Recreating Retro Album Covers

A discophile collects records; an audiophile is a connoisseur of recorded sound. What do you call a person obsessed by the record album's artwork?

Even as a pre-teen, it always irked me whenever an album cover didn't quite match the vintage of the enclosed disc. The word "re-issue" wasn't yet in my vocabulary, but I still knew, for example, that a Judy Garland LP shouldn't have psychedelic artwork. Considering her sad demise, what could Capitol Records have been thinking?

Of course now I deeply appreciate the variety of re-issue artwork produced by the marketing departments of the record companies and realize how classy it could often be. This 1950s LP of Glenn Miller favorites on RCA is a marvelous example of portraiture in commercial art.

The dawn of CDs and the sonic splendors of digital remastering from the 1980s onward created fresh demand for reissues of vintage recordings. Quite often, record companies obliged listeners with glorious box sets, replete with vintage artwork and detailed liner notes. Rhino's "Songs of the West" is a prime example of the extent of care to which some companies went during the CD heyday of the 1990s.

Who knew that the '90s would one day be considered a "golden age" of sorts for the packaging of recorded sound -- a coming together of market interest, demographics, expendable income, and the exploration of new digital technologies for both the audio and visual aspects of record producing.

The birth of digital downloading in the 2000s, however, did away with all of that. The down-and-dirty business of "do-it-yourself," and the seemingly universal acceptance of convenience over quality, meant that all of the little aesthetic pleasures that accompanied an LP, and later a CD, are gone, including the lush visuals.

"Who knew that the '90s would one day be considered a 'golden age' of sorts for the packaging of recorded sound…"

In its stead, for contemporary music anyway (rap, country, hip-hop, etc.), is graphic design that stunningly represents today's tastes. However, even the best of it is usually viewed electronically on an iPod or computer screen, and so gets lost in the shuffle -- literally. For reissues of older music, iTunes and Amazon create cover art that brings new meaning to the words "drab," "hasty," and "execrable."

On the other hand, for vintage music lovers, applications such as iTunes allow us to personalize our private collections in ways never imagined before, including the ability to display and store multiple album covers.

And so I have been busy  -- very busy -- either snatching decade-appropriate LP artwork from off the Internet, or creating my own where none existed before, especially for CD compilations devoted to music from the 78 era.

"For reissues of older music, iTunes and Amazon create cover art that brings new meaning to the words 'drab,' 'hasty,' and 'execrable'."

Please enjoy my visual creations, all created entirely in Microsoft Word -- yes, even a pain-in-the-butt program such as the Publisher elements of Word can be bent to accommodate your graphic desires.

I created many of my covers to suggest the famed work of Alex Steinweiss of Columbia Records. Not only is he credited with inventing the LP album format -- the beloved decorated cardboard sleeve -- but his eponymous swirly font, "Steinweiss," is permanently linked with the late 1940s. In this creation for a Crosby reissue, we can see all of his visual quirks and preferences on display -- collage, humor, the swirly script, and his signature in the upper right.

I had Steinweiss in mind when I created the cover, below, for a Dinah Shore compilation. I found a free downloadable font that clearly attempted to imitate "Steinweiss Script," vintage graphics for the background, an appropriate photo of Miss Dinah, and Columbia's "LP" logo for good measure, and Voila! Perhaps I should instead say, "Mmmwaaah!" in tribute to the lovely Miss Shore

In the following instance, I patterned the cover after an actual Steinweiss creation, substituting Shore for Errol Flynn. It's not an exact copy but rather a sly suggestion of the original. By the way, note Steinweiss' signature in the lower right behind Mr. Flynn.

This next one was entirely an original on my part. I am proud of it. I think it suggests the late '40s very nicely, including my use of a duotone photo. I didn't want to wear out the welcome of the Steinweiss script, so I opted for a streamlined '40s script that did the job without any fuss.

I turned my attention to Decca next, whose designers and producers preferred duotone close-ups of its recording stars. Here, I gave Frances Langford a cover that might easily fool even the most discerning eye were it printed on cardboard and slipped into a vintage record bin. Below Frances is a little number I created in tribute to Connie Boswell (soon to be rechristened "Connee" after she realized that a double "ee" made it easier for her to sign autographs).

I'll revisit more of my handiwork in my next entry and will close with this "tribute to a tribute." I had always admired the three-volume series of LPs produced by Columbia shortly after Bing Crosby's 1977 death. I especially liked the hand-tinted photo (which became the graphic-design rage in the 1980s) and the miniature vintage record labels floating around The Old Groaner's head.

