Album Cover Hall of Fame’s News Update and Link Summary for March, 2023

Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for March, 2023

Posted March 1, 2023 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

February might be a bit shorter than other months, but that doesn’t mean that we album art/artist fans were short-changed in the news department. Starting off with the Grammy Awards and continuing with new exhibitions, art and book releases and a lot of ancillary items, there’s plenty for us fans of album cover art/artistry to dig into, so let’s cut the chit-chat and take a look at what I’ve put together for you.

Preliminary judging has begun on the entries vying for another noted industry award – the Making Vinyl Packaging Awards – and, as one of the judges on the panel tasked to review the hundreds of submissions received, I’m curious and eager to see what always turns out to me a fascinating cross-section of examples of album covers/packages coming in from all over the world.

This month’s newsletter contains a human-curated (as opposed to an AI-generated – we’re old school here at the ACHOF) summary of the news in all of the main topic areas, with updates and info about several new museum and gallery exhibitions, new auctions and sales and a goodly number of art and artist-related articles. As always, I’d like to once again say “thanks” for your help and support, so  let’s get started with some updates on the award shows recently ended and currently in progress:

Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for January, 2023

Album Cover Hall of Fame’s News Update and Link Summary for January, 2023

Posted New Year’s Day, January 1, 2023 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Greetings to you all, and a Happy New Year 2023 to you and yours!

Hope that you all enjoyed your Holidays and have much to look forward to this upcoming year. While we were all involved with our celebratory efforts, efforts continued on several fronts to help determine everyone’s favorite album cover/packaging work of the past 12 months, with voting taking place in several name-brand competitions. The results of those contests will be released in ceremonies taking place in January and February and you can be sure that they’ll be highlighted here on the ACHOF site.

2023 will also be one of change here on the ACHOF site. As you know, for the past 10+ years, we’ve involved both our readers and our anonymous panel of experts in our own nominating/voting efforts in order to select people – i.e., the designers, photographers, art directors, etc. working in the music business and creating retail album packaging – for special honors, and while those efforts have produced lists of artists who’ve all built impressive portfolios of work in their respective areas, it has been an effort that – at least to me, this site’s principal – has distracted me from the main focus of the site, that being to give my readers in-depth interviews, information and ongoing coverage of the output of these talented individuals and design teams. With that said, I am announcing that, going forward, I’ll be working on creating a new site where the general, artist-specific info (bios, interviews and news) will go, with the “hall of fame”-related materials remaining on the albumcoverhalloffame.com site. More details on that effort will be announced soon, but I thought it important to share my intentions with you now with the hope that you’ll provide me with some feedback and suggestions as to how best to move forward.

Anyway, this month’s newsletter is a simple summary of the news in all of the main topic areas, with updates and info about several museum/gallery exhibitions, new auctions and sales results from previous ones and a large number of art and artist-related articles, so I’d like to once again say “thanks” for your help, your support and your patience while I work to get this site set on its new track in the long and short-term. Let’s get started with some updates on the award shows currently in progress:

Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for December, 2022

Posted December 1, 2022 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Greeting to you all – nice to see you all again!

Once again, I have to apologize for leaving you without an update for the month of November, but my wife and I decided to brave the travel scene to complete a vacation trip we’d started in late 2019 that had to be truncated a) by a death in the family and b) that crazy COVID-19 thing that shut things down a bit for a year or two. This journey, which took us to NYC and then over to the U.K. and Ireland, was quite restorative and, I must admit, was timed so that we’d be out of the country on November 8^th so we’d be able to have some distance between us and the pre-and-post-election media madness for a while. Of course, there was no escaping the news, but at least it was offset by all of the excitement that took place in the UK’s government while we were there, and we enjoyed the scenery/people/food there so much that it kept us in the right frame of mind, allowing us to return after a month with some degree of sanity and appreciation of life’s better things in tact.

Of course, during our travels we came across a number of album/music art-related things that added to the overall enjoyment of the experience, including a visit to the site of the new (set to open in its entirety in 2024) Universal Hip-Hop Museum in the Bronx Marketplace (NYC), with a tour provided by the museum’s director, Rocky Bucano; a visit to Liverpool, England (our first) that included an escorted overview provided by designer/author/all around great guy Andrew Dinely (of the Soft Octopus design studio there) that also included a stop at the British Music Experience – an “immersive exhibition” that takes attendees through an illustrated (via memorabilia, videos, etc.) review of the immense and diverse pop music scene in the U.K., from its beginnings in the 1950s through the most-recent BRIT Award-winning artists, and several other finds along the way (such as a memorial sculpture dedicated to the late Irish rock guitarist Rory Gallagher). I’ll be including brief articles about that as I unpack the info gathers and photos taken over the course of the next month or so.

