1000 Record Covers by Michael Ochs

1000 Record Covers by Michael Ochs

Record covers are a sign of our life and times. Like the music on the discs, they address such issues as love, life, death, fashion, and rebellion. For music fans the covers are the expression of a period, of a particular time in their lives. Many are works of art and have become as famous as the music they stand for--Andy Warhol's covers, for example, including the banana he designed for The Velvet Underground. This edition of Record Covers presents a selection of the best rock album covers of the 60s to 90s from music archivist, disc jockey, journalist, and former record-publicity executive Michael Ochs's enormous private collection. Both a trip down memory lane and a study in the evolution of cover art, this is a sweeping look at an underappreciated art form.

In the early 1950s, Michael Ochs acquired a rock & roll addiction. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ochs worked in the PR offices of Columbia, Shelter, and ABC Records to support his habit. He's also worked as a disc jockey, taught a rock history course at UCLA, and written for Rock, Melody Maker, Cashbox, and Crawdaddy, among other publications. In the mid-1970s, Michael Ochs founded the Michael Ochs Archives. Currently, the archives house millions of pictures as well as over 100,000 albums and singles.