Record Jacket Art

Command Records RS 806 SD, Enoch Light: Provocative Percussion, 1959, Cover Art by Josef Albers (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 810 SD, Enoch Light: Provocative Percussion Volume 2, 1960, Cover Art by Josef Albers (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 821 SD, Enoch Light: Provocative Percussion Volume 3, 1961, Cover Art by Josef Albers (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 834 SD, Enoch Light: Provocative Percussion Volume 4, 1962, Cover Art by Charles E. Murphy (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Record Jacket Art

Command Records

Back in the late 1980s and all the way through the 1990s, I used to collect these amazing LP vinyl records at the flea market on 22nd and 23rd street in New York City. They used to sell for $1 a piece at that time and there were plenty of them so I am sure they were immensely popular in the 1960s since they were just everywhere.  The cover art always struck me from the moment I saw them.  Most of the Command Records featured simple yet sophisticated illustrations by Josef Albers, Charles E. Murphy, Barbara Jean Brown and George Giusti. They were elegant, simple designs and easily recognizable, engraved in your memory forever.

Nowadays, these records are becoming harder and harder to find. The once famous New York City flea market is just a shadow of what it used to be, thanks to the onslaught of darn eBay in the late 1990s but even more so because of the new nondescript apartment buildings that were constructed in the early years of the new millenium.  Most of the parking lots where the flea market was held on weekends, was sold off to developers, out with the old, in with the new.

Whenever I browse through this collection, the smell of the old cardboard record jackets and the solid feel of the vinyl brings back lots of good memories to the good old days of the New York City flea market and simpler times, when you could find a mint-in-box Weltron 8-Track Player for $40 but haggled the price down to $35, when you paid 50 cents for a cup of perfectly fine coffee at the corner Deli (no friggin' Wholefoods - we love them anyway, Starbucks, Duane Reade or bank on every corner), when every artist and designer went to Industrial Plastics on Canal Street for supplies, when you could purchase an entire 5-story building in Tribeca for $600,000 (which most of us thought was just madness...Tribeca was a deserted place in the 1980s, who would ever want to live there). And when the meat market was still a rough place, with lots of boarded up buildings and soliciting transvestites day and night.   No Apple store, of course!  Times certainly have changed...

Lucia Fontana

Modern Design Interior

Command Records RS 800S.D., Terry Snyder and The All Stars: Persuasive Percussion, 1959, Cover Art by Josef Albers (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 808SD, Terry Snyder and The All Stars: Persuasive Percussion Volume 2, 1959, Cover Art by Barbara Jean Brown (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 821 SD, Enoch Light: Persuasive Percussion Volume 3, 1961, Cover Art by Josef Albers (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

For Discriminating people who desire the finest in sound...

always - demand Command.

The appearance of Command Records's Provocative Percussion, recorded by Enoch Light and The Light Brigade, was a significant event for everyone who listened to phonograph records in the early 1960s.  The records of Provocative Percussion were a fantastic eye- and ear opener to everyone who had any interest in record music - to listeners, who were amazed by the unprecedented combination of advanced engineering craftsmanship with brilliantly imaginative musical performances; and to record manufacturers, who were tremendously impressed by the overwhelming public response to the musical exhilaration that poured from the disc. The first release of Provocative Percussion shot up to the top of the list of best-selling stereo records and stayed a best seller for more than ninety (90) weeks - that is, for more than a year and a half! But this represented only the American response. Great attention was given to the record labels' jacket art under guidance of Command Records's art director Charles E. Murphy. Charles E. Murphy studied under Bauhaus master Josef Albers before accepting an invitation from Enoch Light to partner with Command Records as design director for Enoch Light's breakthrough recording series. Charles E. Murphy spent the late 1950s through the early 1960s working with Command Records to produce a graphically advanced series of album designs that played off of Bauhaus concepts and geometric abstraction with the most amazing artistically inspired cover art. In his career with Command Records, Charles E. Murphy supervised such great designers as S. Neil Fujita, George Giusti, and Josef Albers himself, among others.

Additional Command Records record jacket cover art:

Command Records RS 814 SD, Enoch Light and the Light Brigade: Pertinent Percussion Cha Cha's, 1960, Cover Art by George Giusti (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 812 SD, Los Admiradores: Bongos / Flutes / Guitars, 1960, Cover Art by Brownjohn, Chermayeff and Geismar (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 811 SD, Dick Hyman and his Orchestra: Provocative Piano Volume II, 1960, Cover Art attributed to S. Neil Fujita (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 834 SD, Enoch Light: Provocative Percussion Volume 4, 1962, Cover Art by Charles E. Murphy (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 33-879, Enoch Light and the Light Brigade: A New Concept of Great Cole Porter Songs, 1962, Cover Art by George Giusti (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 844SD, Enoch Light: Big Band Bossa Nova - The New Beat from Brazil, 1962, Cover Art by Charles E. Murphy (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 876SD, The Ray Charles Singers: Command Performances, 1964, Cover Art by George Giusti (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 804 SD, Enoch Light: The Sound of Strings, 1962, Cover Art attributed to George Giusti (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)

Command Records RS 33-898, The Ray Charles Singers: One of those Songs, 1966, Cover Art by George Giusti (image credit Lucia Fontana - nova68.com)