📷 Gallery Inner Sleeves

Threads with gallery-like content.
Looking at the IH-5 that Steve posted above, I believe that the albums pictured are identical to ones I have on IH-6.
 
I've yet to see one of the '4 color catalog' of A&M albums offered if you sent a SASE. They were rumored to show covers of LPs that were never released.

JB
I had one of the old catalogs of full color of everything released through that time. I do not remember what the max album number was but I do know only 4 Brasil'66 were listed. It did have Bossa Rio and that is how I came to know the existence of that album. There was also a different sleeve when I bought "Fool On The Hill" it had a menorah design against a light brown background and only about 15 album pictures on the opposite side.
I also had a "Little Catalog" similar to the one posted here but it did not have any pictures.
I always enjoyed the inner sleeves of LP records. If you bought through a record club, you almost always just got white sleeves.
 
Puzzle: Where is BOSSA RIO (4191)?

The Bossa Rio album may have been discontinued by the time this catalog was printed. Just a few years later, other albums began to disappear, such as Crystal Illusions and Equinox by Brasil'66.
 
Quoting the beginning of the "Spanish Flea" recording by Julius Wechter and the Baja Marimba Band: "...Oh, there it is...I found it..."

The little picture of the McCurn album, it wasn't an innersleeve, it was the rear of the Dave Lewis LiTTLE GREEN THiNG album:

LewisRearMcCurn.jpg
 
Back to the full color catalog that I once had, looking at the little catalog list, I saw Phil Och's Greatest Hits-SP4253 listed. That one was also in the color catalog as I remember it was a cover of him in a gold suit. I also remember there were large pictures of some of the main artists in the catalog as well. The Brasil'66 photo was from the back of Ye Me Le. So the catalog went through the 1970 albums.
 
Looking inside an early 70s A&M album, I found this innersleeve:

innersleeve70s.jpginnersleeve70sb.jpg
 
Upload it to imgur.com (no account needed), hover over the photo and click "Copy Link". Paste it in here, and it's good to go.
 
You all have piqued my curiosity of my A&M inner sleeves so I have pulled my lps and looked and I have at least six additional not posted here. Some have the "Man's Best Friend Music" ( Rita Coolidge debut, Pais Tropical) and some have the Ansel Adams pictures( Stillness and a later issue of YeMeLe). Others have scattered lp covers with a lot of rainbow spaces as well. The latter only have maybe eight or nine covers on each side of the sleeve((2nd and 3rd albums by Rita Coolidge).
 
Yeah, I don't think we've completed the innersleeves postings at all.
 
I never did understand that rainbow sleeve where they gave over half of the space to rainbows. I mean, nothing against rainbows, but the whole idea of that innersleeve was to advertise other titles. Maybe they figured that putting too many miniature album cover images made the whole thing look too "busy" or something like that. Or maybe the designer was an old hippie who liked rainbows. One of those things to put in the "we'll probably never know" file. (Because, who besides us would care?!)
 
Back in the cassette days, I used to used that rainbow design for artwork, typing the title with a typewriter.

InnerRainbow300.jpg
 
Maybe they figured that putting too many miniature album cover images made the whole thing look too "busy" or something like that. Or maybe the designer was an old hippie who liked rainbows.
I think it may have been a "reserved for future use" issue...only they moved on from this design to another in the following years and never filled in the blanks. Errr, rainbows.
 
The inner sleeve was something that I always looked forward to for the catalog of records as well as pictures and lyrics. Today's CD's have lyrics but the print is so small it is difficult to read. They do not include many of the sleeve pictures as well.
Today's buyers of downloads and CD''s are missing a lot by not having the sleeves.
 
Today's buyers of downloads and CD''s are missing a lot by not having the sleeves.
The 12" LP jacket was often a work of art. Even today, vinyl releases sometime put extra effort into packaging (new releases usually do; reissues can range from plain white innersleeves to lavish reproductions of the originals with added liner notes and photos).

