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Friday, June 21, 2002

By Scott Mervis, Post-Gazette Weekend Editor

The idea is so prosaic it's astounding no one thought of it until 1939: Put a cover on the record.

Until Alex Steinweiss signed on as art director of the fledgling Columbia Records with the plan, 78 rpm records were sold in brown wrappers stamped with the name of the artist and recording and, at most, a musical note from the clip art file.

"When you walked into a record store," Steinweiss says in an interview from his home in Sarasota, Fla., "all you saw were like spines on books. No attempt was made to attract the attention of the buyer. So they gave me a chance to do a test and it shook up the whole industry."

Carlo McCormick, curator of "The LP Show," was stunned to learn that the originator of the album cover was still around. Now, Steinweiss, 85 and still sharp as a needle, has his own little section in "The LP Show" and will speak here at the opening Saturday night.

Steinweiss' seminal album cover, "Smash Songs by Rodgers and Hart," used a Broadway marquee as a sparkling graphic. His cover on Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony boosted sales by more than 800 percent. It took a while, he says, for the industry to catch up.

"We trailed Europe by a long distance in the development of good graphic design," he says. "They had great poster designers and book designers. In America, we had Quaker Oats."

When the war struck home, Steinweiss designed training manuals for the Navy during the day and worked till midnight creating colorful and whimsical album art for Columbia.

In 1947, with the invention of the LP, Steinweiss was handed the riddle of how it would be packaged and shipped. He patented the paperboard jacket and sleeve that became the industry standard.

Throughout his career with six different companies, he designed more than 1,000 album covers, mostly classical, jazz and show tunes. The combination of photograph-driven covers and the rise of the rock era in the '60s drove him away.

"Here I was in my gray flannel suit, and the executive who came out to talk to me was dressed in blue jeans, leather jacket with fringes, long hair and boots. I looked at him and I looked at myself and I said, 'I'm finished. I'm superannuated.' That's when I decided to get out of it because it got to be a stinking business with all the drugs and everything else going on."

Rock album art, like much of what is in "The LP Show," he says, was "way out, to attract the young people. As far as art was concerned, there was no art."

"Today," he adds, "there isn't even any design in the record business."

And don't even ask about CDs, either aurally or visually. Although he's agreed to design some in recent years, he says, "I don't like to talk about CDs. Four and three-quarters by4 3/4 as opposed to 12 by 12. Not much you can do with that."