86. Elton John - Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy

Flickr Download DeviantArt

This work is derived not from the original album cover art design but from the album's promotional poster that came with the album, released in 1975. Icons on the bottom left and bottom right of the

original image have  been removed and portions  on the sides have been extended with the use of the Liquify filter.  The contrast and brightness  were the adjusted and the whole image was stretched

and sharpened with the use of Crosshatch.

Folded at centre with the artist's name added at lower right and without the calligraphy at the bottom,  the original poster served as the album's  gatefold cover.

The album cover art by Alan Aldridge  features images of Elton John,  Bernie Taupin and the band (animated  elements of the artwork were used in a 30-second  television commercial  celebrating the

release of the album).  The front panel shows Elton breaking out of a dangerously dreary cityscape astride his piano while the back of the cover shows Bernie writing in a somewhat  protected pastoral

bubble. Keen-eyed fans can also identify Elton’s first music publisher Dick James and Bernie’s then-wife Maxine in the intricate illustration. www.eltonjohn.com

Bruce David Janu on The Vinyl Voyage: "When I was a kid, I used to check out record  albums from the public library. I was perusing  the LP bins one day and came

across Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.  At the time I was perhaps 10 years old and knew nothing about Elton John,  other than the crazy outfits and

sunglasses he wore.  

Anyway, I checked out Captain Fantastic not because it was Elton John, but because the cover was so awesome. Although I hadn't yet been exposed to Hieronymus

Bosch, the cover must have been influenced by the paintings of the 15th century artist.  When I studied art in college I remember looking at The Garden of Earthy

Delights and immediately thinking of Captain Fantastic.  Like Bosch, the cover to Captain Fantastic is filled with other-worldly creatures: birdmen, naked bodies,

giant fish, men carrying large timepieces, creatures pooping gold. The only thing missing from the Elton cover is a man playing a flute out of his ass.

Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy came out in an era when album art mattered and bands spent a great deal of time and energy making the album art

part of the entire experience.  The packaging was almost as  important as the contents.  First, the introduction of compact discs diminished album art importance

and the evolution  to digital  completely killed this  time-honoured tradition.  The art of Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy  could never be shrunk to a

small LCD screen. Indeed, an album like Captain Fantastic would not even be produced today."

This is the original poster art.

www.gottahaverockandroll.com

This is the original album front cover.

No. 158, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 173, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000.

Original album art design and poster by Alan Aldridge. Album produced by Gus Dudgeon. MCA (USA), DJM (UK) 1975.

Written, according to lyricist Bernie Taupin, in chronological order,  Captain Fantastic is a concept album that  gives an autobiographical  glimpse at the struggles John (Captain Fantastic) and Taupin

(the Brown Dirt Cowboy) had in the early years of their musical careers in London (from 1967 to 1969). The lyrics and accompanying photo booklet are infused with a specific sense of place and time

that would otherwise be rare in John's music. John composed the music on a ship voyage from the UK to New York.

"Someone Saved My Life Tonight",  the only single released from the album  (and a number 4 hit on the US Pop Singles chart),  is a semi-autobiographical  story about John's disastrous engagement to

Linda Woodrow,  and his related 1969 suicide attempt.  The "Someone" refers to Long John Baldry,  who convinced him to break off the engagement rather than ruin his music career for an unhappy

marriage. It was viewed by Rolling Stone writer Jon Landau as the best track on the album: "As long as Elton John can bring forth one performance per album on the order of 'Someone Saved My Life

Tonight', the chance remains that he will become something more than the great entertainer he already is and go on to make a lasting contribution to rock." wikipedia

(A) Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy - Tower of Babel - Bitter Fingers - Tell Me When the Whistle Blows - Someone Saved My Life Tonight

(B) (Gotta Get a) Meal Ticket - Better Off Dead - Writing - We All Fall in Love Sometimes - Curtains

"We All Fall in Love Sometimes" live from blog.naver.com/mvez on YouTube.

              

    

www.eltonjohn.com

Previous: Patti Smith - Horses

Next: Queen - A Night at the Opera

Back to Gallery 3

71. Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms

Flickr Download DeviantArt


British music journalist Robert Sandall wrote: "Looked at now with 20/20 vision of hindsight, the image on the sleeve of Brothers in Arms seems uncannily prophetic: that National steel guitar

heading up into the clouds — a shiny six-stringed rocket devoid of any obvious means of propulsion — describes,  better  than any words can, what happened to Dire Straits after the release of

their fifth studio album. Up till the summer of 1985 success had, for them,  come as a by-product of the music making process.  They had never courted celebrity, chased fads, or played safe.

