The Face Of Rock & Roll: Images of a Generation
By Bruce Pollock and John Wagman
1978, Holt
The Drive:
“Whether art or artifact, powerful message or mere advertisement, the album cover has always been the face of rock & roll,” writes Bruce Pollock and John Wagman in their LP-sized paperback. Celebrating the “extra-musical expression” of the album cover—from the dawn of rock & roll to the present (at the time)—the collection of images range from indelible to obscure, and are organized with the purpose of chronicling “the chaos of rock & roll’s life story.” Through tasteful passages of text that don’t compete with the flow of the reproductions, the illusion is established that this “life story” is, indeed, about a person rather than a musical era. “Rock & Roll was born in the fifties by rhythm & blues out of pop music,” purports Pollock and Wagman. “It’s grand-sires were the blues and jazz on one side, country and folk on the other. It bounced around a number of schools: Tin Pan Alley in New York City, Music Row in Nashville, Motown in Detroit. In the mid-sixties it dropped out of college to experiment with sex, dope, and social protest. When the smoke cleared in the seventies, its head had changed quite a bit.” As a whole, the book is it’s own addictive album, one that leaves out the music and offers only the “visual hook.” The book succeeds in doing exactly what it suggests that album art has does for the myth and allure of rock & roll itself, pulling us “deeper into the sound—sometimes through the sound into a world of [our] own, made up of memories, fantasies, and great leaps of association.” If you pour through this book long enough, you’ll want to own each one of the albums inside, and that wouldn’t be a foul reward.
