At Friday (Oct 7th) evening's art opening of Billy Sprague's space themed album cover exhibit at North Oakland's As Is Exhibitions gallery space at 4707 Telegraph Ave. so many people showed up to catch the unique album cover exhibit by the avid record collector / Amoeba Berkeley employee, that for much of the night the large crowd spilled outside onto the Telegraph Avenue sidewalk. It was the perfect night for Billy's opening since the Bay Area early October weather was in Indian Summer mode, plus it was First Friday's in Oakland with art openings everywhere including right next door at Smokey's Tangle art space that shares a doorway with the 4707 space. Among the large crowd that showed up at the event were many of Billy Sprague's fellow Ameobites. "Tom McKwon, Shawn Williams, Big Tunde, Gail, Marc Weinstein & family, Ryan Stark, Kent Randolph, Ramon, Lori and Steve, Ian, Ranon, Rebecca & Matt plus a bunch of ex-employees," (including DJ Inti) all converged at the last Friday's packed opening reported the curator.

Like all the other lifelong music collectors I was drawn in by all of these amazing album covers - many I already knew but a lot I had never even seen before like Music for Sleepwalkers Only which - one of Sprague's personal faves that he accurately describes as, "a great mostly black galactic cover with three sleeping pills floating in space in a rather phallic manner."

Ever since the music industry tried to quietly kill off vinyl, it appears that the medium, complete with its accompanying cover art form, has triumphantly resisted eradication. In fact, not only have records, along with album & singles & ten-inch cover art, refused to die -- they've actually grown in popularity with a whole new generation of appreciative vinyl fans.

As we well know, these days vinyl sales are continually going up and it seems you can't go a week without encountering some wonderful new album cover art show somewhere. Not only are curators presenting classic album cover art on exhibition, but this week one most innovative individual is presenting an exhibit of all new & original record cover art by many different artists complete with all-new corresponding music -- fictitious songs for fictitious bands!

Bay Area artist Sonny Smith (of Sonny & the Sunsets) melds his love of both music and art in a unique new gallery show titled 100 Records that opens tomorrow (April 9th) at Gallery 16 in San Francisco. The diverse & tireless San Francisco artist, who just recently returned from SXSW in Austin, TX with the Sunsets (the band he formed three years ago with Tim Cohen and Kelley Stoltz and whose changing lineup now includes Ryan Browne, Tahlia Harbour and Zack Ehrlich), spent the past year meticulously piecing together the 100 Records show in which he created the names and song titles for 100 different fictitious bands.

Over the last few decades there have been many fine books publsihed that present album cover art but, good as they are, they have all typically been presented in a one dimensional fashion, showing the front (sometimes the back too) of the record album cover art with maybe some data on the cover artist and the recording artist within the cover. But the recently published hella fun book of album art Sleeveface: Be The Vinyl by Carl Morris & John Rostron (Artisan) breaks the mold by presenting album covers in sight gags in which music fans pose with their fave album covers (like the ones below), with the covers covering their faces (hence: "be the vinyl" subtitle).

The art contained in Sleeveface: Be The Vinyl, which just about any music collector will find irresistable, is one of those things that many of us have done at some time with one or more album covers, but no one (until now) had thought of presenting in a nicely packaged book form. In fact, since the book was published last month it has inspired countless individuals to do their own "Sleeveface" and forward them to the official Sleeveface website to be posted, including the Christmas themed one above and the ones below. Also on the site is the how-to-sleeveface guide (see video immediately below) which informs curious readers about how to blur the line between album sleeve and reality. The 192 page book, which contains over 200 sleeveface images of mostly album covers you are already familiar with, sells for approx $13.00.