Marred for Life: Defaced Album Covers at Sixty Bowls

Used record stores can tell us something about society. The durability of vinyl keeps records in circulation for decades, with them evidence of taste, or lack thereof, and of their owners. And of course besides the records themselves, those record stores gather thousands of their covers—which are their  own visual art form: Just a 12.375-inch square, but within those limits, infinite possibility. And the possibility does not end when the record gets sold. As stoners through the ages have found, it’s hard to resist doodling on the faces of famous people and further embellishing what someone else once thought was design perfection.

Los Angeles-based collector and musician Greg Wooten – born in Cleveland, and a graduate of Cleveland Heights High School – found more than a passing appeal in defaced album covers and began collecting them. He has several thousand. In 2019, he selected presumably his favorite 250 and published a book: Marred For Life! A selection of the defaced covers is on view at Sixty Bowls Gallery in Ohio City, Saturday, August 22 through Friday, August 28. There’s a closing party 5 – 7 pm August 28.

This is not commissioned art, and it was never even meant to be exhibited. As viewers will see, this is the sometimes clever, sometimes crass, almost always juvenile doodling of a generation whose listening experience involved putting a record on the turntable and sitting back to read the liner notes. Then perhaps using the album as a surface for removing seeds from marijuana, and rolling joints. Then perhaps deciding that the album art wasn’t perfect after all, and that it needs a little something more: A moustache. Bloodshot eyes. Superman-style X-Ray vision. A re-write of the text. Perhaps some exaggerated or creatively placed genitalia.  Wooten finds the defaced album covers by sorting through bins, such as at Blue Arrow Records in Collinwood (which, since 2022, has released three LPs by Wooten’s current band 1X4X9).  The discovery process adds a layer of mystery and anonymity. We’ll never know the identities of any of the artists.

It’s not to be taken too seriously, but one can’t help but note the occasional stand-out allusion, or certain trends. For example, someone’s treatment of The King Sisters’ 1958 album Imagination: giving the row of four once beautiful blonde women blacked out teeth and tattoos, and blackening three letters of the word Imagination to highlight the word “gin” draws perhaps unintentional connection to the William Hogarth etching, Gin Lane, which portrays a population with hollowed eyes and cheeks, and a mother seeming to drop her baby.

The Beatles are treated over and over again in the book Marred For Life. The White Album is treated as a blank canvas, in one case for contemporary spirograph artistry, in another for doodled flowers and butterflies, and several others for elaborately labeling the otherwise blank cover. Meet the Beatles! becomes Don’t Meet The Beatles! On the cover of the VeeJay Records release, Introducing The Beatles, some collector of yore gave the four lads five o-clock shadows, dark glasses, and blacked out teeth, and even penned an apology—”Sorry about that, Ringo.”

On the trend front, somewhat predictably, people who are too beautiful are made a little less so: Peter Frampton, on the cover of I’m In You, gets clown makeup. Elvis, on Let’s Be Friends, gets a heavy wipe of crimson lipstick.  On the cover of Loving You, he gets solid yellow lights beaming from his whitened-out eyes.

Several artists get harsh treatment—noteworthily Barry Manilow, who in a series of covers featuring close-up celebration of the face of He Who Writes the Songs—gets a dark beard, or Kiss makeup, or dark glasses, or even a complete blackout of his visage.

The altered album covers are not offered for sale, but signed copies of the book Marred for Life are. But really, the existence of this collection is one of those details of society that tell us something about who we are, and how we consume and interact with culture. We deface it. We elaborate on it. It reminds us that we have so much media that it has lost its preciousness. It reminds us that children and younger siblings transgress, or that they inherit other people’s records. They have something in common with graffiti on public walls, but carried out in more controlled and private circumstances. This is observed and brought to our attention by the collector first, and by a gallery–Gary Thomas’s Sixty Bowls–that is run with the ideal not of making grand statements or finding what is important, but instead having a good time, and celebrating the quirky pursuits and creative output of friends.

Marred For Life: Defaced Record Covers from the Collection of Greg Wooten
Opening Reception 5 – 8 pm Saturday, August 22
Closing Reception 5 – 7 pm Friday, August 28

Sixty Bowls Gallery
3125 Detroit Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44113