Icon: Music Through the Lens, episode 3: “On the Record” (Cheese Film & Video, Eagle Rock Film Productions, PBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. I watched the third (of six) episode in the awkwardly titled series Icon: Music Through the Lens, “On the Record,” about the art of the album cover. At times there was an awkward fit between the overall subject of the aries – photography of musical artists, especially rock and rap artists (and naturally my eyes glazed over every time they discussed rap artists because I’m so disgusted with the form, with only minor exceptions) – because many of the most famous and “iconic” (a word that gets thrown around a lot in this series) album covers of all time, from Alex Steinweiss’s pioneering works for Columbia and some other companies in the 1940’s and 1950’s (Steinweiss would seem to be a person you can’t help but mention in a history of the album cover, but with the usual blindness of shows like this to virtually the entire pre-rock history of music, he wasn’t mentioned at all) to records like Pink Floyd’s famous “prism” cover for The Dark Side of the Moon, didn’t use photographs at all. One pre-rock catalogue that did get mentioned was the cover art for Blue Note Records; most of their famous covers were both designed and photographed by the label owner’s junior partner, Francis Wolff. One photographer interviewed for the show suggested Wolff and other photographers who imitated his style of shooting jazz musicians had an advantage in that most of their subjects were Black, and that gave them fewer tonalities with which to work and reinforced the dark, shadowy, chiaroscuro effect of those photographs. It’s a good point but the show’s authors (Dick Carruthers is credited as director but the imdb.com listing contains no writing credits) rather ran it into the ground; anyone who’s ever seen a film noir knows you can photograph white people that way, too.

One cover that came in for particular praise was John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme – an outdoor three-quarter head shot taken by Coltrane’s record producer, Bob Thiele (who seems to have been his closest friend in the final years; when he was dying of cancer the two people with whom he planned his funeral were his wife Alice and Thiele) which, according to Thiele, Coltrane particularly liked because there was nothing “artistic” about it. It was just a head shot that was undistorted and with no attempt to light it for effect, and he thought it was the most honest picture of him anyone ever took. As with so much else in the history of rock as an art form rather than just a piece of disposable pop culture, the real beginnings of rock album covers as art were with the Beatles. The show compared the rather straightforward cover photo of their first album, Please Please Me, with the half-lit portraits of them on their second album, called With the Beatles in Britain and Meet the Beatles in the U.S. Alas, they did not mention Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer they befriended in Hamburg (and who actually married a Beatle, Stu Sutcliffe, when he chose to leave the band and remain in Hamburg to pursue his true artistic talent, painting) and who not only was the first person to photograph them that way but also came up with the Beatles’ hair style. When they started playing in Hamburg they swept their hair up à la Elvis and wore leather jackets and blue jeans; it was Astrid who thought they’d look cooler and more hip if they redid their hair in what was then called “the French style” but later was universally proclaimed “the Beatles’ haircuts.” (Ringo Starr was once asked at one of the many inane press conferences the Beatles were forced to do in the early days, “What about your hairdos?” “You mean hair-don’ts,” he replied, and Paul added, “We were coming out of a swimming pool one day, and we liked the way it looked.”)

A number of the people interviewed for the show said they experience music as much visually as aurally – more than one musician on the show recalled buying an album with no idea of what the music would sound like or whether they’d like it just because the cover looked cool – which I don’t. I felt somewhat at sea when music videos became popular in the U.S. in the early 1980’s because I didn’t like being locked into one set of images when I thought of a song – though more recently I’ve seen Megan Thee Stallion’s appearances on music awards and variety shows (to the extent variety shows still exist) and enjoying the experience (I think it’s the combination of her large size and her sheer athleticism; one doesn’t expect a woman that big to throw herself around like that!) but doubting I’d like her music if I experienced it away from the visuals. (That’s been true of some older, more – shall we say – “iconic” artists like James Brown; the films of his live performances, especially The T.A.M.Il Show from 1965, are astonishing but his records pretty much leave me cold, though I admire the ultra-tight playing he got from his bands, a revelation after I grew up in San Francisco at the height of the “psycledelic” scene in which the bands seemed to be trying to make a virtue out of sloppiness. Still, I think James Brown is one artist for whom “you had to be there.”)

