I recently shared the interior filming location of Diane Evans’ apartment. Before finding that location, I was on a different quest that begin shortly after the original airing of Part 7 in mid June 2017 on Showtime. Being a long time collector of vinyl albums, I immediately recognized the blue-hued square propped against the wall as a vinyl album. But which one was it?
I first took several images of the album cover using my phone’s camera. I searched Google Images using the small grainy image but couldn’t locate a match.
Considering the apartment’s decor has a mid-century modern vibe and Lynch included Dave Brubeck’s music in Twin Peaks, I thought it could be a jazz album.
I searched “album covers of the 1950s” where I discovered the Birka Jazz Archive. Not kidding, I scrolled through nearly every page on the site attempting to find a match. No luck.
Additional searches included, “turquoise album covers,” “1950s jazz album covers,” and a variety of record label names from the time period. Again, no matches found. Searches like this continued periodically throughout the remainder of summer and into fall.
All of this changed on December 5 when I picked up my copy of Twin Peaks – A Limited Event Series on Blu-ray from Best Buy around 5:05 p.m. The first thing I did upon arriving home was look at Diane’s apartment in Part 7. By 10:26 p.m., I found the album!
The image clarity of the Blu-ray disc greatly improved my ability to see the album cover. It wasn’t jazz … it was classical!
Released in 1953 on Columbia Masterworks, the album was Ravel / Debussy, Budapest String Quartet – Quartet In F Major / Quartet In G Minor, Op. 10.
The mid-century modern album cover was designed by Rudolph de Harak (1924-2002). He opened his own design company in 1952 and created hundreds of posters, record covers and book jackets including more than 300 covers for McGraw-Hill.
I believe de Harak’s design, not musical content of the album, was the primary reason the album cover was included in Diane’s apartment. That shade of blue mixed with modern art design was the perfect addition to her color palette.
By December 8, I had a copy of the album that I easily found on eBay for about $16.
