60 of the Cheesiest Album Covers of the ’60s
A look at the unauthorized “pirate” albums of Taiwan
I MOVED TO CALIFORNIA from my native Northeastern Pennsylvania in June of 1978. I naively believed I would find some semblance of “the sixties” hidden away in San Francisco. But in only a few years, most of it had been blotted out. Oh, there were still a lot of hand-painted Victorian houses and a few hip coffee shops and bookstores. Longhairs still walked the streets and played in the parks. But Baghdad-by-the-Bay had changed since the brief heyday of the hippies.
Through a series of events that might make a good movie, I ended up in the Napa Valley. Needless to say, this was one of the least “hip” parts of Northern California. There I did what every record collector does: I found the used record stores and closest flea markets. Then I hit the garage and yard sales.
Everywhere I went, I found these strange, cheaply constructed albums with covers photocopied from “real” albums. They were counterfeits, manufactured in Taiwan, of legitimate albums from other countries. The Taiwanese had not signed international treaties regarding intellectual property rights.
The sole redeeming quality of many of the Taiwanese pirate albums is that many of them were pressed on bright orange vinyl.
