Album Art To Go By

I thought I was being set up. What else are you to think when a co-worker comes up to you all excited and says, "You have to go look in the bathrooms! You have to go look in the bathrooms!"? Plural, as in both the men's and women's public restrooms at work. Being a dutiful employee, as always, I trudged off to the back hall to "look in the bathrooms!" not knowing what I'd find and practicing a ho hum no big deal reaction just in case Candid Camera cameras were rolling. What I found was no practical joke but an art exhibit.

Putting to use some "Frame Your Favorite Album Artwork" frames that haven't sold, the co-worker had festooned the drab walls of both bathrooms with six or seven album covers, and done so with a nuanced, quite aesthetically-pleasing touch. Due to the configurations of the restrooms, the artwork mostly hangs on the wall facing the lone commode in each. Ergo, most of a man's time in the w.c. will be spent with his back to the art. Women, however, will be looking at the framed albums' front covers while they go about their business. Thinking about all the insipid wallpapers and dull paint jobs I've encountered over a lifetime of answering nature's call, I must admit that hanging album art in a bathroom is a great choice, wholly worthy of my co-worker's exclamation points.

Now to wax, as it were, poetic about album cover art, and lamenting its ruination by CDs and now digital downloading, is hardly anything new. We all have our favorite covers that bring back truckloads of memories. But to curate a bathroom album artwork display, especially in a public restroom in a corporate-friendly environment, is a delicate proposition. One needn't unsettle the customer when he or she is still in the middle of shopping and hasn't yet purchased anything. I mean, as much as I love Bob Dylan and his Blonde On Blonde album and its fuzzy, iconic artwork, I don't think I want this image staring at me while I'm porcelain sitting:

Sensitive to this need to provide pleasing, memorable art while not creeping out the customer, my co-worker did an excellent job choosing the albums and displaying them. Most of the albums seem to be from the late 1970s or early 1980s, with colorful yet somewhat abstract covers. I think Journey albums appear in both the men's and women's rooms; I'll make a point of twisting around and staring at Discovery while I happily flush. I love the fact that there's a Stones album in the men's room (the somewhat treacly, unStonesy Flowers album, a cut and pasted U.S.-only release, rather than something a little more authentic and appropriate [the original Beggars Banquet, above], but probably too outre for our customer-friendly environment) while A Flock of Seagulls adorns the women's room walls. Bright and colorful and inoffensive, yes?

But I laugh a little thinking of the hit song from this album, "I Ran."

Of course, if the boss had made me Commode Curator (which assumes the boss is a dolt, which he is far from), things might have turned out a little differently. Cliched as hell, but I would have placed my second favorite cover of all-time, The Who's Who's Next just above the men's toilet.

I'm sure the paper towel dispenser's location there is the only reason why such an artistic statement of purpose was nixed. Also, to speed up any dawdlers in the one-seat men's room while I'm doing a middle-aged male's a cappella dance outside in the hall, I would have placed this baby at eye-level across from the throne:

Okay, so my interior design skills should be contained to a man cave and not allowed to wander freely in public restrooms, but I do believe there is room for common ground, a chance for my all-time favorite album cover to hang inoffensively, even appropriately, in such a setting: Neil Young's amazing On The Beach.

Is there an album cover, or album itself, that sums up not only the malaise of 1974 America but the contemplative nature of man's daily private sit-down better than this? Oh the hours I have spent examining this cover. The flowery umbrella, chairs, and paper cup, the cheap can of beer, the "Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon To Resign" headline on the abandoned newspaper, the discarded boots, the desultory surf, Neil's incongruous electric wardrobe, the long hair, the back to the world hands in pockets despairing shrug stance, and that perfect, half-buried tail fin (which I always thought was a crash-landed UFO)--all of it so casually (un)staged and fitting so perfectly the title song's sad lazy lines: "Now I'm living out here on the beach/but those seagulls are still out of reach" (actually, Neil, there's a flock of them right next door in the women's room). Turn the cover over and the image continues--just a long stretch of sand with a lone potted palm tree, the physical, fauna representation of Neil in full shakey mode. Brilliance.

May your trips to the loo be as memory-stirring and as artistically pleasing as mine at work will now be.