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Exhibit preview: Ode to the LP

Friday, June 21, 2002

By Scott Mervis, Post-Gazette Weekend Editor

Before there was the wee little booklet that slides tediously out of the crunchy plastic jewel box, there was the album cover, an article of substance you could wrap your hands around and fondle and gaze at seemingly for the entire duration of the record.

A mere relic in the age of digital, it lives on in attics all over America, in stores like Jerry's Records and now on the walls of the Andy Warhol Museum.

"The LP Show" is a tribute to album art, but an odd one in that it is concerned neither with documenting the history of album cover art or exhibiting its finest or more significant specimens. And what's inside matters not in the least.

"I can leave a show like that to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," says curator Carlo McCormick. "What I wanted people to see was the outrageous cornucopia of eye candy, of unbelievable weirdness that occurred. It's not a happy-go-lucky trip down memory lane."

"The LP Show" does a spin at the Warhol, after a first run last summer at the Exit Art gallery in Manhattan and a second showing this winter at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. The exhibit has generated attention in both the art and music worlds, drawing cover from magazines like Spin and ArtForum.

McCormick, senior editor at hip pop-culture mag Paper in New York, doesn't recall where the idea came from but does remember thinking a show of album art was a no-brainer.

	More on this story EXHIBIT PREVIEW: 'The LP Show' WHERE: Andy Warhol Museum WHEN: Sunday through Aug. 18 OPENING: "The LP Show" and "Off Guard: The Photographs of Ron Galella" open tomorrow. A 6 p.m. talk with Alex Steinweiss, inventor of the album cover; 7 p.m. reception with Ron Galella. $10 for reception, $5 Carnegie Museum members. Call 412-237-8300. The man who invented album art Art Review: In praise of the rock poster

"People have been putting records up on their walls forever. I even heard that IKEA makes a special frame for them. When people started getting rid of their records for CD players, there were certain records they just couldn't throw out, so they'd stick them up on a shelf or a wall. No one has taken it seriously as an art form, but in some ways people have understood its aesthetic pleasures and values for a while."

Had McCormick simply chosen his favorite album covers and stuck them on the wall in IKEA frames, it probably would have been treated like one of those Rock 'n' Roll Artists shows that decorate hotel walls on the weekend. But McCormick, working with Exit Art, used the covers to concoct a sort of installation without, he says, "being too pretentious about it."

Inspired by some of the fetish-istic tendencies of record collectors, he grouped the covers loosely by theme, letting them flow naturally from one to the next in what he considers a weird stream of consciousness. For instance, the classic King Crimson scream cover is paired with a wailing Lloyd Price and a row of atom bombs might be followed by a row of bouffant hairdos.

"I really love the juxtapositions that you can get," he says. "If you're just doing, like, records with people under water, you can get that specific. Records with smiley faces. Records which feature motorcycles on the cover or food on the cover, that you get incredible radical juxtapositions. You can do the art justice in that you aren't paying attention to the music. That was kind of important to me. I didn't want to do the 2 1/2 thousand greatest records ever made or the greatest covers ever made. I think people know that stuff. I don't need to put the White Album in. I don't need to put the Stones in or Led Zeppelin, or any of the most famous records."

The project, which he began four years ago, allowed him to investigate the wild, eccentric world of record collecting. Living in Pittsburgh -- one of the capitals for vinyl junkies -- we probably all know at least one person who lives for the dusty smell of cardboard and vinyl, like the Steve Buscemi character in "Ghost World."

McCormick leaned on more than 60 of them, in all classes and varieties, beginning with friends like John Zorn, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and underground hero Foetus, down to lonely blue-collar guys who will spend their last dime to get that one elusive record.

McCormick, who has a modest collection of 10,000 records, some of them collected only for their covers and none of which are in the show, says he became one of those crazed collectors by the time this show was curated.

"It's funny 'cause I'm not one, but you can imagine what I'm like a couple years into this, like, 'I gotta get that. I heard about this record!' and I hadn't seen sunlight in a year and I had greasy, spotty skin and disheveled hair and I'm talking in my sleep and my wife's like, 'Will you stop talking about that Ike and Tina Turner record' " -- the one where they're in white face and eating watermelon.

There was one collector he encountered who specializes in "private press" records, truly indie ones like "a weird lounge act in the Midwest or a high school marching band."

Likewise, McCormick says, "For me, the treats are the more obscure ones like Christian children's ventriloquist records or the Space-Age Bachelor Pad records, this cul de sac of exotica."

Speaking of which, some of "The LP Show" is not intended for general audiences. There are sections themed to such topics as sex, drugs, death and fascism that can be explicit or disturbing.

"I understand with the Warhol, people can't go there with a full load of family values, 'cause it's a pretty cutting-edge museum," McCormick says. "When I did it at the Experience Music Project, that was a real concern 'cause that's like dads walking in with their kids and paying $25 a ticket, big tourist thing. I'm a dad myself, even though I don't censor what my kid sees, but I certainly wouldn't want to bum people out that way. I don't know if it's offensive, but there's provocation there."

At Exit Art, "The LP Show" consisted of 2,500 pieces. It was trimmed to fewer than 1,500 for its run in Seattle. At the Warhol, it will be back up to around 2,200 covers. The Warhol was fortunate to get the show, as it is not being widely traveled. According to McCormick, the collectors don't care much about the art world, plus they want their records back.

"It was hard to convince them to travel it at all. They did Experience Music Project, because it's devoted to rock 'n' roll and Hendrix, and they did the Warhol because they've all heard of Warhol. That's the only two I could talk them into."

In case you're wondering, Warhol is represented in the collection with a cover he did for jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell and one for a record of Tennessee Williams reading "The Glass Menagerie" (the Rolling Stones "Sticky Fingers" cover may or may not be in the show).

The art crowd might also want to be on the lookout for a Jackie Gleason record called "Lonesome Echo" that was designed by Salvador Dali and a sampling of work by Josef Albers, a German artist from the Bauhaus school.

Many of the artists, he found, were far more anonymous.

"I was reading the fine print on these records as part of the catalog process," McCormick says. "What I found on some records was that the person who lent the sunglasses for the photo shoot would get credit, but the art director wouldn't or the photographer wouldn't."

Even without systematically documenting the history of album art, "The LP Show" is a tribute to a form that began as a marketing tool in the late '30s and, to the dismay of many, was all but obliterated with the CD era.

"Now that it's been lost," McCormick says, "you can see how rare it is, how significant it was, this perfect foot-by-foot square. How it held a tremendous amount of information and could do all these amazing things in that little square."

'THE LP SHOW'

WHERE: Andy Warhol Museum, North Side.

WHEN: Sunday through Aug. 18.

OPENING: It opens along with "Off Guard: The Photographs of Ron Galella" with a 6 p.m. talk and slide show by album-art pioneer Alex Steinweiss, followed by a reception from 7 to 10 with an appearance by Galella and music by New York DJ Toshio Kajiwara. Tickets are $10; $5 members. Call 412-237-8300.