Audio Books: the Literary Origins G H S .A of Grooves, Labels and Sleeves W W W

Chapter 12 m o .c te a Audio Books: The Literary Origins g h s .a of Grooves, Labels and Sleeves w w w

m Richard Osborne o .c te a g h s .a w w w

This chapter addresses the relationship between literature,m popular music and o classical music by examining the packaging of the printed.c word and recorded te a sound, with a particular focus on the novel and the vinylg record. When it comes h to packaging, music is indebted to literature. The vinyls record has three main .a w components – the groove, the label and the sleeve w– and each has links with the w written word. The groove is sound in script form, a text written with the ‘pencil 1 m of nature’. In 1877 Thomas Edison constructedo the first machine to successfully .c te play back these tracings. He christened it thea ‘phonograph’, a term arrived at g 2 by combining the Greek words for ‘sound’ hand ‘writing’. Eldridge R. Johnson, s .a the head of Victor Records, developed thew paper record label at the beginning of the twentieth century. Colin Symes hasw argued that the label ‘fulfils many of w 3 the same functions as a [book’s] titlem page’. When it comes to sleeve art, the o person generally credited with inventing.c the record cover is Alex Steinweiss.4 His te a packaging for the LP record was modelledg on the dust jackets for hardback novels. h s In this chapter I examine the.a bookish reification of music, looking in turn at w these grooves, labels and sleeves.w I will explore the ways in which this packaging w encouraged people to think of the correspondences between sound recording and m o the printed word. However,.c although the record kept on spinning back to literary te models, this influence alsoa highlighted differences between the two forms. Literary g h formatting also helped sto encourage differences within music, most notably the .a 5 ‘great schism’ that widenedw between its classical and popular forms. In the section w w

m o 1 ‘Pencil of Nature’.c is a term coined by William Henry Fox Talbot to describe his te a photographic process;g see H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, 1844). The naming h of the phonographs was clearly indebted to the naming of the ‘photograph’, which is derived .a from the Greekw for light writing. w 2 w See Richard Osborne, Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record (Farnham, 2012), m pp. 9–11.o 3 Colin.c Symes, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording te a (Hanover,g 2004), p. 96. h 4s Jennifer McKnight-Trontz and Alex Steinweiss, For the Record: The Life and Work .a of wAlex Steinweiss (New York, 2000), p. 1. w w 5 Symes, p. 247. © Copyrighted Material

© Richard Osborne (2014) From Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds), Litpop: Writing and Popular Music, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472410979 202 Litpop: Writing and Popular Music © Copyrighted Material on the groove I will address the implications of turning sound into script, a process m that underlined the differing statuses of literature, classical music and popularo .c te song. In the sections on labels and sleeves I will draw upon the work of Gerarda g Genette to examine whether or not these devices serve the same functionh as the s .a title pages of books and their dust jackets. Genette has coined the term w‘paratext’ to describe the supplementary materials that operate as ‘thresholds’ tow a book’s w 6 core literary text. It is my belief that although literature has regularlym cast music o as its ‘other’, recorded music has relied heavily on literary supplements.c to help te 7 a produce its meanings. g h s .a w w w The Groove m o .c te One regular feature of contemporary reactions to Edison’sa phonograph is a focus g h on the sight, rather than the sound, of its grooves. s On 7 December 1877 the .a phonograph was displayed to the staff of the Scientificw American, the first people w outside of Edison’s immediate circle of employeesw to encounter the machine. In

m their report on the invention they state that ‘thereo is no doubt that by practice, .c and the aid of a magnifier, it would be possiblete to read phonetically Mr. Edison’s 8 a g records of dots and dashes’. The English Mechanich of 4 January 1878 contains s one of the earliest reports on the phonograph.a in the British press; here Edison’s w assistant Charles Batchelor writes: ‘Somew of these sheets of tinfoil, after having a w sentence recorded on them, have been straightened by Mr. Edison and plaster casts m o taken of them. In this state the indents.c made on the foil of the diaphragm form an 9 te interesting study’. a g h The groove fascinated becauses it was felt that the translation of its language .a was within reach. Edison, for one,w believed that he was on the path to achieving w w this goal. He tested the quality of records by looking at them rather than hearing 10 m them. Emile Berliner, the o inventor of the disc-playing gramophone, also had .c faith that the translation ofte the groove’s language was within reach. A pamphlet a g given away with one ofh his early machines boasted that: ‘Printed sound-records s adapted for the purpose.a of studying sound-curves, and catalogues of plates will be w 11 published from time wto time’. His discs were easier to study than cylinders by w virtue of the fact thatm they were already flat, like an open book. This flatness was o .c te a g 6 h Gerard s Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin .a (Cambridge, w1997). 7 w Forw an extended discussion of some of the issues covered in this chapter see

Osborne, mVinyl. 8 o .‘Thec Talking Phonograph’, Scientific American, 32:25 (1877): 384–5. 9 te a Asor [Charles Batchelor], ‘Phonograph’, English Mechanic, 667 (1878): 404. g 10h s Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York, 1998), pp. 436–7. .a11 w Emile Berliner, ‘Pamphlet with Directions for Use of 7” Machine’ (undated) ;w accessed 22 May 2013. © Copyrighted Material

