BOOK REVIEW: “Fade To Black: Hard Rock Cover Art Of The Vinyl Age” by Martin Popoff with Ioannis
Even though it has been praised, bashed, loved, censored, condemned, and ridiculed, hard rock continues to be a vibrant music for people of all ages. Its roots and offshoots are well documented in books and documentaries, not bad for a music that was once blamed for everything from teen pregnancy to suicides. Hard rock and heavy metal is scholarly, although those in the know will tell you that the music has always been a great source of information and inspiration. In the era when vinyl was king, the record cover was what made an impact first to the potential record buyer. Maybe the song would be playing in a record store, maybe you had seen an ad for it in Hit Parader, Circus, Kerrang, or Rip, but you still had to truly seek what you wanted to find, even when hard rock and heavy metal became the most popular music around the world. Fade To Black: Hard Rock Cover Art Of The Vinyl Age (Sterling) is not only a healthy look at some of the best hard rock covers ever released, but each album features background information on its creation. If these covers were your eye candy, now you can explore its ingredients from the outside in.
Journalist Martin Popoff worked with artist/designer Ioannis to interview the designers, photographers, illustrators, and sometimes the artists themselves to discuss what went on behind each album cover, and sometimes its after effects. Also, by calling this a book about “hard rock”, it covers a broader spectrum than just “heavy metal”, so you’ll get influential garage, acid, and progressive rock, leading to the birth of heavy metal and its eventual offspring. Many of the images were major factors in the myths of heavy metal, from illustrations of vikings fighting on snowy mountain tops to bands flirting with sexuality, whether it was the use of a sexy woman or the band wearing pants that reveal a bit too much. The book begins with a look at The Rolling Stones and The Who before its path heads towards Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Blue Cheer, Iron Butterly, before eventually landing on Led Zeppelin, MC5, Free, and King Crimson. Like the music, things get more adventurous. One might not think of Grand Funk as a hard rock band but they represented Flint, Michigan with their abrasive style of rock and soul. If The Who were considered maximum rock’n'roll, the Flint trio were very much their names: grand funk. Throughout the book Popoff and Ioannis reveal some of the secrets that may lurk in these covers, including background information, costs, along with internal record company politics that was based on everything from “I don’t get it” to “we need a better cover”. Then it touches on what happened when these covers would be taken in by the public. It is revealed that the cover for Foreigner’s Head Games was actually meant to be cute and harmless (it’s nothing more than a girl trying to wipe away the dirty graffiti so that no one would see it, although everyone had interpreted it as being sexual, good and bad). Hard rock fans will discover that versions of covers released in their country were censored compared to the home country of the artist (do a search for the uncensored cover for the Scorpions’ In Trance, and that’s the nice one, not Virgin Killers). While the second half of the book is dedicated to albums that were also released in the cassette and CD eras, many fans bought the albums because they knew the covers would be killer, be it titles by Megadeth, Ozzy Osbourne, Jane’s Addiction, or W.A.S.P. Even Badlands’ first album is here, and while the cover might seem silky-smooth today, the album was powerful then as it is now. Seattle is also represented with glimpses of Nirvana’s first (Bleach) and Soundgarden’s second (Louder Than Love, and as someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest, I found this reference to be interesting:
Perched above and below are the band name and title in the now-iconic retro font seen on countless T-shirts. Bleach appears in quotes, although no one remembers the title or refers to the record that way.
Page 1 of 2 | Next page