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Picture discs are awesome: Exploring a fun audio format
03.21.2018
11:12 am
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Prince picture disc

I’ve always had a thing for picture discs. Even when I was a little girl, my favorite Disney albums were the ones that had cartoon depictions of the stories that I was listening to embedded in the vinyl..

One of my very good friends in college had a fabulous collection of picture discs. We worked together at this thrift store in Santa Cruz in the 90s and spent our workdays scoring really fantastic t-shirts, talking music and just bullshitting. It was really great. I miss that thrift shop culture that doesn’t exist anymore. Anyway, I would go to her house and she had a room where a collection of 7” picture discs was meticulously displayed, just below the molding of the ceiling circling the room. She swapped them out each week, and switched sides too! So many fine punk rock and ska bands were bastions of pop culture glory in that apartment!

I was thinking about the history of picture discs the other day because, honestly, it’s pretty weird and interesting. The first generation of “picture discs” was literally a disc put into a picture. They were called Gramophone postcards. These buggers were made up of small celluloid discs containing audio information, which was then glued to postcards. A hole went through the disc and the postcard and it played at 78rpm. Voila! These showed up around the turn of the century, first in Germany, although they made a comeback in the Soviet Union in the 1950s because hey, everything old is new again, right? Plus they were dirt cheap to produce, unlike vinyl records.

Here’s where it gets wild. The early generations of picture discs were not just pressings for the latest romantic crooners or hot jazz tunes. Nope. Starting in the 1920s and moving forwards, there was a certain amount made for fascist propaganda. Fun times with Hitler and friends becoming early adopters of the latest fad technology.

Around the 1940s, picture discs made their way into people’s homes in a cardboard format. Larger than the Gramophone postcards, these “discs” operated on the same principles: a plastic coated card with information grooves able to be played on your average record-playing device of the time.  And, of course, it had a picture on it. You may have had versions of this as they continued to be made into the 1980s and printed on the backs of cereal boxes. The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” hit was a natural to sell sugar cereal and the Monkees were famously “heard” on boxes of Post’s HoneyComb, Alpha-Bits and Rice Krinkles cereals starting in about 1970. [Note the Don Kirschner connection there.] Teen idol Bobby Sherman and the Jackson 5 also saw their music printed on cereal boxes.
 

 

 

 
As an archivist, I totally dig the ephemera and oddities but I also love exploring the idea that there was an entire record label, poor little Vogue Records, that existed for only one year (1946-1947) and dedicated its entire output to picture discs in the manner that the general population recognizes them. They are records (in the traditional vinyl, circular disc-with-picture, sense) but they are also quite special.

Due to the manner in which Vogue produced their discs, the audio quality was very high. According to the Association of Vogue Picture Record Collectors, a very special way of creating the records was used whereby a “central core aluminum disc was sandwiched between the paper illustrations and vinyl. Perfecting this process took quite a while; Tom Saffady and his engineers spent several months working out the bugs that often resulted in torn or dislodged paper illustrations.” The music that Vogue released wasn’t that big time and these days not many people collect the discs for what was recorded on them, but WOW. That artwork!

I have my own tiny collection of what I have picked up over the years. I have some weird shaped records, some titles I found for decent prices when I worked at Amoeba Music a zillion years ago, and others when I was just a college kid in northern California. But sadly I don’t own any Vogue discs. The fact that there are aural dynamics lying in the grooves of objects that could simply be viewed as visual art—or clever pop culture packaging designed to appeal to little kids—gives me a kick. Serving two functions, it always seems like these records are their own little secrets to themselves. As time moves forward and those of us who love records become fewer in number, who knows? They may become exactly that: oblique ciphers to another era with different cultural values. For now, they have some damn nice pictures on ‘em.

First, let’s check out the Gramophone postcards!
 

 

 
Here are some cardboard records…
 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ariel Schudson
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03.21.2018
11:12 am
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Odd photoshopped vintage LP sleeves
04.22.2011
03:58 pm
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These cleverly Photoshopped album covers are pretty funny. I had to do a double take because I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on… I think my favorite is “I Don’t Like Me Either.”

All images are from the devious and NSFW website Twisted Vintage.
 
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Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Gallery of defaced LP sleeves

Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.22.2011
03:58 pm
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