Copyright material: You are not permitted to transmit this file in any format or media; it may not be resold or reused without prior agreement with Ashgate Publishing and may not be placed on any publicly accessible or commercial servers. Audio Books: The Literary Origins of Grooves, Labels and Sleeves 203 © Copyrighted Material

a vital factor in the disc’s success over the cylinder in the marketplace: it wasm a o format that could be duplicated more easily. Here Berliner had learned from.c the te printing press; by using a reverse matrix he could manufacture multiple copiesa g h of his discs, in the same manner that reverse typesetting had been used sto print .a multiple copies of texts. w w w The tracings on discs and cylinders also inspired poets and artists. Writing m in 1919 Rainer Maria Rilke recalled that ‘what impressed itself’ ono his memory .c following his first encounter with the phonograph ‘was not the tesound from the a 12 g funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder’. Làszlò Moholy-Nagyh was so s excited by this automatic writing that he wished to replicate it manually:.a w w w

An extension of this apparatus for productive purposes couldm be achieved as o follows: the grooves are incised by human agency into the.c wax plate, without te a any external mechanical means, which then produce soundg effects which would h signify – without new instruments and without an orchestras – a fundamental .a w innovation in sound production (of new, hitherto w unknown sounds and tonal w 13 relations) both in composition and in musical performance. m o .c te The groove’s status as writing affected the waysa in which the phonograph was g utilised. In Edison’s original lists of proposedh uses it is ideas relating to the written s .a 14 word that are dominant: ‘letter-writing’, ‘dictation’,w ‘reader’, ‘books’. Moreover, w the first recording companies wished to w fill records with words rather than music.

The most important of these, the Northm American Phonograph Company, was o formed in 1888 with the aim of licensing.c Edison’s machine as a dictation device. te a It was only when this venture failedg that the company’s regional affiliates began h s to explore the possibilities of recording.a popular music. Louis Glass of the Pacific w Coast Phonograph Co. developedw the ‘nickel-in-the-slot’ machine, a precursor to w the jukebox, which offered customers a selection of songs and instrumentals. As m o the other affiliates adopted.c this device their profits soared. In 1891 the Louisiana te Phonograph Co. reported athat one of its machines had taken $1,000 in two months, g h while the Missouri Phonographs Co. operated over 50 machines, one of which had 15.a taken $100 in a week.w w Why had the companiesw not thought of using popular music in the first place?

m The status of phonographo recording – and, by extension, its literary quality – can .c te a g 12 h Rainer sMaria Rilke, ‘Primal Sound’, in Selected Works: Volume I Prose, trans. C. .a Craig Houstonw (1919; London, 1954), pp. 51–2. w 13 w Làszlò Moholy-Nagy, ‘Production-Reproduction’, in Krisztina Passuth (ed.), m Moholy-Nagyo (New York, 1985), p. 289. [Original: ‘Produktion-Reproduktion’, De Stijl, 7 (1922): 97–101.].c te 14 a g Thomas Alva Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, North American Review, h 126:s 262 (May-June 1878), p. 531. .a w 15 Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: The Evolution of the w Phonographw , 2nd edition (Indianapolis, 1976), p. 110. © Copyrighted Material

© Richard Osborne (2014) From Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds), Litpop: Writing and Popular Music, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472410979 204 Litpop: Writing and Popular Music © Copyrighted Material shoulder some of the blame. There was a desire to establish the phonograph as a m quality device. An association with ‘lower’ forms of music would not help thiso .c te to be achieved. In a disputed but telling statement, Edison is claimed toa have g said ‘I don’t want the phonograph sold for amusement purposes. It is noth a toy. s 16 .a I want it sold for business purposes only’. In the ranking systems thatw formed w an important part of nineteenth-century society, popular music was placedw below business enterprises. m o Conversely, it could be argued that the earthly and literary qualities.c of the te a phonograph prevented classical musicians and composers fromg embracing it. h s 1877, the year of the phonograph’s invention, was also the year.a of Walter Pater’s w 17 declaration that ‘all art constantly aspires to the condition wof music’. Pater’s w argument rested on the idea that out of all of the branches of art it was within m o classical music that form and function were most successfully.c reconciled. He te was also building on over a century of Romantic thinkinga in which music was g h elevated amongst the arts because of its non-representationals quality. Literature, .a for example, was a weaker discipline because the writtenw word was not capable 18 w of conveying the extremities of human emotion. However,w with the phonograph,

m music was being transformed into literature. Byo rendering sound as a groove, .c music’s form and function were also being affectedte in peculiar ways. a g If this process helped to discourage classicalh performers from embracing the s phonograph, its subsequent use as a business.a machine would only have made w matters worse. In addition, early recordsw could not properly capture classical w music, both temporally (they had a duration of less than two minutes) and tonally m o (they were unable to produce the timbre.c or full range of many of the orchestra’s te instruments). Consequently, prior toa the early 1900s there was little desire amongst g h renowned musicians and singers tos record for this mechanical device. .a And yet all types of composerw and musician were to benefit from music’s w w transmutation into text. The groove’s status as writing lay at the heart of copyright m debates about sound recording.o A 1905 French court ruling determined that literary .c copyright rules should be teapplied to records on the basis that they contain what a g is, ultimately, a legible script.h It determined that they contain ‘a special writing, s which in the future will.a undoubtedly be legible to the eyes’ and that therefore w 19 ‘the rules of plagiarismw are applicable’. These questions of status, legibility and w economics were tom remain in place as the record moved on to the next stage of its o evolution: the label..c te a g h s .a w 16 w Alfredw O. Tate, Edison’s Open Door: The Life Story of Thomas E. Edison Great

