Wearing their art on their sleeve

As I have stated before, every now and then I read a great article and like to share it with my readers. Author Joe Burns was kind enough to allow me to reprint his wonderful article about picture sleeves. Joe's article originally was printed here: www.wickedlocal.com/

Wearing their art on their sleeve

By Joe Burns


YARMOUTH - It was never just for the record.

Back when vinyl was the final word in music marketing, the picture sleeves that covered the doughnut-hole 45 RPMs served as more than dust protectors; they were colorful come-ons designed not only to sell the single, but the artist as well.

Less common and more fragile than their LP cover cousins, they’ve become scarcer over the years. Ripped, discarded, soiled and written on, many didn’t make it past the ‘50s and ‘60s. Fortunately some survived and were rescued by Chip Bishop of West Dennis, who’ll be exhibiting items from his collection of pop culture artifacts starting Feb. 20 at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod in South Yarmouth.

Bishop’s introduction to record sleeve art began 51 years ago, in Woonsocket, R.I, when he was 12-years-old.

“I wanted to have a career in radio,” Bishop says, recalling his boyhood ambitions. “For Christmas I got a tiny little radio transmitter and I set up my own radio station in the basement of my parents’ home. Bishop’s AM radio signal reached about a mile, but that was far enough to find an audience, and soon he was getting requests.

“I started collecting records for my little pirate radio station, whatever I could afford. It was 79 cents a record at the time. I could afford maybe one or two a week,” Bishop says. “And that’s how it started.”

When he was 15 Bishop began hanging out at a real radio station — WWON in Rhode Island, which proved to be a boon for his record collection.

“The manager of the radio station would give me all the records that they weren’t going to play. They were an adult music station and they weren’t going to play Little Richard, Fats Domino and Elvis so he gave me the records,” Bishop says. “That led to a lifetime of collecting that was interrupted by college and getting married and raising a family. But I got back to it and started hitting yard sales and flea markets.”

Picture sleeves weren’t on Bishop’s mind when he was a boy.

“That was a bonus,” he says.

But by the 1970s Bishop’s interest in the art that accompanied the records was piqued by collectors’ magazines that began to feature them.

“It turns out that the sleeves are more valuable than the records because relatively few of them survived,” Bishop says.

At one time his collection of 45s was up to 4,000. That number has since been sliced nearly in half. The large majority of those records don’t have picture sleeves. Most are protected with the more common paper jacket with the hole in the middle to display the record label. Bishop says the less common picture sleeves came into their own in the era of the teen idols, when girls would buy records and pin the pictures up on their walls.

“It started for real with the coming of Elvis in the mid-‘50s. They were marketing tools, often times to introduce an artist who people weren’t familiar with,” Bishop says, noting that as rock and pop stars were being turned into movie stars, the sleeves were also a means of promoting movies such as “High School Confidential” (Jerry Lee Lewis) and “Where The Boy Are” (Connie Francis).

”It took off again in the mid-‘60s when The Beatles came on to the scene, because Americans didn’t know who these British lads were,” says Bishop whose collection also includes art from that period as well.

Picture sleeves didn’t end with that era, those 7-inch squares of art are still found today, protecting, new vinyl recordings, but you won’t find them in Bishop’s collection. He’ll be showing about 200 sleeves mostly from the ‘50s and the ‘60s and across a wide range of music from Little Richard to Annette and everything in between. Also on display will be a vintage record player from the era. CDs custom made by Bishop for the occasion will provide musical accompaniment.

The covers, along with the vinyl discs that they protected, provided something that, in this day of iPods and MP3s, most miss out on – the sensory experience that comes from handling a record and admiring the artwork.

“In this word of downloading music they don’t get that,” says Bishop, using a non-monetary measure in determining their value.

“They’re old friends from my youth,” he says. “Great memories from a much simpler time.”