PARIS, Aug 31 (AFP) - When Deutsche Grammophon unleashed the  
first vinyl records on to an unsuspecting public 50 years ago, no 
one could have had the slightest idea of the subsequent cultural 
impact it was to have. 
   Quite apart from bringing music of all kinds to a mass audience,  
the very format of the record's cardboard covers would spawn an 
entire popular sub-culture, namely "album art". 
   With the advent in the 1960s of early experimental forays in the  
sphere of pop music, the album cover came into its own as a vehicle 
for painters, photographers, comic strip artists and graphic 
designers to create small works of art in their own right. 
   The early 12-inch (30cm) records featured little more than  
wooden-looking, smiling photographs of the performers or, in a vain 
attempt at a sales pitch, pictures of scantily-clad young women. 
   But by the 1960s, not only were the Beatles and the Rolling  
Stones arguably the most innovative musical acts around, they were 
also responsible between them for some of the most memorable 
examples of album art. 
   The Stones appeared in the first 3-D cover with "Their Satanic  
Majesties Request" and would later cause mild outrage with the cover 
of "Sticky Fingers", which featured a picture of a pair of denim 
jeans, complete with a real zip fastener which could actually be 
undone to reveal an expanse of flesh beneath. 
   The reference work for all album art, though, remains the  
Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", a brilliant 
photo-montage by the British artist Peter Blake of major figures of 
the 20th century, from Albert Einstein to King Kong and Marilyn 
Monroe. 
   By the time that record was released, album cover art was  
already developing as a recognised form, inspired to a large extent 
by Andy Warhol's famous "banana" cover for the Velvet Underground's 
album, "Peel Slowly and See". 
   As the so-called psychadelic era reached its height, covers like  
Cream's "Disraeli Gears" featured balloon-like lettering and strange 
swirling designs, while underground hero Robert Crumm, the man 
behind the Self-Loathing comics and the pornographic cartoon strip, 
Fritz the Cat, designed a whacky cover for the album "Cheap Thrills" 
by Big Brother and the Holding Company, featuring a young Janis 
Joplin. 
   The German band Faust produced the first transparent disc in a  
transparent cover, taking the notion of the Beatles' "White Album" 
with its minimalist plain cover, to an even more elaborate extent, 
while gimmicks abounded: from the pop-up cardboard cutouts of the 
band in the centrefold of Jethro Tull's 1968 "Stand Up" to the 
highly impractical round cover of the Small Faces' "Ogden's Nut Gone 
Flake" in the form of a tobacco tin. 
   As with all forms, the attentions of the censor were never far  
away and explicit nudity always called for a cover-up whether it was 
the scores of bare-breasted women on The Jimi Hendrix Experience's 
"Electric Ladyland", the full-frontal shot of John Lennon and Yoko 
Ono on "Two Virgins" or the Lolita-like youngster on the cover of 
supergroup Blind Faith's eponymous album - all had to be sold inside 
brown paper wrappers. 
   By the mid-1970s, punk rock reversed the trend and revived an  
earlier vogue for photo covers and while picture discs and vividly 
coloured vinyl had a brief heyday, it did little for the sound 
quality of the records themselves. 
   And then album art went into a rapid decline, along with the old  
vinyl albums themselves, for with the increasing popularity of the 
Musicassette and the Compact Disc, artists found working within the 
restrictions of small surfaces no match for the broader canvas of a 
solid 12-inch square cover. 
   Perhaps, though, the current vinyl revival will herald a return  
to the days when cover design was as much a part of the marketing of 
a rock album as the record within.