Individualistm (New York, 1938), p. 253. 17 o .Walterc Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, Fortnightly Review (October 1877), p. 140. 18 te a See Gerry Smyth, Music in Contemporary British Fiction: Listening to the Novel g h (Basingstoke,s 2008), p. 20. .a19 w Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis and London, w 1985),w p. 98. © Copyrighted Material

The Label m o .c te Colin Symes is correct in noting the correspondences between a record’s labela and g h a book’s title page. The two devices carry similar sets of information: theys detail .a authors and titles, the names of manufacturers and copyright details. Moreover,w in w w both fields these devices were the most important sites for this information prior to m the development of printed covers: books were first bound with printedo sleeves in the .c early nineteenth century; for records this development occurred overte a century later. a g Symes’s work draws on the ideas of the French Literary theoristh Gerard Genette, s who coined the term ‘paratext’ to describe the devices that surround.a the main text w w of a book – prefaces, introductions, illustrative material, andw so on – all of which 20 serve as a ‘threshold’ before the reader embarks upon the mainm text. Genette has o suggested that the notion of paratext could be expanded into.c other areas, including te 21 a the materials that accompany an analogue record. Doingg so, however, reveals h several differences between the ‘thresholds’ of records sand books. .a w The first of these differences lies at the level of wfunction. For Genette a paratext w 22 is merely ‘an assistant, only an accessory of the text’. It could be argued that this m is true of a title page of a book: the main body oof text could be successfully read .c te without it. This is not the case with a record. Despitea the best endeavours of Edison, g Moholy-Nagy and the French legislative system,h no one has managed to decipher the s .a language of a record’s grooves. The label, win addition to summarising the contents w of a record, has had to fulfil the functionw of translating its textual information.

Moreover, while a record’s label usuallym offers a reasonably faithful description of o the grooves, it also serves functions .beyondc the task of transcription. In the first te a half of the twentieth century, the labelg was of great importance in establishing the h s status of recordings. It also helped.a in their marketing. Indeed, it was as a sales aid w that Eldridge R. Johnson originallyw developed the label. He outlined his plans to a w colleague, stating that he wished to ‘mark’ records ‘properly, as if we were making m 23 o them to sell’. Consequently,.c his first paper labels featured eye-catching colours – te usually gold or silver – thata were printed against a black background. g h This leads us to the seconds difference between title pages and labels: authorship. .a For both books and recordsw one of the main selling points has been the author’s 24 w name. While it is usuallyw easy to determine the author of a book (apart from cases

m o .c te 20 a Genette, gp. 2. h 21 s Ibid., p.a 407. 22 . Ibid.,w p. 407. w 23 w Ruth Edge and Leonard Petts, ‘The First Ten-Inch Records, Part 1’, Hillandale m News, 156o (June 1987), p. 201. 24 .Thec prioritization of a book’s author was something that evolved, however. Genette te a notes gthat many books were credited anonymously until the mid-nineteenth century (p. 45). h Michels Foucault argues that it was during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, .a coincidingw with the establishment of copyright laws, that authorial ‘ownership’ of literary w worksw began to be proclaimed: see Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Counter- © Copyrighted Material

© Richard Osborne (2014) From Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds), Litpop: Writing and Popular Music, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472410979 206 Litpop: Writing and Popular Music © Copyrighted Material where there is a ghost writer), it is usually the person who is identified as being m the principal writer of the main text – this is not the case with a record. Writers,o .c te performers and producers all have a stake in claiming authorship of recordeda g music. More importantly, so does the record company. In fact, in the earlyh days s .a of the industry it was the record company that was considered to be wthe main w author of the disc or cylinder. The companies used different materialsw to make their recordings, and they used different recording techniques in theirm studios. As o a consequence records were sold on the basis of these differing manufacturing.c te a methods as much as they were on the audible contents of each disc.g h s The prioritisation of the record company can be witnessed.a in the design that w Johnson developed for the first record labels. While a book’sw title page commonly w features the publisher’s name and colophon, these are not usually dominant. m o Johnson’s design, which provided the standard template.c throughout the life of te the analogue record, gave the record company name anda its symbol precedence: g h they occupied the whole of the upper half of the label.s The implications of this .a layout can only be fully considered when we take intow account just how prominent w the record label used to be. Shellac records were commonlyw sold in brown paper