That's what I liked about browsing the used record bins--there were often notes, essays, personnel listings, etc. on the back cover and you could spend hours looking through the titles. With CDs, before I stopped buying them locally, it was a matter of flipping quickly through them to find the titles I was after.
 
I think there might be one of these on eBay. I've copied the photos and cleaned them up a bit:

Catalog1adj.jpgcatalog2adj.jpgcatalog3adj.jpgcatalog4adj.jpg

Looking at the list of albums, I believe that this is most likely from sometime in 1972. Carole King Music came out late in 1971 and Rita Coolidge's Nice Feelin was definitely 1972. One interesting note-The copy of Wings by Michel Colombier is listed here as SP 3503. The copy I have is SPX 4281. For those that do not know, the "X" indicated a higher suggested retail of $5.98 in a time when most were $4.98. Fool On The Hill is the first that I have ever seen with an X(SPX 4160) and then Miguel Rios' Song of Joy(SPX 4267} was the second. Wings would be the third that I have ever seen but in late 1972 all the A&M releases got the $5.98 retail as did many other labels. The success of Abbey Road with a $6.98 list in 1970 spurred a lot of labels to increase their price structure. In 1974 they started in at $6.98 and by 1978, many were at $7.98 list prices. By this time I had joined record clubs and was getting them at special pricing with a lot of free with purchase specials.
 
Wow, seeing those prices ($5.98, $6.98, $7.98) made me remember all the controversy about those price increases. At the same time, labels were starting to cheap out on their vinyl quality so people were upset with paying a higher price for a lower quality product. In our store we almost always sold everything at $1.19 less than list, so a $5.98 album would be $4.79. Sometimes the labels would fancy-up the innersleeves, use custom record labels, include a poster or a lyric sheet, etc. to justify the higher prices. It got to where I would be kind of peeved when a major artist would release a new album with a plain-jane package.
 
Steely Dan held back Gaucho since MCA insisted on a then-new $8.98 (?) list price for their album.

I think the cheapest I ever bought new records for was $4.95 in the early 80s--I remember getting the latest Earth Wind & Fire (Powerlight) and Police (Synchronicity) albums at Sam's Jams where they were loss leaders to get us into the store. (I was already a regular--no enticement needed...but yeah, I took advantage!)
 
I remember we got a "deal" on a case lot buy of the first Foreigner album. I'm not sure exactly what we sold it for but we were the lowest priced store in the area with that album. We did the same thing around the same time with Frampton Comes Alive. I think we sold that two-record set for $5.99 or something. Those were fun times, I loved being the local go-to for music.
 
Every now and then, the CBS group(Columbia,Epic) would reduce the list prices on a slew of titles and it would give new life to the sales. A few years later, they would reduce more. After they got back distribution of Ode Records, their listings were all at 7.98 and in the early 80's, they were all back to $5.98 suggested retail. They had stickers on the plastic cover as "The Nice Price." Other labels followed suit(A&M for one) and reduced the prices. Fool On The Hill was one but they made it one sleeve without the back hill and the member pictures. The new back cover was the original inside color photo of Sergio with all the song information.
We had two very large record stores in this area that had huge displays of LP's and they would have tons of the reduced albums as well as many bins of cutouts and I hit those very heavily in my younger days.
 
Records got hit with a double-whammy in the 70s---the price of the petroleum needed to make the vinyl and overall inflation itself.

Oil Crises I (1973-74) and II (1979) are kinda self-explanatory, but the year to year inflation in the 70s is staggering.

Start with something that cost a dollar in 1970. Here's what it cost in each year of the decade:

1971: $1.04
1972: $1.08
1973: $1.14
1974: $1.27
1975: $1.39
1976: $1.47
1977: $1.56
1978: $1.68
1979: $1.87

And in 1980---$2.12.

Obviously, oil prices are figured into those numbers, but the price of everything rose substantially.

The 1971 Ford Pinto had a base price of $1919. The 1980 Pinto, which had big bumpers, an uglier nose, and a marginally redone instrument cluster, but otherwise was the same car, had a base price of $4,605.
 
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