Hissing through clenched teeth the other day as I struggled to extract “Storyville,” the new Robbie Robertson album, from the death grip of its shrink wrap, I had an epiphany. It wasn’t much in the overall scheme of things-a minor sense of loss among far more mournful ones doled out daily on the front page and on the 11 o’clock news. Still, it hit with the primal impact of a Keith Moon (the Who, remember?) drum solo: I realized how much I resent compact discs.
My sudden pique wasn’t because the CD was so tightly sealed I almost needed the Jaws of Life to tear it open. Nor was my dismay the pathetic wail of a sonic dinosaur who complains bitterly, as a friend did recently, that there hasn’t been any really good music since somewhere in the mid-1970s. (The friend insists that Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” in 1973 was the last great album, but I tend to date the decline of rock after Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” in 1975 and The Eagles’ “Hotel California” in 1976.) And I wasn’t even annoyed by the artificially bright and infernally perfect CD sound-free of the friendly pops, clicks and background hiss on good old vinyl records.
It wasn’t any of that. Instead, it was the compact disc’s tiny size that raised my ire-and how that had changed everything about the experience of listening to albums.
After I had finally opened the diabolical box in which CDs are packaged in these hermetically sealed, individually portioned, tamper-free times, I glanced down at the album I was finally holding in my hand. The cover artwork looked interesting, but I needed a magnifying glass to appreciate it. When I fed the disc to my CD player, the songs sounded swell, but I had no idea what they were called or who was playing and singing, because neither the front nor the back cover had any information at all. It was then, in a moment of absolute clarity, that I knew what truly galled me about CDs: they had robbed me of the visual and tactile rewards that had contributed so hugely to my listening enjoyment of what we used to call LPs.
I can vividly recall rushing home with a vinyl album, slapping it on the turntable and cranking the system up to the threshold of pain while I held, looked at and read the album cover, record sleeve and perhaps the gatefold if it was one of those great double albums. I followed along on the lyric sheet, seeing where the printed version differed from the way it was finally sung and noting what musicians and singers performed on each cut. Sometimes, such as with Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life,” there was a large booklet with lyrics, information on singers and musicians. Often there were revealing photographs. At the very least, the album sleeve hid all sorts of secret stuff.
Now that the LP is all but dead (only 2 million were produced in the first half of 1991, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, compared with nearly 154 million CD albums), those simple joys are gone forever. The saddest byproduct of the CD’s triumph of miniaturization, convenience and (arguably) sound was the destruction of the minor art form of the album cover. The very size of an LP cover-a full square foot-proved an irresistible tabula rasa to a generation of artists, photographers and designers whose largely unfettered inspirations produced scores of brilliantly conceived and executed covers. Encouraged by the visual possibilities of this large format, art and commerce merged in a way rarely seen since Renaissance masters churned out portraits of merchant princes and their families.
Elaborate, fanciful and often wildly creative covers regularly graced albums in the golden age of vinyl, starting with the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967. Remember Led Zeppelin’s “In through the Out Door,” Linda Ronstadt’s “Simple Dreams” and The Rolling Stones’ “Some Girls”? Who could forget the impact of the classic raunchy Stones cover-the one with the bulge and the zipper-for 1971’s “Sticky Fingers”?
At less than five inches square, compact discs offer little to fondle, almost no room for anything interesting to look at and print so tiny it might as well be coffee grounds. There’s simply no incentive for record companies to spend time, energy or money on artwork and graphics. What, after all, is the point of producing intricately designed covers when they can’t be seen well enough to be appreciated? Information that used to be printed on covers is now tucked away in wee booklets so small they practically require tweezers to handle and take the eyesight of a hawk to read.
It’s a sad state, all right. But you begin to see the record companies’ dilemma when celebrated albums from the past are reproduced in compact-disc versions with an approximation of their original covers. Just look at Led Zeppelin’s CD-ized “Houses of the Holy” to understand just how dismal the artwork becomes. The powerful image of naked children clambering over rocks is reduced to a silly slice of nonsense viewed through a mailbox slit.
Finally, left with nothing to do but listen to Robertson’s album, I found myself drifting into a fantasy scenario. I would invent a gizmo that could be used to puncture and slash open the evil CD packaging to free the music inside-knives, saws or plastic explosives would no longer be necessary to do the job. Sell it on late-night TV, I cackled to myself, like Ginsu knives and folding fishing rods. Make a fortune. Move to Maui. And maybe found a museum dedicated to great album covers from the ancient days of vinyl.