m bags with cut-away centres, which allowed the orecord label to show through. An .c indication of the importance of this design lies inte the fact that in the record business a g ‘label’ was quickly adopted a synonym for ‘company’.h Another indication lies in s the fact that some label names became generic.a terms – witness Motown or Stax. w To my knowledge there has been no parallelw within book publishing. w Genre is the third main area of difference between title pages and labels. In m o book publishing it is the cover or dust.c jacket that has been the most common te indicator of genre, usually via differenta tropes of pictorial design. Colour-coding g h has nevertheless also been employed.s In the early twentieth century, yellow a . 25 covers were sometimes used tow indicate that a book was licentious. Penguin w w books expanded upon this idea: since the company’s inception in 1935 it has used m different coloured sleeves and/oro spines as a means of identifying different genres. .c In this instance, it appearste that book publishing learnt from the record industry: a g the idea of colour codingh genres was developed in the record industry in the first s decade of the twentieth.a century. Here, it was the label that performed the task. w Once again Eldridgew R. Johnson’s Victor company was the pioneer. Johnson w realised that for them gramophone disc to gain cultural acceptance more attention o needed to be given.c to performers and composers. He argued that ‘only great te a musical talent couldg transform the phonograph record from a toy into the greatest h 26 medium of homes entertainment’. During the early 1900s ‘celebrities’ from the .a world of classicalw music were enticed to record for the gramophone. Johnson w w

m o Memory,.c Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (ed.) Donald F. Bouchard, trans. by te Donalda Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford, 1977), pp. 113–38. g 25h s Genette, p. 27. .a26 w Eldridge R. Johnson, cited in The 50-year Story of RCA Victor Records (New York, w 1953),w p. 33. © Copyrighted Material

began to sign the most renowned musical artists to exclusive, long-term contracts.m o In May 1905 the British journal Talking Machine News reported on the success.c of te this policy: a g h s .a Much has been done to enhance the reputation of the talking machine by inducingw w w artistes of celebrity to sing and play into it. There is not the slightest doubt that m many persons who were once apt to scoff and sneer changed their opinionso and .c feelings when they learned that Melba, Caruso, de Reszke, Suzanne Adams,te Ben a 27 g Davies, Kubelik, Kocian and others had made records. h s .a w w With these names featured on the labels, the cultural reputationw of these artists would devolve to the record company’s name, which continuedm to be featured o prominently on the top half of the label designs. Furthermore,.c with this label name te a emblazoned on future releases it would then lend prestigeg and credibility to the h rest of the record company’s output. s .a w There was a flaw in this scheme. Although classicalw music provided the means w for establishing the status of sound recording, it was not where the greatest profits m lay. Reporting in 1907 to the board of Victor’s oBritish affiliate, the Gramophone .c te Company, Theodore Birnbaum stated, ‘This classa of business is difficult to handle, g and it is questionable whether it can be regardedh on any other basis than high- s 28 .a class advertising’. In his history of EMI,w the label into which the Gramophone Company would evolve, Peter Martland wdiscloses that ‘less than one per cent of w 29 the Company’s unit sales in 1913 were mCelebrity records’. The bulk of sales were o made up of their popular music releases..c te a The Victor and Gramophone companiesg had qualms about proclaiming their h s authorship of popular music. They.a were concerned that if their names became w associated with these ‘lower’ formsw it might affect the reputation of their classical w recordings. Consequently, the companies developed a set of coloured labels, each m o of which would represent a. cparticular type of music. This policy was inaugurated te with Red Seal record labels,a which were used exclusively for recordings made by g h celebrity artists. These weres introduced by the Gramophone Company’s Russian .a division in 1901 and extendedw to the rest of Europe in 1902. The Victor Company w followed suit in the USw in 1903.

m A hierarchy ofo label colours and prices followed. Victor issued purple-label .c records for recordingste by Broadway stars as well as those by less celebrated a g classical performers,h and blue-label records for double-sided couplings of purple- s label releases..a The original black label now signified the bottom of the range, w artistically wand economically. It was reserved for ‘Vaudeville, actors, popular w singers . . . anything which appealed to what might have been considered the mass m o .c te 27 a g Our Expert, Talking Machine News, 3:1 (May 1905): 9. h 28s Peter Martland, Since Records Began: EMI The First 100 Years (London, 1997), .a p. w63. w w 29 Ibid. © Copyrighted Material

© Richard Osborne (2014) From Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds), Litpop: Writing and Popular Music, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472410979 208 Litpop: Writing and Popular Music © Copyrighted Material taste’.30 In response, Columbia issued a multicoloured label for its classical and m operatic releases and a blue label for ‘personality’ recordings and lesser classicalo .c te recordings. They also reserved their black label for ‘mass taste’ recordings. aThese g record company labels were further subdivided by the allocation of differenth s .a batches of catalogue numbers to different musical genres. Roland Gelatt wremarked that ‘A collection of Red Seal Records established one as a person of wboth taste w 31 and property’. At the opposite end of the scale Victor dismissed theirm black-label o recordings as being ‘Coney Island Stuff’.32 .c te a There were consequences of demarcating music in this way.g Notably the h s audiences for classical and popular music became increasingly.a divided. Symes w believes that ‘The advent of the phonograph … began to consolidatew the “great 33 w musical schism”’. Andre Millard concurs, stating that record companies ‘did m o their part in the polarisation of American society by publicising.c the differences 34 te between “good music” and “popular music”’. There woulda be further divisions g h within popular music itself: labelling practices prompteds the separation of the .a American market into ‘popular’, ‘country’ and ‘racew records’ streams. It would w appear that just as a record’s label and a book’s titlew page differ when it comes to