Of course, while I was away, the first ACHOF Reader’s Poll took place, and the results of the voting will be shared a bit later in this newsletter. At the same time, another major album art-related poll – Art Vinyl’s Best Art Vinyl Awards – began gathering votes on its site (see more on this a little later as well) and the Recording Academy here in the U.S. released the names of the nominees for their upcoming Grammy Awards voting, with results to be announced early next year. Lots of great art and artistry on display, so it’ll be interesting to see how the voters/voting public responds to the announcements of the top vote-getters in all of these competitions.

Announcing the Winners of the 2022 ACHOF Reader’s Poll

posted November 22, 2022 by Mike Goldstein, Album Cover Hall of Fame.com

For the past 10 years, the contributors to the Album Cover Hall of Fame have worked to recognize and promote the talents of the people who’ve brought music fans and art collectors (and those of us that appreciate both activities) the best in retail and online music packaging, design, graphics and photography.

Helped each year by asking a panel of curators, gallerists, music marketing execs and writers/researchers who cover the topic to register their opinions, I’ve been able to deliver these details to my readers and, once a year in November, present the top vote-getters in our annual poll as inductees into the hallowed (virtual) halls of the ACHOF. What I haven’t been able to do until now is ask this site’s visitors and fans about their favorite album art-makers, and so to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first class of inductees into the ACHOF, I asked you all to participate in a poll that would serve to track and the report on your feelings about who of our past inductees deserved special commendation.

This year’s poll allowed you to look over the past winners in each of the active award categories and then asked you to select those who are your most-admired art directors, illustrators, designers and photographers, with the top vote-getters placed in special categories that will be called…well, what will we call them? We don’t want to call them “the best”, nor do we want to repurpose some of the popular names that the awards industry has used over time – “People’s Choice”, “Fan Favorites”, “Vox Populi”, “Diamond/Platinum/Gold Medal Winning”, etc. A quick trip to the thesaurus presents words and phrases like “title holder”, “prize winner” and “top dog”, among others, along with some that I think are a bit over the top, such as “conquering hero”, “vanquisher” and “numero uno”, so while I know that it had to have been something memorable and appropriate, I don’t think we’re quite ready to commit to anything beyond “Top Vote-Getters”.

Album Cover Hall of Fame’s News Update and Link Summary for August, 2022

Posted August 1, 2022 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Mid-Summer greetings to you all. Since we last spoke, many of you have experienced extremes in several aspects of our lives – temperature, drought, economic uncertainty, politics, etc. – and so I hope that you’ve all managed to keep your heads above water (assuming that you have water) and your focus on what’s going well in your lives. I’ve been trying hard to keep a positive mindset, but I have to admit it’s been an effort aided by my discovery of some delicious new gins and other mixers (drop me a note if you’d like some recommendations). In any case, let’s get back to the matters at hand.

This past month’s research into all things album cover-related has uncovered a lot to read about and look into – some items being continuations of ongoing serials and other stories providing us with some new and exciting things: exhibitions, items for sale or auction, deeper dives into artists’ portfolios and several articles that uncover new and never-before-divulged details about some of our favorite covers. Overall, the frequency and quality of these news bites continues unabated. The fact that this news comes from sources all over the world certainly adds to the notion that the interest in great album cover art (and in the people that make it) knows no boundaries.

Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for July, 2022

Album Cover Hall of Fame’s News Update and Link Summary for July, 2022, posted July 1, 2022 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Happy pre-Independence Day greetings to you all. We here in Chicagoland have gone through several days of nearly 100-degree heat as we passed from Spring into Summer, so we can only hope that things moderate a bit soon so we can leave our air-conditioned cocoons and enjoy the outdoors a bit. Wish us luck, and we’ll return the favor.

The month of June did include the conclusion of another auction featuring a rare item of original album art – the cover painting for one of the late rapper Tupac Shakur’s albums – which hit a fairly-impressive sales number when all of the bidding was done, the release of some fine art books featuring the works of some of the music business’ best-known designers and photographers and the passing of one of rock music’s (and the comic book/fantasy publishing world’s) better-known illustrators, Ken Kelly, along with a lot of interesting editorial work about album cover images and the people that make them so, with all that to consider, I’m suggesting that you take a moment away from the summertime activities you might typically enjoy and take a few moments to review and absorb all of the items and links I’ve shared with you this month.

