"Sober--Within Reason"

Once upon a time, record stores were as dignified as the free public library. Popular recordings were stacked in bins, and hardly anybody thought to dignify them by collecting them in albums. Nowadays, pop albums are almost as common as paperback novels. And more and more, they are packaged with the same kind of half-dressed jacket heroines that the reprint publishers have long used to sell paperbacks.

On the current shelves, Victor's Music to Help You Sleep offers such sentimental oldies as Beautiful Dreamer, Love Walked In and several more, with a come-hither jacket picture of a redhead in negligee perched on the edge of bed. Columbia's Dream Time Music by Paul Weston offers Embraceable You, Over the Rainbow, Why Shouldn't I?, etc., with a disheveled, shirtless brunette striding through a misty landscape.

A parallel trend: collections of broody "theme" music, some of it specially composed. Capitol Records has several brisk-selling numbers in this department, one of them entitled The Passions, with subthemes entitled Despair, Ecstasy, Hate, Lust, Terror, Jealousy and Joy. On the jacket: the picture of a lush young woman lost in a mixture of subthemes.

Capitol Records pioneered five years ago with a Hollywood-designed item called Music Out of the Moon. It was about as distinctive as a movie sound track, but it was decorated with a photograph of a half-covered girl and billed as "music that can affect the sensitive mind in a way that is sometimes frightening . . . always fascinating." Its sales exceeded all expectations. After that, most major labels got busy.

Last week Billboard listed Capitol's Music for Lovers Only (produced by TV Funnyman Jackie Gleason) as No. 1 best-selling popular album, leading more sedately covered LPs by such favorites as Doris Day, Eddie Fisher, Eartha Kitt and Liberace. In general, sales of all the gaudily decorated albums are going strong. Record executives take satisfaction in the thought that they are just giving the public what it wants. "We try," says one, "to be sober--within reason."

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