The New Album Art
Andy Warhol created a new fine art style by painting the labels of Campbell’s soup cans and other masterpieces of American commercial packaging.
Neither Warhol nor Campbell’s ever managed to improve on the screaming ugliness of the tomato soup label. But pop art has turned on everybody to seeing all kinds of everyday things —– soup cans, detergent boxes billboards –— in an entirely new way: as potential art works. At the same time, a flood-tide of new artists is turning out work for commercial purposes which has all the independence and power traditionally restricted to the museum and gallery scene. Art with a capital A is going out of style, and the rigid wall between fine art and commercial art is ceasing to exist.
Nowhere is this happening more dramatically than in album-cover design; record-store walls are becoming as interesting as poster shops and galleries. Everybody suddenly seems hip to what a record jacket is all about.
The standard method of producing an “art” jacket use to be by pasting in a reproduction of some familiar Miro or Picasso; a really far-out art director might even commission an original painting. There were the artsy, soft-focus photographs of Miles or Coltrane ebbing into the deep purple. Another big prestige pitch was to cover the entire jacket with some chic, innocuous design, usually department-store roccoco. These ideas were lavished almost exclusively upon jazz and classical jackets; no one ever bothered dressing up a pop album.
No one seemed to worry about whether a Picasso painting had anything to do with the music inside, much less with the rest of the album cover. And this is the huge difference that is revolutionizing album covers now, especially in the rock field. The best of them begin with the fact that they are album covers — –high-gloss cardboard, with limited color-printing possibilities and a 12-inch-square format that somewhere has to observe such rules of the game as indicating a title and who the artists are– — plus, of course, the label. And they go everywhere from there.
Not surprisingly, some of the biggest pace-setters in cover design have been Beatles albums. Early covers like “Beatles ’65” (Capitol ST 2228) set the style for the formalized group photograph, everyone rigidly posed, looking straight in the camera and holding umbrella staves or guitar necks dead up-right in a severe geometry. The whole idea pokes irreverent fun at the phony “candid,” “live action” poses of standard press-agent photos, exaggerating the carefully posed group picture of 19th-century photography and primitive photographers the world over. The aim is also, of course, what primitive art so often captures without trying: aggressive, penetrating Presence.
Almost every group in the business has come out with an album cover, poster or press picture that represents some kind of variation on the theme —– more rigidly stylized, or more loosely posed in landscape or street settings. Probably the most familiar, for better or worse, is the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow cover (RCA Victor LSP-3766), which has been reproduced all over in posters and press photographs. One of the more successful informal poses is the Mama’s and the Papa’s If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears cover (Dunhill D 50006), showing the group, fully-clothed, inside a bath tub. The idea is carried to a logical conclusion in the cover for John Wesley Harding (Columbia CS 9604) which is simply a polaroid snapshot by John Berg. The top corners are rounded off, and the picture is outlined in white on the flat gray cover layout like a page from an old family album. It has a beautiful graininess, a glare of fresh sunlight and a totally candid, documentary honesty which make it one of the best album cover photographs.
Klauss Voorman’s 1966 cover, Revolver, was one of the first jackets to use Art Nouveau-style graphic work. It reflects a realization that, after all kinds of jackets portraying the Beatles in various close-up poses and, if you didn’t get the point, re-iterating “The Beatles” in big bold letters, everybody knew who the Beatles were and what they look like.
The black-and-white cover reduces the group picture to small-scale photo-collage, nesting in Medusa-like strands of hair that cascade over the Beatles’ stylized, mask-like faces. In a field that is now swamped with covers in every variety of dime-store psychedelic, it is still one of the strongest out.
One of the few other graphic covers that touches it is Jeremy Steig’s own drawing for his album, Jeremy & The Satyrs (Reprise RS 6282, R 6282). Also in simple black on white, it portrays a Bacchanale, or solstice rite, in a web of free, sinuous lines that generate into trees, flowers, figures. The backside also does an imaginative job with the group pictures, using each of The Satyr’s New York cabaret cards next to a picture of some cops making an arrest.
The Beatles’ big leap forward came with the cover for Rubber Soul (Capitol T 2442), still one of the best covers made. Robert Freeman’s Rubber Soul cover is a variation on the formal picture, but subtly distorts the Beatles’ faces into a soft flaw of rippling images, like reflections on the surface of a quiet pool. Their heads are arranged in a dizzyingly undulating semi-circle, which is echoed in the liquid lettering of the title —– the cover’s only use of words, except for an inconspicuous Capitol bug. The fish-eye has been used on covers before and since, but mostly with gimmicky effect. In Rubber Soul, it turns a deceptively quiet composition of brown and soft green foliage into a literal fish eye view, as subtle as the music inside.
The new Beatles’ trend-setter is the Sergeant Peppers’ cover (Capitol MAS 2653), with the group, in bright, bizzare bal costume against a cast of-thousands photo-collage of real and wax-work figures that looks like the crowd scene finale of Fellini’s 8-1/2. It is the diametric opposite of the close-up, formal group photograph (that’s on the inside fold-out, in vivid color) like a surrealistic junk-shop window that yields up stranger treasures the more you look at it. The fresh, outdoor light and garden color emphasize the incongruity like a paste up of Marilyn Monroe in a painting by Theodore Rousseau. The credits are beautifully disposed of: the title, lettered on the bass drum head, and “Beatles” written in flower, in front of a row of cannabis plants.
The Mothers’ wild version of the same theme on We’re Only In It For the Money (Verve V/V6 5045X) is an instance where the parody is almost better than the original, more bizarre without the beauty. 8-1/2 by way of Mad Magazine. The Mothers, in frilly, thrift-shop female garb, are portrayed in grotesque close-up on both sides of the jacket’s outer lining, a counterpart of the Sgt. Pepper inside fold-out. The crowd scene inside is an outrageous conglomeration of transvestite Mothers, plaster figures and a pop collage of famous personages ranging from President Johnson to Hopalong Cassady, the eyes blocked out in “True Detective” style. A lightning bolt crackles through a purple sky and, on the sod beneath, “Mothers” is spelled out in vegetables. The whole production (by Frank Zappa) is a kind of beautiful atrocity.
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