Saturday 9 December 2017

Vintage album covers: sex with absolutely everything, including Christmas and Beethoven

How Pat Boone ended up on an album with this cover is...

...beyond me - and the Lawrence Welk Orchestra didn't exactly have a reputation for Led Zeppelin-style excess on tour (or maybe they did?). Using irrelevant images of barely-clad women to shift essentially innocuous entertainment industry products didn't begin with late '50s and '60s American album covers, of course. But it seems odd that rock and roll LPs, which were often crammed with sexually suggestive music aimed at hormonally agitated teenagers, didn't tend to be festooned with naked women, while albums aimed at the middle-class adult easy-listening market often luridly decked out. For instance, what twisted commercial logic would have convinced record industry marketing departments that the most appropriate way to link their latest album to the annual celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ would be to stick a hot chick on the cover?
Mind you, any time of year would do:
...or Music for Peeping Toms?
I wonder exactly what it was about Anita Ekberg that Roberto loved back in 1956? Hmm. Striptease was evidently a thing back then:
And when you were exhausted by all that stripping and belly-dancing, there were LPs to help you recuperate. This one was presumably designed to help women daydream about not being married to  husbands who expected them to behave like whores all the time:
And which woman could possibly resist buying an LP with this flattering title?:
If the music was even remotely exotic, there wasn't the slightest doubt about what was needed on the cover:
And this young lady could probably have procured a suitable ointment for her problem at Boots:
What this cover has to do with the songs of France, I have absolutely no idea:
By 1970, the world had pretty much lost any sense of propriety - how else to explain the Westminster Gold record company imagining that this was a suitable cover for a Beethoven piano concerto?? 
Mind you, I was once the proud owner of this album - but it did have "Long Shot Kick the Bucket" and "Return of Django" on it:

2 comments:

  1. The Westminster gold album-was it by any chance designed by Benny Hill?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, it was - it was issued with a bonus 45 record featuring a specially orchestrated version of Boots Randolph's elegiac "Yakety Sax".

      Delete