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Clevelander’s book spotlights ’80s music sleeves Art, for the record
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
Matthew Chojnacki shined a flashlight into the now-dark hallway of ’80s pop- music culture, and his beam landed squarely on a colorful artifact: The 7” record sleeve.
The freelance writer and music/pop culture historian from Cleveland sifted through stacks of vinyl in search of the artwork that best defined the era.
The result is “Put the Needle on the Record,” a beautiful coffee-table book that spotlights more than 250 vinyl-single covers that helped shape many a rock star’s image.
In the ’80s, nearly every song hit the shelf wrapped in an eye-catching sleeve that spoke nearly as distinctively as the music.
But Chojnacki’s book is not just visual. It’s supported with nuggets of information culled from hundreds of hours of interviews with the art teams that supported Madonna, Prince, Pink Floyd, Queen, The Clash, Van Halen and many more.
Chojnacki shed some more light on his project in this interview with The Vindicator:
Q. What is it about this topic — and this era — that prompted you to put the book together? Was it because the music and artists were so image-conscious? Or was it nostalgia for sleeve artwork, which has since disappeared?
A. I always say that the ’80s represented the birth and death of the 7-and 12-inch single cover.
LP cover art was huge in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, but in the ’80s (with MTV), an artist’s image went into overload.
Even though vinyl singles were only around for a few weeks or months at a time (depending on how they charted), artists were suddenly placing as much emphasis on their single sleeves as they previously did with their album sleeves.
LP sleeves lived on indefinitely, but single sleeves vanished rather quickly from store shelves.
I wanted to bring these long-forgotten images back.
Now, mind you, some deserve to be forgotten, but I couldn’t resist including a few of those gems as well. You take the good, you take the bad.
And, of course, by the end of the ’80s, the vinyl single vanished entirely with the dawn of CDs (and later) iTunes.
As the medium shrunk in size, so did the interest from record labels in creating proper cover art.
Today we’ve gravitated toward overly airbrushed, badly cropped celebrity head shots.
The labels have gone backward in terms of cover art, and part of the idea for the book was also to motivate current artists to again pay attention to their sleeves.
Q. The fact that the sleeves are presented in pairs in your book is interesting — and a little surprising. Why did you make “pairing” the basic concept of your book? Was it because you kept noticing repetition?
A. There are a ton of cover art books on the market, and I wanted to use a slightly different approach. Instead of grouping cover by year, music style, etc., I thought that pairing the images by theme and design was a bit unique, and lends for more of an “art-book” feel than simply it being a random collection of my favorite sleeves.
And with this process came a bunch of image revelations. Like Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” vs. LaToya Jackson’s “Heart Don’t Lie,” where they both wore the same outfit. Or pairing a banned sleeve from The Smiths (“What Difference Does It Make?”) against a re-released version of the same single, where Morrissey perfectly mocked the original.
Speaking with the original musicians and designers (I interviewed about 125 of them) further brought out the stories behind the images and really helped to form these visual pairings.
Q. Tell us about yourself. Do you have a background in art that stoked your interest in this topic? Also, how has the book been received since it was published in 2011?
A. By day I work for Hugo Boss in Cleveland. I’m the vice president of finance there.
By night, I love music (you can still catch me at about a show a week), and have a huge vinyl collection, with a focus on new wave music.
The reception to the book has been unbelievable ...and unexpected. It took seven years to piece the book together, and my main drive was just to get the book out there. So, I didn’t have any expectations about its reception. So to be covered in publications like Rolling Stone and The New York Times, and to win a nice amount of independent book awards was such a great surprise.
But the most surreal element was interviewing artists for the book that I adored — like Gary Numan, Duran Duran and The B-52’s. For a big music geek, it doesn’t get much better.