Taking my visual cue from Volume 3, I devised this bit of art for a similar collection of Dick Powell tunes, which, like the Crosby series, included cuts originally issued on Brunswick that would later be acquired by Columbia.  Frankly, I like my cover better, thanks to strategic use of shadowing to draw attention to the various vintage elements. The sepia photo and fleshy background are also much warmer; then again, from everything I have ever read about Der Bingle, so was Dick Powell's personality.

Addendum: Pictured is a Columbia 78 set of Sinatra records, and my variation on it for iTunes use.

Mission San Luis Obispo's architectural roots

The missions of California are arguably the state’s greatest architectural resource, influence and inspiration. They connect modern California with Mexico, and in turn with Spain and its Islamic and Catholic architectural traditions, and ultimately with ancient Rome.

Here is a similarity that I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere before in California mission literature, including various architectural surveys, popular guidebooks, and local histories.

Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa (Saint Louis Bishop of Toulouse) was founded September 1, 1772 on the central California coast. The mission's most outstanding guiding hand was Father Luis Antonio Martinez who remained at the mission for thirty-four years.

The church of Santa Maria del Naranco, near Oviedo, Asturias in northwest Spain, is an example of Asturian Pre-Romanesque architecture, and dates from 848 A.D. Located on the slope of Mount Naranco just 1.9 mi from Oviedo, it was built by Ramiro I of Asturias as a royal palace and was converted to a church in the 12th century, says Wikipedia.

(Wikipedia photo)

Padre Martinez, who arrived at Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa in 1798, was responsible for much of its construction until his departure from California in 1830. Although the church was built in 1793, it was in fact Martinez who was responsible for the addition of the mission’s most notable and distinctive feature, its vestibule and belfry, completed in 1820.

“The Mission church of San Luis Obispo is unusual in its design in that its combination of belfry and vestibule is found nowhere else among the California missions,” notes the popularly used Wikipedia, echoing similar observations made for almost two centuries.

According to Hubert Howe Bancroft, Padre Martinez was born in 1771 in Briebes, Asturias. Modern Brieves is just 55 miles from Oviedo, the largest nearby city of the region. The church of Santa Maria del Naranco is a mere three miles from Oviedo, Asturias, Spain.

(Wikipedia photo)

It is more than likely that the energetic Father Martinez recreated in adobe in far off California, the stone details of the church he was undoubtedly familiar with in Asturias. A glance at the two buildings reveals their shared similarities – the vestibule, the belfry, the arches, the moldings. The details are shared on the sides of the buildings as well.

Photographs dating from the 1860s, before the quake-damaged vestibule was removed (and restored in the 1930s), were taken at a time when the roofline of the church had no overhang, offering an easier comparison with Santa Maria del Naranco, whose stone exterior also had no overhang. Of note is the prominent molding detail that surrounds the belfry openings at San Luis Obispo, echoing the detail around the corresponding openings at Santa Maria del Naranco.

“The Palace of Santa María del Naranco, involved a significant stylistic, morphological, constructive and decorative renovation of Pre-Romanesque, supplementing it with new, innovative resources, representing a leap forward with respect to immediately previous periods… What marveled the chroniclers for so many centuries were its proportions and slender shapes, its rich, varied decoration and the introduction of elongated barrel vaults thanks to the transverse arches, allowing support and eliminating wooden ceilings.”

The California mission link to Ancient Rome, specifically the architectural suggestions of Vitruvius, can be seen in the façade of Mission Santa Barbara. Likewise, Moorish traditions, expressed in the great mosque of Cordoba, were reproduced at Mission San Gabriel. The Dutch influence on Spanish architecture is evident in the facades of San Diego and San Antonio, among others.

Perhaps we should now add Mission San Luis Obispo to that list of missions with notable architectural antecedents, and whose Asturian Romanesque predecessor has been hiding in plain sight for 1300 years.

The observation came about by accident. The college where I taught, recently closed its doors, and so I have plenty of time on my hands. I was surfing the Web and decided to look up Asturias because I recalled a lecture about the Visigoths from a 1984 Cal State Hayward Spanish class. One link lead to another and up popped a photograph of Santa Maria del Naranco. I immediately made the connection. Next, I researched the names and backgrounds of San Luis Obispo's padres in my volumes of Bancroft's History of California and discovered that Padre Martinez was indeed from Brieves, Asturias, just miles from Santa Maria del Naranco. And there you have it.