Music From Monitor

Wide Wide World

Music From Monitor
Alcoa
1960

Apparently a rare promotional record from The Aluminum Company Of America.

According to the jacket notes ALCOA decided that they needed to make "the home-buying and home owning public more conscious of the need for better housing and more willing to invest the necessary funds to obtain better housing." I'm not kidding, this is how it reads.

As a part of ALCOA's project to make people feel horrible about not living in an aluminum sided house... they lunched a radio program in 1959 on NBC called "Monitor". They used this program as a platform for all sorts of "experts" to spew about "housing as they see its problem and its effect on American life."

Man... Fortunately Monitor also featured music to help perk you up from the guilt you must have been feeling for living in a brick house. And some of that music is featured on this LP.

I must admit that ALCOA bought themselves an amazingly cool Space Age/Atomic Age record cover! "Aluminum Music Sphere Designed by Lester Beall for the ALCOA Forecast Collection. Now this is a great use of aluminum! Love it!

The music is not pure space age or as cool as the cover looks but Wide Wide World is awesome sounding along with Sid Bass's How High Is The Moon (a song from this Sid Bass LP). I would call the LP a mix of bachelor pad and easy listening. Overall, not a bad collection with a few dull tracks to give your time to ponder why everything you see in your house is not made out of aluminum.