m both form and function, they also differ when it comeso to their interaction with the .c final layer of musical and literary packaging: tthee sleeve. a g h s .a w The Sleeve w w

m o The major record companies’ preoccupation.c with classical music was in evidence te again when it came to the developmenta of the LP. Introduced by Columbia in 1948, g h the LP was created to house the slonger pieces of classical repertoire. Its sleeve .a was also designed with classicalw music in mind. Alex Steinweiss, Columbia’s art w w director, was commissioned to make the design. He came up with a package that m featured a printed cover pastedo onto 24-point chipboard, which opened on the right .c hand side (like most bookste published in the West). This design was manufactured a g by the Imperial Paper Boxh Company, who came up with the idea of printing s 35 sleevenotes on the back.a of a record’s cover. w w w

m 30 o B.L. Coleman.c and D.G. Cotter, ‘A Numerical Listing of the Victor Single-Faced te 6000 and 7000 Purplea Label Series (Part 1)’, Hillandale News, 51 (October 1969), p. 17. g 31 h Rolands Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph 1877–1977, 2nd revised edn. (London, .a 1977), p. 149.w 32 w Williamw Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and

Popular Memory,m 1890–1945 (New York and Oxford, 1999), pp. 31–2. 33 o .Symes,c p. 247. 34 te a Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge, g h 1995),s p. 93. .a35 w Lewis Garlick, ‘The Graphic Artist and the Record Industry’, Journal of the Audio w Engineeringw Society, 25:10–11 (October/November 1977), p. 781. © Copyrighted Material

In the nineteenth century, classical music had been elevated above literaturem o in terms of the hierarchies of the arts, but Columbia was now borrowing from.c te the conventions of hardback publishing in order to establish the LP’s culturala g h credentials. The LP sleeve was clearly indebted to the design of the dust coverss for .a books. It shared the same protective, informative and promotional duties.w It also w w borrowed their layout: author/artist and manufacturing company were outlined m on the front sleeve, accompanied by an appropriate pictorial representationo .c of the contents; on the rear there was a descriptive text and maybete a photo of a g the author/artist; on the spine there were details of the author/artisth in addition s to the manufacturer’s details. Book publishing and classical music.a subsequently w w pursued similar trends in sleeve design. During the 1950s, wdesigners working in both fields would often employ bold, illustrative designs. m By the 1970s, classical o recordings and canonical literary works would be packaged.c using paintings from te a the periods of their composition, thus tying together threeg art forms and furthering h the ‘classical’ connotations of each. s .a w There are differences between dust jackets and wrecord sleeves, however. This w is particularly the case when it comes to the descriptive text housed on their back m covers. Herbert C. Ridout of the British brancho of Columbia Records claimed .c te the invention of sleevenotes: in 1925 he employeda the musician and writer Harry g Wild to pen descriptive notes for a series ofh classical recordings, which were to s .a be written with ‘the object of interesting andw endeavouring to educate the listener w 36 who wished to improve his musical taste’.w The sleevenote thus pre-dates the

LP. Furthermore, it has served functionsm beyond those of the notes on the rear of o a book’s dust jacket. It is more detailed,.c in effect providing both an introduction te a to and a synopsis of the work. It galso performs a different task: it is a literary h s interpretation of a musical work,.a rather than a literary meditation upon a literary w work. Importantly, it is not a threshold:w the sleeve can be read while the record is w being played (here I am referring to the images on the front cover as well as the m o text on the rear). This is not.c the case with the introduction or synopsis of a book, te which cannot be read at thea same time as the main text. g h There are further differencess between a book’s dust jacket and an LP sleeve. .a The earliest LP coversw placed an emphasis on the company name and logo which, w as with labels, dominatedw the upper half of the design. Although subsequently

m reduced on the sleeveso of most other forms of music, the record company .c masthead continuedte to occupy the top third of many classical record covers a g (Deutsche Grammophon’sh sleeves provide a notable example). Also reflective of s record company.a interests was the rear of the sleeves. In addition to the descriptive w sleevenotes,w there would be adverts for other products manufactured by the record w companies, including cleaning products for the care of the LPs, record guides, and m o albums. cavailable by similar artists or composers. There were also texts providing te detailsa about how to best protect your LPs. g h s .a w 36 Herbert C. Ridout, ‘Behind the Needle XX: Looking Back Over the Gramophone’, w Gramophonew , 19:209 (February 1942), p. 145. © Copyrighted Material