 

Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for May, 2022

Album Cover Hall of Fame’s News Update and Link Summary for May, 2022

Posted May 1, 2022 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Wow, what a month. Busy with so many things, and “the hits keep on coming”. You’d have thought that everyone’s attention would be focused on truly important things happening in and to our world – war, a refugee crisis, the world economy zig-zagging with every bit of news and several people who think that it is more important to legislate to remove vague references about some of the sad truths about U.S./World history than to address the ongoing issues head on – and yet those in the visual and musical arts continue to produce works that inspire us and make us think and smile. This month’s summary is my valiant attempt to share coverage of those efforts with all of you, so I do hope that you’ll spend a little time digging through the sections and sharing things you find interesting with others as well. We all need to learn how to share better, no?

Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for December, 2021

Posted December 1, 2021 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Season’s Greetings and Happy Post-Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday cool-off period to you all. The last month has surely been both a joy (being able to see certain family members and friends in person) and a challenge as we enter the Holiday season having to deal with new derivations of COVID, the availability (or lack thereof) of some of the things we wanted to give (or get) as gifts and the general sense of “who knows what’s next” we’re all faced with, so it is with great pleasure that I’m dedicating this month’s ACHOF news summary to the delivery of interesting stories about your favorite album package image-makers both here in the U.S. and around the world.

The people responsible for packaging your favorite music products continue to astound (although, in some cases, confound) us with the results of their efforts, so this month’s edition of the ACHOF News Update and Summary includes a number of great examples of album cover artist/art news – the kind of updates you’ve come to expect in these monthly summaries.  Leading off in the news department are stories about the nominees (and, in one case, inductees) in several significant album cover art-related annual polls, including those for The Grammy Awards, the Making Vinyl Packaging Awards, the Best Art Vinyl Awards and, my favorite, the Album Cover Hall of Fame. You’ll find this info in its own separate section, below.

Album Cover Hall of Fame Breaking News for November 19, 2021

Posted 11/19/21 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

I have the very sad duty to ruin the beginning of your weekend with the report that legendary rock shooter Michael David “Mick” Rock has died. Well-known as “The Man Who Shot The Seventies” in reference to the huge number of albums, magazine articles, books and museum/gallery shows that featured his photos from that era, he was 72.

Mick Rock first met David Bowie in early 1972 and most of the memorable images of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust were shot by Mick in his capacity as Bowie’s official photographer.   Rock was instrumental in creating many other key rock ‘n roll images such as album covers for Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, Lou Reed’s Transformer, Queen’s Queen II (recreated for their classic music video ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’) and Joan Jett’s I Love Rock ‘N Roll. He was the chief photographer on the films The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus and he also produced and directed the seminal music videos for Bowie to be found on Bowie’s Sound and Vision DVD collection: ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, ‘Jean Genie’, ‘Space Oddity’, and ‘Life On Mars’. Other notable examples of Rock’s album cover work include the covers for Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby; Iggy & The Stooges’ Raw Power, Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack and End of the Century for the Ramones.

Tributes from fans and many of the people who knew, worked and loved him have been pouring in from all over the world, as you’ll find in the obituaries and articles referenced in the links posted below:

NME –  https://www.nme.com/news/music/legendary-music-photographer-mick-rock-has-died-aged-72-3099649

uDiscovermusic.com – https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/mick-rock-queen-photographer-dead-72/

Planet Rock.com – https://planetradio.co.uk/planet-rock/news/rock-news/mick-rock-dies/

I had the pleasure of corresponding with him several times over the years and, back in 2007, he helped me put together an article about his work on the cover for the 1974 hit record Queen II, which features one of his best-known images of the band. He was kind enough to also share some other shots that came from that photo session, so I’d invite you to read more about this project and the man behind it by clicking on over to https://rockpopgallery.typepad.com/rockpop_gallery_news/2007/08/cover-story-que.html

Take a dive into this great talent’s work by visiting his website – https://www.mickrock.com/ – where you’ll also find a statement from his daughter, Natalie, who is also quite the talent. A man as unique as his work, he’ll surely be missed.

Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for June 2021

Posted June 1, 2021 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Greetings to you all from Chicagoland and welcome to this month’s edition of the ACHOF News Update and Summary. Is everyone beginning to emerge from your self-imposed exiles (hopefully, fully-vaccinated and doing all you can to stay safe and healthy)? I am happy to announce that the hummingbirds have returned to my balcony, my herbs and flowers have been planted and, with any luck, Spring will stick around long enough for my wife and I to get out and enjoy it.

Another sign of Spring’s arrival is my yearly announcement that I’ve been able to speak with one of this year’s Grammy winners in the Packaging Category – designer Lawrence Azerrad, the winner (along with his collaborator, Chicago’s own Jeff Tweedy) of this year’s Grammy Award for “Best Box/Special Limited-Edition Package” for the work done on Wilco’s Ode To Joy set – and have just posted this interview on the site for your reading pleasure.