Cover Art

Want to find out where your favorite New York City album cover picture was taken, and perhaps take your own picture? Check out Bob Egan's PopSpots blog, where he shows the sites, superimposes the album cover on a current photo and describes how he tracked the place down.

Some of the fun is in seeing how much some of the areas have changed, or how their backgrounds have changed, in the time since the original pictures were taken. Skylines look different, new stores replace old ones, some spots get upgraded, benches or ornaments are added or removed, and so on.

Egan is an exhaustive researcher, which leads to some, shall we say, obscure acts as well as better-known ones. In the Central Park section of the site, he features a picture of counterculture musician David Peel, used on Peel's 1972 album The Pope Smokes Dope. My knowledge of music doesn't hit hipster level by any means, but I'm not too bad when it comes to my familiarity with some obscure performers. Still, I had never heard of Peel. After listening to some cuts on YouTube, I can see I didn't miss much.

Although if I ever want to sit in the same spot Peel did when he had his picture taken sometime in the early 1970s, I can. Which is still kind of cool.