Dire Straits  had been  loved and respected  as one of the  few bands to  have maintained  strong and credible  links with the  multifarious  roots of rock and roll at a time — remember all the

desperate pop posing of the early 80s? — when roots were  emphatically not a  fashionable place to be." Source

The guitar featured  on the front of the album  cover is Mark Knopfler's 1937 National Style 0 Resonator  photographed by Deborah Feingold. The Style 0 line  of guitars was introduced in 1930
and discontinued in 1941. 


Sometimes I couldn't avoid from relating the resonator guitar to Mark Knopfler's guitar playing in "Money for Nothing." "That guitar again," I'd say to myself while watching MTV. And of course,
it was a Gibson Les Paul. Mark plucked it instead of picked it. The music  was essentially rock. Rock on MTV. The year was 1986.


 Here's the original album cover art design.

No. 11, Billboard, The 300 Best-Selling Albums of All Time; No. 219, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000; No. 352, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

No. 50, Music Radar, The 50 Greatest Album Covers of All Time.


Design by Sutton Cooper, Photo by Deborah Feingold. Album produced by Neil Dorfsman & Mark Knopfler. Vertigo (UK), Warner Bros. (US) 1985.


Brothers in Arms was one of the first albums to be directed at the CD market, and was a full digital recording at a time when most popular music was recorded on analog equipment. It was
also released on vinyl  (abridged to fit on one LP) and cassette.  It was the first album to sell one  million copies in the CD format  and to outsell its LP version.  A Rykodisc employee would
subsequently write,  "[In 1985 we]  were fighting to get  our CDs manufactured  because the entire  worldwide  manufacturing  capacity was overwhelmed  by demand for a single rock title
(Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms)." Source


(A) So Far Away - Money for Nothing - Walk of Life - Your Latest Trick - Why Worry

(B) Ride Across the River - The Man's Too Strong - One World - Brothers in Arms

"Money for Nothing" Dire Straits with Eric Clapton live at Knebworth from Eagle Rock on YouTube.

            

  

direstraits.org

Previous: Little Richard - Here's Little Richard

Next: Natalie Cole - Unforgettable

Back to Gallery 3

70. Little Richard - Here's Little Richard

Flickr Download DeviantArt

People called  him the architect  of rock and roll.  He claimed that as a child he felt feminine and played with girls.  In 1984 he told Charles  White that he was "omnisexual." In 1995, he told
Penthouse that he always knew he was gay. In 2007, Mojo magazine described him as a "bisexual alien". Source


 Little Richard's (Richard Wayne Penniman, b. 5 December 1932) most celebrated work dates from the mid-1950s, when his dynamic music and charismatic showmanship laid the foundation for
rock and roll. His music also played a key role in the formation of other popular music genres, including soul and funk. Little Richard influenced numerous singers and musicians across musical
genres from rock to  hip-hop;  his music impacted the rhythm  and blues era for future generations to come,  and his performances and headline-making  thrust his career right into the mix of
American popular music. Wikipedia


"I came from a family where my people didn't like rhythm and blues," Little Richard told Rolling Stone in 1970.  "Bing Crosby, 'Pennies From Heaven,' Ella Fitzgerald was all I heard. And I knew
there was something that could be louder than that, but didn't know where to find it. And I found it was me." Richard's raucous debut collected singles such as "Good Golly, Miss Molly," in which
his rollicking  boogie-woogie piano and falsetto  scream ignited the unfettered possibilities of rock & roll.  "Tutti Frutti" still  contains what has  to be considered the most inspired rock lyric on
record: "A wop bop alu bop, a wop bam boom!" Rolling Stone

No. 50, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 525, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000.

Information wanted for original album art design concept and photo.

Album produced by Bumps Blackwell. Specialty 1957.

Little Richard had been making records for four years before he rolled into Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studio in New Orleans and cut the epochal "Tutti Frutti" in the fall of 1955, but everything

else he'd done faded into insignificance when Richard wailed "A wop bop a loo mop a lomp bomp bomp" and kicked off one of the first great wailers in rock history. In retrospect, Little

Richard's style doesn't seem  so strikingly innovative  as captured in 1956's Here's Little Richard - his boogie-woogie  piano stylings weren't all  that different from what Fats Domino

had been laying down since 1949, and his band pumped out the New Orleans backbeat that would define the Crescent City's R&B for the next two decades, albeit with precision

 and plenty of groove.

