During the vinyl age (roughly the early ’50s through the ’70s), LP album covers played an essential role in music enthusiasts’ first-time listening ritual. This involved delicately removing the 12″ (or 10″) disc from its protective wrapper, then carefully placing it on the turntable while revving the hi-fi up. Each step was key to a multimedia experience that also included reading liner notes and communing—the best word I can think of—with the artwork and/or photographs. Consciously or not, all the artists and artisans involved in creating a record package worked toward the same fetishistic outcome, that of making an immersive fusion of sight and sound.
When Mark Havens and Chris Entwisle invited me to preview the preliminary contents of WAIL: The Art of Prestige Records 1949-1970 (RIT Press), I had not heard of Prestige. I was reminded, however, that before the cable TV era, when music videos were the next big music industry thing (later to be replaced by online digital pyrotechnics), the simple paperboard album cover triggered more than mere commercial sales appeal. Cover art tapped into the listeners’ personal senses of memory and emotion.
WAIL celebrates these intimate relationships made between art, artist, music and listener. Through oral histories and a wealth of ephemeral printed artifacts, it chronicles Prestige Records’ graphic, typographic and photographic legacy and the illustrators, layout folks and graphic designers who made all the components come together. (I had never seen any of these covers before.)
Unlike Command Records, which established a house style through its frequent abstract album covers, Prestige was not as unified, but it did set a tone with artful photographs, often printing in two colors. Typographically, its artists, most notably Reid Miles, made bold compositions, like the cover for Monk below.
In exploring virtually forgotten sleeves, WAIL also traces how the collected work fits into the legacy of Midcentury Modern design at large.
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