© Richard Osborne (2014) From Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds), Litpop: Writing and Popular Music, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472410979 210 Litpop: Writing and Popular Music © Copyrighted Material When popular music first turned to the LP it adopted the conventions of m classical music sleeve design. This was a means by which aspirant genres, sucho .c te as jazz, folk and rock, could indicate a burgeoning seriousness: by followinga the g original design standards they gained some of the rich cultural associationsh of s .a literature and classical music. Nevertheless, these conventions did not alwaysw sit w comfortably with the content of popular music LPs. Sleevenotes, forw example, were employed somewhat awkwardly for all releases until the mid-1960s.m o As popular music began to develop its own conventions of LP.c packaging, te a another element in the ‘great musical schism’ emerged. Whileg classical music h s tended to downplay the importance of its album artwork, many.a working within w popular music would come to regard the sleeve as an integralw part of a musical w project. In fact, some designers deliberately constructed sleeves so that they would m o keep the consumer occupied while they listened to an LP. .Thec sleeve designers Ian te Anderson and Nick Phillips stated: ‘If you’ve got an albuma that’s 40 minutes long, g 37 h you’ve got 40 minutes of attention for the sleeve’. s .a A continuing development in popular music LPw sleeve design has been the w reduction of text on the covers. Here the cover artw of the Beatles and the Rolling

m Stones is illustrative. The design for the Beatles’o first LPPlease Please Me (1963) .c is typical of its period. It is dominated by a colourte portrait of the Beatles and is a g headed by large typography blazing their name.h Hit singles are central to both s the LP and the sleeve’s construction: the record.a took its name from the Beatles’ w biggest hit to date and this title is highlightedw on its cover; there is also a subtitle w declaring ‘with Love Me Do and 12 other songs’. The back cover is dominated m o by a long text, educating the purchaser.c about the album’s songs. The success of te Please Please Me gave the group greatera control over their next album, With the g h Beatles (1963). They determined sits content (no singles were issued off this LP) .a and its design (Robert Freeman’sw stark, half-lit black and white photography was w w immediately arresting). With no hit singles to declare, the only texts that remain m on the front sleeve are the downsizedo LP title, the record company’s name, and .c an indication of whether thete record is mono or stereo. By the close of the Beatles’ a g career the company logoh had been removed: the sleeve of The Beatles (1968) s features the group’s name.a only; the front cover of Abbey Road (1969) has the w famous group photo butw no text at all. w

The Rolling Stonesm had reached this point before them. Andrew Loog Oldham, o the group’s manager,.c conceived the sleeve of their first LP, The Rolling Stones te a (1964). A photographicg group portrait dominates its front cover; group name and h title are absents (the first time this had occurred within pop music); the only writing .a on the sleevew is the record company logo. One consequence of this design is that it w w is the image of the group that is promoted; they are elevated at the expense of all m other contributorso to the release, including the record company. .c te a g h s .a37 w Cited in Andrew Collins, ‘Design O’ The Times’, New Musical Express (11 w Februaryw 1989): 44–5. © Copyrighted Material

Oldham was also an innovator when it came to sleevenotes. The words thatm o he penned for The Rolling Stones No. 2 (1965) became infamous. They pastiche.c te the critical imperative of sleevenotes (‘compare them to Wagner, Stravinskya and g h [Norrie] Paramour’); they ape their literary pretensions (the text is writtens in the .a style of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange); and they encourage thew reader w w to commit a crime in order to purchase the LP (‘If you don’t have bread, see that 38 m blind man knock him on the head, steal his wallet’). Adverts for recordo cleaning .c cloths and other artists’ records sat uneasily alongside such cynicism.te In time the a g sleevenote began to disappear: the Beatles’ 1965 LP Help! wash their first to do s away with this convention; the Rolling Stones waited until 1967’s.a Between the w w Buttons before doing the same. w

There are two main reasons why record companies permittedm this reduction o in text and consequently the reduction of their own presence.c on popular music te a sleeves. The first is commerce. As early as the mid-1950sg it was discovered that h sleeves dominated by record company mastheads helds little appeal for those .a w browsing in record shops. Instead, the customer wwas attracted by the pictorial w elements of the sleeve: a strong visual statement was more likely to lead to 39 m ‘impulse buying’. Record companies thereforeo began to place greater emphasis .c te on sleeve art. Writing in Record Mirror in 1955,a Jack Bentley noted that it was g through design that ‘each firm strives to outdoh the other’, adding that ‘a pointer in s .a this state of rivalry is how even HMV havew demoted their traditional dog listening w 40 to the gramophone trademark to just a weakw corner of the cover’.

The second reason is art. The sleevem has been used to signify artistic differences o between popular music genres. For example,.c cool jazz signalled its difference from te a hot jazz when it espoused the longer-playingg format over the shellac 78. Similarly, h s rock musicians claimed superiority.a to pop stars by turning to the LP format rather w than 45rpm single. The longer temporalw duration of the LP allowed these musicians w to vaunt their expanded musical horizons, while the broader visual canvas of the m o LP sleeve enabled them to stamp.c their projects with sophisticated cover art. These te authors aimed to create unifieda musical works; like the chapters in a book, the g h tracks on an LP would forms part of a complete artistic statement. The sleeve was a .a factor in this process; forw example, witness recordings as diverse as Frank Sinatra’s w In The Wee Small Hoursw (1955), Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973), or

m Joy Division’s Closero (1979). In each case the sleeve was essential in establishing .c the mood of the tmusice and the intentions of the performers: the drawing of Sinatra a g beneath a lamplighth on In the Wee Small Hours helped to transform his image from s bobby-soxer .aidol to lone male troubadour; the mysterious prism on Dark Side of w the Moon helpedw to establish the cool enigma of Pink Floyd; Closer’s tombstone w cover cemented Joy Division’s funereal appeal. This is, of course, also the art m o .c te 38 a g Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones No. 2 (Decca LK4661, 1964). h 39s Dominy Hamilton, ‘Introduction’, in Storm Thorgerson and Roger Dean (eds.), .a Albumw Cover Album (Limpsfield, 1977), p. 14. w w 40 Jack Bentley, ‘Fascinating L.P. Cover “War”’, Record Mirror (1 October 1955): 16. © Copyrighted Material

