For an enormous chunk of Andy Warhol’s life – from his 1949 arrival in New York by means of the early Sixties, simply earlier than he achieved celeb standing as America’s pop artwork poster boy – he saved the lights on by working as a contract industrial artist. Throughout that interval, he created a ton of album covers.
However even after discovering fame, Warhol saved a hand in album artwork design for the remainder of his life. All through his profession, he designed dozens upon dozens of covers for artists of nearly each style, from cult heroes to superstars. The most effective of these works are worthy of as a lot consideration as some other nook of his catalog.
Let’s have a look at a tiny sampling of Warhol’s most memorable album covers and uncover their origin tales.
Moondog – The Story of Moondog (Status, 1957)
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Louis “Moondog” Hardin was a pioneer of outsider music. Incessantly a road performer, Moondog dreamed up a sui generis mixture of jazz, classical, primal, and avant-garde sounds, typically enjoying devices of his personal design, typically whereas sporting a Viking helmet.
When Warhol was tasked with envisioning the quilt for Moondog’s second Status LP, he drafted the calligraphic abilities of somebody he knew properly and would name upon greater than as soon as: his mom, Julia Warhola. Andy’s inventive items didn’t emerge from a vacuum – Julia had an uncommon, visually putting type of cursive writing. In a transfer uncommon for album designs of the period, Andy made his mom’s hand-written model of the report’s liner notes the primary function of the entrance cowl. The gambit paid off: Mrs. Warhola obtained an honor from the American Institute of Graphic Arts for it.
Kenny Burrell – Blue Lights (Blue Word, 1958)
Nearly all of Warhol’s pre-fame cowl designs had been for jazz information. He created album artwork for Depend Basie, Artie Shaw, Thelonious Monk, Paul Desmond, and extra. However the cowl he got here up with for jazz guitar big Kenny Burrell’s Blue Lights had its roots in an unlikely facet of Warhol’s work for rent.
Warhol had spent years illustrating print adverts for the I. Miller chain of shoe shops. His work for the franchise, showing each week within the New York Instances, earned Warhol a number of Artwork Administrators’ Membership awards. By no means one to overlook out on maximizing a chance, he carried that inspiration over to his artwork for Burrell. The footwear and legs occupying the highest half of the album cowl may have come straight from one in every of Andy’s I. Miller drawings. The quilt proved widespread sufficient that it was repurposed in pink for Blue Lights Vol. 2 three years later.
The Velvet Underground & Nico – s/t (Verve, 1967)
The “banana cover” Warhol created for the self-titled debut of The Velvet Underground & Nico (whom he was managing and nominally producing on the time) just isn’t solely his most well-known album design however one in every of his most generally recognized works in any medium and an iconic piece of 60s pop artwork.
Like Warhol’s career-making Campbell’s soup can, the banana cowl was a part of his agenda for turning on a regular basis pictures into inventive statements. However the unique model additionally had a sexual suggestiveness that matched the VU’s lurid songs of NYC road life. On the album’s first urgent, the peel pulled again to disclose a unadorned, sizzling pink banana beneath. The impact was unsustainably costly, and future pressings had been strictly two-dimensional.
The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers (Rolling Stones Data)
Warhol was all the time aiming upwards, and his cowl idea for The Rolling Stones’ first studio album of the 70s took the suggestiveness of the Velvet Underground album to a different stage. As a substitute of a banana with a detachable peel, patrons of the unique Sticky Fingers had been confronted with a crotch-level shot of a person in tight denims who was clearly, let’s say, dressing to the suitable, and the zipper pulled right down to reveal the underwear beneath it.
As with the Velvet Underground cowl, prohibitive manufacturing prices restricted the particular results to the preliminary urgent. However contemplating that the quilt mannequin was Joe Dallesandro, a Warhol protege greatest recognized for showing nude in Andy’s 1968 movie Flesh, the shock beneath that zipper may have been much more scandalous than it was.
John Cale – The Academy in Peril (Reprise, 1972)
Warhol preferred to discover an idea throughout a number of items (extra on that in a minute), however his cowl for former Velvet Undergrounder John Cale’s second solo album appears to occupy its personal unique territory. Warhol’s die-cut design symmetrically displayed 21 closeup images of Cale’s eyes and 4 of his face, all represented as Kodachrome slides.
The concept nearly had a predecessor – Warhol labored on an identical idea for Cale’s first album, Classic Violence, however it was scrapped when the longhaired Cale had his locks shorn and now not resembled the images Warhol was utilizing. In lieu of charging Cale for his Academy in Peril cowl, Warhol acquired permission to make use of the album monitor “Days of Steam” in his contemporaneous movie Warmth.
Diana Ross – Silk Electrical (Capitol, 1982)
One in all Warhol’s most frequent techniques, particularly in later years, was to show a photograph with an Epidiascope (opaque projector), and use that because the template for a portray. He was reportedly doing it as early as his design for Depend Basie’s self-titled 1955 LP, and over time, he utilized it to album cowl pictures of everybody from Paul Anka to Billy Squier.
One in all Warhol’s only functions of the method was for Diana Ross’s Silk Electrical. A well-liked 1976 cowl photograph of Ross for Andy’s Interview journal, taken by Richard Bernstein, offered Warhol’s inspiration. However the foundation for the album imagery itself was the current photos he’d taken of Ross, who had commissioned photographic portraits of herself and her three younger daughters. The October 2, 1981 entry in The Andy Warhol Diaries reads, “Diana Ross came at 3:00 and she loved all the portraits, she said, ‘Wrap them up,’ and they all fit in the limousine, and she had a check at Bob’s place by 5:00. And she wants me to do the cover for her next album.”
Bibliography
The Lifeless Straight Information to the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed – Peter Hogan
The Artwork of Jazz: A Visible Historical past – Alyn Shipton
The Andy Warhol Diaries – Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett
www.artistsbooksandmultiples.blogspot.com
www.thehistorialist.com
