remove the vinyl and you get the total visual of the “Elvis Costello and The Attractions Armed Forces” artwork.  That’s still not the end though.

There's an EP of a live performance as well as individual cards with photos of the band members to peruse.

Hours.  Hours and hours and hours were spent poring over this cover art while listening to Accidents Will Happen, (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding, Goon Squad and Oliver’s Army.   Despite Imperial Bedroom having my favorite Costello song (Beyond Belief), Armed Forces is my favorite Elvis Costello album.  Even today, when I play it on my iPod I appreciate it more because of the time I spent with its cover, soaking in the music and appreciating every note, every word and every pause in between tracks. 

Long live Vinyl.