© Richard Osborne (2014) From Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds), Litpop: Writing and Popular Music, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472410979 212 Litpop: Writing and Popular Music © Copyrighted Material of commerce: carefully considered packaging helped to transform these LPs into m highly desirable products. o .c te Genette has described a paratext as being an ‘assistant’ or an ‘accessory’,a a g device that performs a subsidiary role to the principal text. When it comesh to the s .a popular music LP this was not necessarily the case. At its best it achievedw parity w between its two principal texts: music and pictorial representation. Thew hierarchy of the arts did come into play, however: in reducing the amount ofm text on its o sleeves popular music aligned itself with images rather than words..c Here the te a affective arts stood together against overt representation. g h s The situation within classical music was different. Few composers.a used the w LP format as a means of shaping new musical pieces; insteadw the medium was w primarily used to capture pre-existing compositions. Correspondingly, the sleeve m 41 o was not regarded as an integral part of the project. Classical.c music aesthetics te demanded a concentration on the music itself; it woulda therefore be incorrect to g h look at the sleeve while the music unfolded. In his appreciations of the LP record, .a Theodor Adorno praised the format because it reducedw the visual element in w music. He particularly welcomed opera in record wform, as the music would now

42 m be ‘shorn of phoney hoopla’. For some classicalo listeners, however, the sleeve .c was a manifestation of hoopla. Evidencing a tcontinuede belief in classical music a g as the supreme non-representational art, someh argued that classical records should s 43 come with neither pictorial sleeves nor sleevenotes..a w There has been no great attachmentw to the classical music sleeve. When w classical recordings are reissued or reformatted they are often given new sleeve m o art. The same is true of book covers .andc jackets, but is not the case with popular te music sleeves. It is rare for the covera of a popular music LP to be updated or g h changed, even when the music itselfs is repackaged in digital form. Here, the sleeve .a has not only remained integral,w it has often been the most valued aspect of the w w LP record. In a separate manifestation of its importance, the beloved artwork of m popular music LPs has helpedo vinyl to remain in production long after its expected .c decline. te a g h s .a w Conclusion w w

m o It was only with. cthe introduction of the LP sleeve that the overall form of the te a analogue recordg began to mirror the overall look of the book: cover (jacket); label h (title page); grooves (text). Each of these elements drew inspiration from literary .a w w w 41 Asm with the authors of books, classical musicians and conductors rarely have a o contractual.c say when it comes to sleeve design. See David Pearson, ‘On Designing Book te Covers’,a The Word, 114 (August 2012): 48–9. g 42h s Theodor Adorno, ‘Opera and the Long-Playing Record’, October, 55 (1990 .a [originalw 1969]), p. 64. w 43 w Symes, p. 110. © Copyrighted Material

publishing. The groove was stamped out on presses similar to those used in literarym o printing. The label and the sleeve, meanwhile, were indebted to paratextual models.c te that had been developed for books. a g h And yet at each of these levels, records operated differently to books.s For .a Genette a book’s paratexts form ‘a discourse that bears on a discourse’;w they are w 44 w texts that serve as thresholds to a principal text. At a record’s core there is a text that 45 m nobody can read. Consequently its paratexts have served a different function.o They .c are not so much a metadiscourse as a transformative discourse; theyte translate the a g text of sound into other forms: the written word (the label and theh sleevenote), and s images (the pictorial elements of the sleeve). The record’s paratexts.a have clothed w w a ‘non-representational’ art in representational forms. These wparatexts can be both exterior (as we have seen, a sleeve can be read while a recordm is being listened to) o and integral (without its paratexts an inert record cannot be.c understood). te a Genette has argued that ‘the main issue for the paratextg is not to “look nice” h around the text but rather to ensure for the text a destinys consistent with the author’s .a 46 w purpose’. The analogue record throws both elementsw of this formulation into w doubt. First, it has been important that the record’s labels and sleeves look good m (even classical music sleeves): they are marketingo devices above anything else. .c te Second, a number of different purposes have abeen served by a record’s paratexts. g While some elements of music are lost in theh act of translation, other things are s .a found. The record’s paratexts have helpedw to establish claims to authorship; they w have promoted some authors at the expensew of others; and they have promoted some forms of music at the expense of mothers. They have also helped to reveal the o fact that music has never been idealistically.c non-representational. At a cultural te a level, music has always helped to signifyg difference. In its bookish recorded form h s some of those differences have been.a brought to the fore. w Do these conditions still apply?w The majority of records are now distributed w digitally and the same will soon be true of books. Colin Symes has hailed this m o development. He believes. c that the paratexts that developed around analogue te recordings were distractinga discourses; it was the purpose of his work to ‘set the g 47 h record straight’. The sames could be said of books: some would argue that their .a paratexts are inconsistentw with an author’s purpose. In both cases a move towards w digital could increasew the focus on the main body of the work. But there is perhaps

m another way of lookingo at things. Rendered digitally, music and literature are more .c alike than ever: theyte are both texts and they are both composed of zeroes and ones. a g The more disturbingh aspect of following this line of thinking is that everything that s .a w w w

