The cover of Canon Canyon’s 10-inch vinyl release Sit Down and Listen (October, 2008) shows a torn, empty couch flanked on both sides by guitar amps.  A picture of John Wayne hangs on the wall beside a stuffed, crazed-looking bear.  A guitar, a small lamp, a model sailboat and a beer bottle complete, but somehow don’t complete, the scene.  A weird yellow light pervades. 

It’s an arresting shot, for reasons I don’t quite understand.  Maybe it’s the college-house feel, reminiscent of my own younger days.  Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of Duke and the bear with the flaccid sofa and beer – frontier meets frat, manifest destiny meets modern-day entropy.  Maybe it’s the amplifiers and their suggestion of latent power, and the guitar-as-rifle leaning at the ready.  Maybe it’s the vacancy.  Or maybe it’s the sailboat.  (That’s escape, right?)  Or maybe it’s just the light.

Whatever it is, it’s unusual and wonderful, and it wouldn’t translate to iTunes or even to CD.  Only on vinyl — only on the cardboard canvas of a record jacket — can one fall in love with an album before even hearing a track.

On the insert is the same picture, only now with two guys on the couch.  They are David Bilbrey and Mike Cooper, members of Canon Canyon and founders of Rural Wolf Records, a Tacoma indie label that does what the majors just can’t seem to — advance the sanctity of the hardcopy album while embracing the digital future.

“Records are cool,” says Bilbrey.  “They have their own sound and mystique.”  Still, “Some people can only listen in the car on the way home.”

The solution?  Sit Down and Listen comes with a wallet-size download card, as do recent vinyl releases by Lozen and Destruction Island, also on Rural Wolf.  Printed with a reverse of the album’s cover shot, the card’s message seems to be, “The same thing, only different.  Two sides of a coin.”

The music industry could learn a lot from Rural Wolf.

In the publishing industry, which shares the recording industry’s woes, modest independent presses — McSweeney’s, most notably — are surviving (even thriving) by crafting beautiful books that people want to hold, display, caress, and conspicuously read at Starbucks.  Meanwhile, McSweeney’s titles are also available for download on Kindle.  The formula has McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers being hailed as a visionary. 

Let me be the first to hail Bilbrey and Cooper.

Of course, I’m reaching.  And why not?  These days, to be a writer writing about music is to live in a state of uneasy suspension — a professional and personal limbo in which the past seems never to completely pass and the future seems forever around the next bend, resurrection and demise equally imminent.  On the bad days (like today) you feel utterly unmoored and confused and you find yourself at your computer late at night with a whiskey, blinking madly, thinking that when things get really bad you can always go back to building houses, except that industry is tits up too.  On the good days (like today) you look at people like David Bilbrey and Mike Cooper and feel awed by the possibility disruption creates. 

When I met Bilbrey and Cooper at Puget Sound Pizza for breakfast recently, they sat side by side on a padded bench, Bilbrey on the left and Cooper on the right, just like on the insert, only different.  Eating eggs, laughing — sunburned Cooper wearing a greasy cap — it was clear they don’t see themselves as industry saviors.  Just two more soldiers in the dude revolution.  

“The original idea was to put on big shows and put the profits from the shows into the label,” says Cooper.  “We sold beer.  We sold hotdogs.”

“We just want to put out our own bands, our friends’ bands, bands we like,” says Bilbrey.  “We just want to break even.”

Breaking even is the new profit.  And Rural Wolf is the new frontier.

[Hell’s Kitchen, Canon Canyon, The Minus 5, The Joshua Cain Band, James Hilborne & The Painkillers, Friday, July 17, 9 p.m., $10, 3829 Sixth Ave., Tacoma, 253.759.6003]