But what set  Richard apart was his  willingness  to ramp up the tempos and turn the outrage meter up  to ten; "Tutti Frutti," "Rip It Up," and "Jenny Jenny" still  sound outrageous a half-

century after  they were waxed,  and it's difficult  but intriguing  to imagine  how people must have  reacted to Little Richard  at a time when African-American  performers were 

expected to be polite, and the notion of a gay man venturing out of the closet simply didn't exist. Mark Deming in AllMusic

(A) Tutti Frutti - True, Fine Mama - Can't Believe You Wanna Leave - Ready Teddy - Baby - Slippin' and Slidin'

(B) Long Tall Sally - Miss Ann - Oh Why? - Rip It Up - Jenny Jenny - She's Got It

"Tutti Frutti" live from MoondogMayne on YouTube.

            

  

  

"I am done."

Previous: Blondie - Parallel Lines

Next: Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms

Back to Gallery 3

67. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Déjà Vu

 Flickr Download DeviantArt

On this work I tried different techniques to make the picture really old. I did this maybe two months before I posted this photo on this blog. I can't remember all of the techniques  as
well as the sequence in which I applied them. No matter how faded it is, to me the songs will always be remembered. I was in college when this album became a hit in the Philippines.  

Stephen Stills, who is a Civil War buff, wanted the cover to look like an old photo from that era, the 1860's. So, to get the look, the band went to a costume store to get outfits 
that looked 19th century. Stephen himself got a Confederate army uniform. Crosby got a "Buffalo Bill" Cody outfit. Dallas Taylor got a gun-slinger outfit, and the rest of the guys 
(Neil Young, Greg Reeves, Graham Nash) rented kind of a mish-mash of cowboy outfits.

In order to make the record cover look like an old-fashioned Civil War-era keepsake photographic album, Stephen Stills asked the photographer to take the photo with an old 
wooden box camera similar to the one used by Matthew Brady, the great Civil War photographer. In that era, over 140 years ago, it took over two minutes to capture the 
image onto a glass plate negative, so the band posed without moving for that long. As they did, a dog wandered into frame and became immortalized.

Actually, the experiment with the box camera didn't yield a good enough photo for the cover, so they ended up using a 35-mm photo, taken during the 2.5-minute pose, instead, 
but printed with a "Fox Talbot" photo technique from the 1850's to give it a vintage look.


This is a version of the old photo and the present-day tree as put together by my friend and colleague Dolf van Stijgeren who runs the CSNY fan site, 4WaySite.




The cover was shot in 1969 in the backyard of David Crosby's rental house in Novato, California, about 30 miles north of San Francisco. Bob Egan

Here's the original album cover art design.

No. 75, Rate Your Music, The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 106, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000;
No. 147, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 165, Billboard, The 300 Best-Selling Albums of All Time.


Art direction and design by Gary Burden, photo by Thomas O'Neal (formerly Tom Gundelfinger). Album produced by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Atlantic 1970.


Déjà Vu was greatly anticipated after the popularity of the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album and given the addition of Neil Young to the group. Stephen Stills estimates that 
the album took around 800 hours of studio time to record; this figure may be exaggerated, even though the individual tracks display meticulous attention to detail. The songs,
except for "Woodstock", were recorded as individual sessions by each member, with each contributing whatever was needed that could be agreed upon. Young appears on only
half of the tracks, and drummer Dallas Taylor and bassist Greg Reeves are credited on the cover with their names in slightly smaller typeface. Jerry Garcia plays pedal steel on 
"Teach Your Children" and John Sebastian plays harmonica on the title track. Full article

(A) Carry On - Teach Your Children - Almost Cut My Hair - Helpless - Woodstock

(B) Déjà Vu - Our House - 4 + 20 - Country Girl - Everybody I Love You

"Our House" live from Hugo L on YouTube.

            

  

www.csny.com

Previous: Grateful Dead - Anthem of the Sun

Next: All Hull - Pipedream

Back to Gallery 3

66. Grateful Dead - Anthem of the Sun

Flickr Download DeviantArt

The Anthem image is certainly an offspring of the social and cultural, exploration, and changes of the 60s. Anthem's foundation and roots however, reach back many years before. During the 60s, I was
much less concerned about rebellion and revolution, than with seeking out what peoples had in common and what brought balance, harmony and contentment to our lives. As I saw it, the first step was
to determine what personal changes of understanding and being were needed in order for me to achieve this state within myself. In other words, to expand my mental and emotional space in order to
embrace it all. This attitude, and being unburdened by either gods or demons (I had reached the 'age of reason' relatively young), led to open personal and artistic exploration, and the assimilation
and generation of whatever ideas, imagery, symbolism, and techniques I felt best represented this understanding in its most expansive context.