44 m Genette,o p. 407. 45 .Thisc is not to say that all of the texts that are inscribed onto vinyl are illegible. For te a example,g the cutting engineer George ‘Porky Prime Cut’ Peckham would inscribe secret h messagess in between a record’s run-out grooves. .a w 46 Genette, p. 407. w w 47 Symes, p. 253. © Copyrighted Material

© Richard Osborne (2014) From Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds), Litpop: Writing and Popular Music, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472410979 214 Litpop: Writing and Popular Music © Copyrighted Material sits on top of these zeroes and ones is now paratext, including music and literature m themselves. o .c te a g h s .a Bibliography w w w

Adorno, Theodor, ‘Opera and the Long-Playing Record’, Octoberm , 55 (1990 o [original 1969]): 62–66. .c te a Anonymous, ‘The Talking Phonograph’, Scientific American, 32:25g (22 December h s 1877): 384–5. .a w Asor, ‘Phonograph’, English Mechanic, 667 (4 January 1878):w 404. w Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis and London: m o University of Minnesota Press, 1985). .c te Bentley, Jack, ‘Fascinating L.P. Cover “War”’, Record aMirror (1 October 1955): g h 16. s .a Berliner, Emile, ‘Pamphlet with Directions for Use of 7”w Machine’, [undated].w Accessed 22 May 2013.

m Coleman, B.L. and Cotter, D.G., ‘A Numerical Listingo of the Victor Single-Faced .c 6000 and 7000 Purple Label Series (Part t1)’,e Hillandale News, 51 (October a g 1969): 17–20. h s Collins, Andrew, ‘Design O’ The Times’,.a New Musical Express (11 February w 1989): 44–5. w w Edge, Ruth and Leonard Petts, ‘The First Ten-Inch Records, Part 1’, Hillandale m o News, 156 (June 1987): 201–5. .c te Edison, Thomas A., ‘The Phonographa and Its Future’, North American Review, g h 126:262 (May–June 1878): 527–36.s .a The 50-year Story of RCA Victorw Records (New York: RCA, 1953). w w Foucault, Michel, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: m Selected Essays and Interviewso , ed. by Donald F. Bouchard, trans. by Donald .c Bouchard and Sherry Simonte (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 113–38. a g Fox Talbot, H., The Pencilh of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and s Longmans, 1844). .a w Garlick, Lewis, ‘The wGraphic Artist and the Record Industry’, Journal of the Audio w

Engineering Societym , 25:10–11 (October/November 1977): 779–84. o Gelatt, Roland, The.c Fabulous Phonograph 1877–1977, 2nd revised edn. (London: te a Cassell, 1977).g h Genette, G., s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin .a (Cambridge:w Cambridge University Press, 1997). w w Hamilton, Dominy, ‘Introduction’, in S. Thorgerson and R. Dean (eds.), Album m Covero Album (Limpsfield: Dragon’s World, 1977), pp. 8–15. .c Israel,t ePaul., Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998). a g Kenney,h William H., Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and s .a w Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1999). w w © Copyrighted Material

Martland, Peter, Since Records Began: EMI The First 100 Years (London: BTm o Batsford, 1997). .c te McKnight-Trontz, Jennifer and Alex Steinweiss, For the Record: The Lifea and g h Work of Alex Steinweiss (New York: Princetown Architectural Press, 2000).s .a Millard, Andre, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge:w w w CUP, 1995). m Moholy-Nagy, Làszlò, ‘Production-Reproduction’, in Krisztina Passutho (ed.), .c Moholy-Nagy (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 289–90.te [Original: a g ‘Produktion-Reproduktion’, in De Stijl, 7 (1922): 97–101.] h s Osborne, Richard, Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record (Farnham:.a Ashgate, w w 2012). w

Our Expert, ‘Helps and Hints’, Talking Machine News, 3:1m (May 1905): 9. o Pater, Walter, ‘The School of Giorgione’, Fortnightly Review.c (October 1877). te a Pearson, David, ‘On Designing Book Covers’, The Wordg , 114 (August 2012): h 48–9. s .a w Read, Oliver and Walter L., From Tin Foil to Stereo:w The Evolution of the w Phonograph, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams & Co., 1976). m Ridout, Herbert C., ‘Behind the Needle XX: Lookingo Back Over the Gramophone’, .c te Gramophone, 19:209 (February 1942): 145–6.a g Rilke, Rainer Maria, ‘Primal Sound’ [1919],h in Selected Works: Volume I Prose, s .a trans. C. Craig Houston (London: Hogarthw Press, 1954), pp. 51–6. w Smyth, Gerry, Music in Contemporaryw British Fiction: Listening to the Novel

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,m 2008). o Symes, Colin, Setting the Record .Straight:c A Material History of Classical te a Recording (Hanover: Wesleyang University Press, 2004). h s Tate, Alfred O., Edison’s Open Door:.a The Life Story of Thomas A. Edison Great w Individualist (New York: E.P.w Dutton, 1938). w

m o .c te a g h s .a w w w