Thursday, March 12, 2009

LP Cover Lover

I just found LP Cover Lover, one of many sites that display campy or humorous or just odd LP covers but also one of the best. It's odd to constantly stumble across these covers, or in fact any of the obscure albums in thrift stores that are too marginal to even make it into second-hand record stores, and realize the enormous amount of LPs that were produced. I sometimes think that every church singing group that bothered to come up with a name also released an album. Perhaps just as mystifying is was anybody buying these things? Some schlocky generic-covered surf band? Some reading of no-name poetry? A edge-of-town lounge singer? (Though my old roommate Jeff and I realized years later that both our first encounters with Chuck Berry was a wretched album of re-recordings he made in the 70s for a bit of spending money)

Of course the advantage to these covers is that they're quick hipness - you don't have to listen to an entire album or watch an entire movie or even run through an entire Mike Avallone or Harry Stephen Keeler novel. For the type of people who would watch an Ed Wood film before a Hou Hsiao-Hsien that's an advantage. All the coolness, none of the work.