Why on earth did you buy that?
I just got to thinking about albums I've bought because of the album cover alone and wondered if this is common.
Of course this was in a time long long ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I made more money (as a hunter gatherer BTW).
I know there has been quite a few but the one that immediately came to mind and was probably my first leap away from good ol' Rock & Roll was Return To Forever. I was just out of high school and I guess I didn't look like a Jazz/Fusion fan as the clerk did his best to warn me away from it, letting me know that I wouldn't be able to get a refund, etc.
I was especially impressed by the slick finish of the cover.
It was my intro to ECM and Chick Corea. I loved it and soon after I went looking for Light As A Feather.
Flora Purim's voice still puts me into an altered state of mind and the thought of that discovery makes me want to go into debt to return to those exciting days of haphazard music buying. <sigh>
So, what have you bought this way, and did you get many stinkers? ...open any new musical avenues for you?
Of course this was in a time long long ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I made more money (as a hunter gatherer BTW).
I know there has been quite a few but the one that immediately came to mind and was probably my first leap away from good ol' Rock & Roll was Return To Forever. I was just out of high school and I guess I didn't look like a Jazz/Fusion fan as the clerk did his best to warn me away from it, letting me know that I wouldn't be able to get a refund, etc.
I was especially impressed by the slick finish of the cover.
It was my intro to ECM and Chick Corea. I loved it and soon after I went looking for Light As A Feather.
Flora Purim's voice still puts me into an altered state of mind and the thought of that discovery makes me want to go into debt to return to those exciting days of haphazard music buying. <sigh>
So, what have you bought this way, and did you get many stinkers? ...open any new musical avenues for you?
Comments
The same would probably be true of The Chameleons' Script of the Bridge and the first OMD album, which originally came from the UK in a fancy die-cut jacket that I thought was very clever at the time. I vaguely recall having bought the first Dead Kennedys and Gang of Four singles (actually the Go4 one was a 4-song 7") because of the covers, or maybe it was because I just liked the titles "California Uber Alles" and "Love Like Anthrax."
But as for stinkers, I dunno... If you're excluding anything you hadn't read a review of, or heard about from friends, or actually heard in its entirety somewhere, then it's a pretty short list, and it would have to go back to the pre-internet days. At the moment I can only think of The Dictators Go Girl Crazy, which wasn't really a stinker, I just never listened to it after the first couple of plays. I also remember not liking the Stooges' Fun House until many years after I'd bought it, but I didn't buy that because of the cover, which of course is utterly hideous.
Also: I actually bought The Kick Inside because of a girl that I wanted to go out with in High School - it was her favorite album for several months. My clever gambit was a miserable failure, however... I don't blame Kate Bush herself for this, and in fact I've bought every one of her albums since then, but it was a fairly serious disappointment.
Figured the same slightly later, for different reasons, for this - yeah, it was too. Have to think about any stinkers...
based entirely on a suspicion as to genre and the perception that the gatefold album sleeve and picture of the band were really (*ahem*, not one my more enduring perceptions) cool. And that was at a time when I could rarely afford albums, so buying one was a largish leap of faith. Now that I think back with the aid of google, I actually remember laboring over my own pencil copy of the cover art from a single from that album:
With the hindsight of perfected maturity and infallible present tastes I no longer listen to this. But the other example was when I bought the gatefold (definitely had a weakness for extravagant gatefold LP sleeves) double-LP edition of Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene and Equinoxe again with a vague awareness of genre but not having heard the contents:
and made two permanent additions to my listening rotation - I still think that these two albums - and their covers- are classics.
I am still to this day regularly put off or attracted to albums on the basis of their art. Since it became possible to listen to samples it's a bit harder for this to be quite as absolute a leap as it once was, but it's still there as a factor, and bad art can, however illogically, even take the sheen off a downloaded music file.
...but it turns out it isn't even metal. I mean, sheeeeeit.
And not available on eMusic, I might add! Must be one of those EMI bands.
(low growl) JEEEEEEEZZZZZZZZUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSS
Though with that hair, I would be expecting 80's Power Pop.
- Can't get slower than this. . . JC = Jesus Christ ?
- Is this a transvestite band ?
- I was only about 8 years old.
I'm sure that there will be people here who like this, but I didn't. I bough the CD partly because I thought I heard it playing in the store, and partly because I liked the cover. It turned out that I'd been told the wrong title when I asked about what I was listening to. I played it once and have never played it since. I've still got it, I really ought to give it to a charity shop
I would.
One though that does kind of stick out for me is James Moody's "Last Train From Overbrook".
Both covers (first, the LP, second the CD combo w/ Flute 'n the Blues album) and the backstory behind the title, which centered around his alcoholism and his stay at the Overbrook rehab, I guess I expected more of a introspective sound from it, or maybe a frenetic-Mingus type sound. When I first put the album in, I was shocked by how much it struck me as standard big band fare. It lacked, to my ears, the level of emotion and the types of emotions that the album covers and titles led me to believe (in my mind) would be present.
This was a long time ago. I didn't listen to it for a long time. Now when I listen to it, I don't attach my preconceptions to it anymore. But back then, it was disconcerting.
As an adolescent dumbass who was into D&D and Warhammer I bought many an album from Record Breaker based on cornball artwork.
Fun fact: I rode this bike to buy that album and many like it.
- Horrible.
Brenda Lee's coming on strong indeed!
Heck yeah! I bet more people did this than like to admit. I can't think of any right now....my albums are packed up at the moment. I thought I was going to get rid of them. Now I'm not so sure.
Wait, I just thought of one. "Cheap Thrills" by Big Brother & the Holding Company:
Kind of lame, since I did know who Toad the Wet Sprocket was, but the cover fascinated me and I had to have it. It's an OK album, but it turned out that the cover was by Dave McKean - known for having done the covers for the entire 75 issue run of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.
He also did this cover which got me into Download:
edit: BTW, it was not a stinker at all. If I remember right, I paid $1.00 for it. New musical avenues? Oh, yes.