Anthem was a synthesis of diverse, distant and dissonant ideas, and modes of thinking about and relating to oneself and the world. The image incorporates elements that draw from not only Eastern and
Western art and ideas, but from man's earliest artistic expression as well. For me, Anthem represents a resolution of some of these apparently contradictory elements into a state of balance, harmony
and rhythmic unity. Expressed within a tight symmetrical structure where controlled energy and wildness can not only abide together but complement, intensify and give greater import to each other.
After all, the world is not delineated in just black and white, but is composed of a varied and rich palette of colours. Bill Walker in Anthem: The Walker's Guide.


Here's the original album cover art design.

No. 288, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 376, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000.

Art design by Bill Walker. Album produced by Grateful Dead and David Hassinger. Warner Brothers/Seven Arts 1968.

On the Grateful Dead's Anthem of the Sun the studio with its production work dissolves into live performance, the carefully crafted is thrown together with the casually tossed off, and the results are

spliced together. The end product is one of the finest albums to come out of San Francisco, a personal statement of the rock aesthetic on a level with the Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxters.

To be sure, the album has its weak points, but as a total work it is remarkably successful, especially when compared to the first Dead album. Full article

(A) That's It for the Other One - New Potato Caboose - Born Cross-Eyed

(B) Alligator - Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)

"Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)" audio from David Berger on YouTube.

            

  

www.dead.net

Previous: The Doors - The Doors

Next: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Deja Vu

Back to Gallery 3

65. The Doors - The Doors

Flickr Download DeviantArt

The original album cover art design is a large photo of Jim Morrison and the rest of The Doors (Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore) combined in a relatively smaller image plus the familiar
calligraphy that many have rendered as one of rock music's most famous logos. It is positioned at right on the image above. Jim appears to be gazing at the distance while the rest of the band have
their eyes on the camera. My processing involved the use of the Cutout and Craquelure filters.

It might be difficult for the younger generation to understand why such imagery had focused so much on Jim Morrison. I couldn't find a better explanation than an article from the September
19, 2009 interview of Bob Heimall, who designed the cover of The Doors 13 album, released in 1970. The article goes:

"Consider, then, what it might have been like to produce an album cover for a band like The Doors – a band that fascinated their legions fans in a variety of thought-provoking (and often
outrageous) ways. Incorporating the moods and sensations produced by Jim Morrison’s lyrics and poetry (and sexually-charged on-stage antics) with the band’s superb musicality and
then taking into account the expectations of a world-wide fan base, this particular Art Director’s output would ultimately be measured on many levels. 

You need to understand that, by this time, The Doors had in effect become "the Jim Morrison Band", with Jim getting all the publicity and notoriety - he was truly one of the 
new "Rock Idols". However, the rest of the band members wanted as much credit as Jim - and they really should have, because of their respective and combined talents -
but the Doors' fans, the press and paparazzi remained focused in on Jim.

When they saw what I created for the cover, though, they were all blown away! Right then, all were in agreement that it should be used as their first "Best Of" album
cover.  The Doors absolutely loved the cover, and I was told later by Jac Holtzman - the owner of Elektra Records - that Jim later came into his office and told
Jac to "take care of me" as I was very talented!" Full article

No. 33, Rate Your Music, The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 42, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time;

No. 46, The Virgin all-Time Album Top 1000; No. 194, Billboard, The 300 Best-Selling Albums of All Time.

Photo by Joel Brodsky, calligraphy by Art Chantry. Album produced by Paul A. Rothchild. Elektra 1967. 

In 1967 at his New York studio, Joel Brodsky created what have now become the most recognisable portraits of Jim Morrison - capturing the self styled Lizard King

at the peak of his physical and artistic powers. The Doors were poised to release two magnificent albums that year, their self-titled debut, The Doors, and,

to many ears, their finest album, Strange Days. ‘Iconic’ is an overused word in the context of celebrity portraiture, but is bang on the money when used

to describe Joel’s famous portrait. Joel Brodsky’s photographs appeared on the covers of The Doors first two albums, and subsequently on The Soft

Parade and many Greatest Hits compilations. More

(A) Break On Through (To the Other Side) - Soul Kitchen - The Crystal Ship - Twentieth Century Fox - Alabama Song (Whisky Bar) - Light My Fire

(B) Back Door Man - I Looked at You - End of the Night - Take It as It Comes - The End

The Doors "Light My Fire" live In Hollywood Bowl from GilGarBal on YouTube.

            

  

www.thedoors.com

Previous: Badfinger - Ass

Next: Grateful Dead - Anthem of the Sun

Back to Gallery 3

Deviations from Select Albums 3, Gallery

This page contains 32 of 32 images. Click on the image to view large.

1  2  3  4  5