Bachelor Pad Revolution

From 1959 to 1961, the artist Josef Albers designed seven LP album covers for Command Records. The first, Persuasive Percussion, with music by drummer-bandleader Terry Snyder, was a number one hit on the charts for thirteen weeks and stayed in the top forty for over two years. Its cover design is starkly graphic: a ten by twenty-two grid of black dots, each one centimeter in diameter, fills its bottom half. By the eleventh row, some of the dots have levitated out of their pre-determined berths, lending the composition a spacey-staccato quality.

I collect these Command albums; it’s probably as close as I’ll ever get to owning an Albers. Ironically, I’ve never listened to them; my record player has been out of commission for years. So until recently, I didn’t get a chance to experience how the graphic designs of one of the twentieth century’s most respected artists, and its preeminent color theorist, enhanced what I took to be the light elevator-music fare of albums promising “persuasive” percussion.

Finally, I heard some of the tracks on Youtube, on which there is a surprising amount of amateur footage employing the recordings. Many depict the record revolving on a turntable, some with the Albers album sleeve propped up behind the player. At first, these watching-paint-dry visuals puzzled me, but I came to understand that the high-fidelity sound of the pioneering stereo effects employed by Command Records founder Enoch Light attracts serious audiophiles who use the albums as test records for the main event: their expensive hi-fi setups, which they were showing off on the decidedly lo-fi website. Yet for all its technical virtuosity, the Light sound is itself muzak-y lite, an uninspired selection of recent pop hits covered as instrumental Latin jazzy confections. A reissue of Persuasive Percussion ran the phrase “BACHELOR PAD MUSIC” in a banner across its cover. In short, Enoch Light provided “sophisticated” lounge music for the Playboy man.

This was not what I associated with Albers, the Bauhaus master hired by Black Mountain College and later a professor at Yale University. Was this the case of the mandarin following the lure of mainstream success but instead veering headfirst toward the insipid? Not so: Albers’ output was, in fact, tremendously catholic, which may explain why Enoch Light’s daughter Julie, a student of Albers’s at Black Mountain College, recommended him to her father. Albers began his career at the Bauhaus as a glass artist, became the teaching master of the furniture workshop, and later led the wallpaper design workshop. At Black Mountain, he pursued a diverse sensibility, producing photographs, photomontages, furniture, lithographs, wood- and linoleum cuts, pen-and-ink drawings, and oil paintings, as well as a great deal of the college’s design output, including its dramatic concentric circle logo.