One of the most astonishing stories came from the photographer who shot the cover for the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album, who walked with the band through L.A. until they came upon an old, dilapidated house with a couch on the front porch. He thought of posing the band members on that couch, and the band told him to back away so instead of a close shot of them on the couch they would get the entire house into the frame. They were planning a double-gatefold LP and the back of the house would make a good back for the album cover. Alas, the band hadn’t yet decided in what order their names would come on the album title, so instead of grouping them as Crosby, Stills and Nash, he sat them with Nash, Stills and Crosby, left to right. When the band definitively settled on “Crosby, Stills and Nash” as their name and album title, they and the photographer decided to go back a week later and reshoot the photo at the same house, with the band members in reverse order. Only when they went there the house was simply gone. It had been torn down just a day earlier to make room for an expansion of the parking lot next to it. There’s another story about the British photographer who shot the cover of Lou Reed’s album Transformer; he used an out-of-focus head shot and printed it in high contrast to create the ghostly effect everyone remembers about that cover. Reed figured prominently in the previous episode about live music photography, too; one photographer remembered shooting a sequence of photos showing Reed actually injecting on stage, though according to Reed’s later comments about his drug history – which was considerably less extensive than the myth around him would believe – it’s likely he either faked the injection altogether or shot up a harmless saline solution like the kind used in IV’s. The photographer who shot Reed’s Transformer cover recalled a long-term friendship which began when he was “clean” and Reed was still using, then continued even as Reed went into rehab and got clean and sober, while the photographer had got into drugs himself.

There are all too many discomfiting stories in this series about the photographers partying, drinking and getting high with the bands (unless they’re about people I know personally, drug stories are profoundly uninteresting to me – and given that I’ve lost a lot of friends, including a former partner, to alcohol or drugs my usual reaction to hearing a drug story from someone I do know personally is, “Oh, knock it off already!”) One of the quirkier stories told in the show was the account photographer Lynn Goldsmith gave of shooting the 1979 album cover for the Patti Smith Group’s Easter. There’s an article in the U.K. Guardian in which she calls this the photo of which she is most proud of any she took in her long career (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/12/patti-smith-easter-lynn-goldsmith-best-photograph). On the Icon program she explained that she wanted to move Smith away from the androgynous image of her previous pictures (including the cover of her first album, Horses, taken by her partner at the time, the otherwise Gay Robert Mapplethorpe) and specifically to show that she had breasts – though the most controversial part of the picture was that it showed Smith’s armpit hair. At one point her record label, Arista, had the armpit hair airbrushed off the cover and Smith herself insisted it be restored. In her Guardian interview, Gioldsmith also said she wanted to bring Smith into the world of color – all her previouis covers and publicity shots had been in black-and-white – and that Smith is herself a photographer and visual artist whose works have been exhibited in musea next to Picasso’s.

And one of the last images of this show was the famous solarized head shot of Jimi Hendrix used on the cover of the U.S. version of Electric Ladyland (after Hendrix’ label, Warner Bros., refused to use the photos of naked women that had adorned the cover of the British edition) – though the show didn’t mention who the photographer was: Linda Eastman, who by 1968 had already developed a reputation in the music scene as a talented woman with a camera/ The next year she would marry one of the Beatles and be known for the rest of her life as Linda McCartney. The commentators claimed the “golden age” of the album cover as an art form was between 1976 and 1996 – they didn’t make the point, but it really ended with the coming of first cassettes and then compact discs, which shrunk the cover art so small it could hardly register or make an impact. I remember when Yes reunited for a CD in the 1980’s and commissioned the same painter who’d done their heavy-duty album covers in the 1970’s, Roger Dean – and he was as talented and imaginative as ever, but shrunk from the size of a 12 ½-inch album cover to a 4 ½-inch CD booklet, his painting could hardly have the same impact. Indeed, the show’s commentators suggested that today’s resurgence of interest in vinyl records stems largely from bands who want the larger canvas of an LP album cover to create striking (and salable) images of their records – even though about five-sixths of the market for recorded music these days is digital “streaming,” which doesn’t come with cover art at all!