O P I N I O N
BOOMER LIFE
by Annette Kurman
You may recall that several months ago I expressed my desire to create a calendar featuring my favorite album covers. I covered January, February, and March. Now it’s time to showcase April, May, and June!
I do have a disclaimer: although I may love a particular album cover, which doesn’t mean the band on the vinyl is a favorite of mine. (Although most are.)
APRIL: Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
Even 50 years after its release, this album’s visual remains a pop icon; you can find it on T-shirts and posters today.
It was inspired by a photograph of a prism with a beam of white light projected through it and emerging in the colors of the visible spectrum that creative team member Storm Thorgerson found in a 1963 physics book as well as an illustration by Alex Steinweiss, the actual inventor of album cover art. The final artwork was created by English art design group, Hipgnosis, that specialized in creating album cover art.
Hipgnosis offered a choice of seven designs for the sleeve; all four band members agreed that the prism was the best.
“There were no arguments,” said Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters. “We all pointed to the prism and said, ‘That’s the one’.”
The design depicts a glass prism dispersing white light into colors and represents three elements: the band’s stage lighting, the album lyrics, and the request for a “simple and bold” design. At Waters’ suggestion, the spectrum of light continues through to the gatefold. Added shortly afterward, the gatefold design also includes a visual representation of the heartbeat sound used throughout the album.
Have you looked at the prism’s colors lately? Indigo is missing! If you learned the colors of the spectrum using the acronym Roy G. Biv, you may have realized that. The light band emanating from the prism on the album cover has six colors, missing indigo, compared with the usual division of the visible spectrum into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
The Dark Side of the Moon was produced at Abbey Road Studios in London, England, released in 1973, and still stands as one of the most successful commercial recordings of all time In the U.S., the album has spent more time on the Billboard 200 album chart than any other release in modern history, selling 45 million copies worldwide.
But, did you know that proceeds from the album helped fund Monty Python and the Holy Grail? As Pink Floyd members often spent their down time watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus in Britain, when the comedy troupe ran into money issues with the movie, the Floyd, flush with money from Dark Side sales, they were more than happy to give up to 10 percent of the film’s budget.
Said Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam recalled, “There was no studio interference because there was no studio; none of them would give us any money. This was at the time [British] income tax was running as high as 90 percent, so we turned to rock stars for finance. Elton John, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, they all had money, they knew our work, and we seemed a good tax write-off. Except, of course, we weren’t. It was like The Producers.”
MAY: Nirvana ‘Never Mind’ (1991)
The image of an innocent baby swimming toward a dollar bill on a fishhook is one of the most instantly recognizable in music history. Kurt Cobain conceived the idea after watching a TV program on water births.
After stock footage of underwater births was ruled out by the label, a compromise was reached, and they went for the swimming option. However, the label was unwilling to pay the $7,500 for the stock image of a swimming baby — so they created their own.
A photographer was dispatched to a pool to photograph four little swimmers, with the dollar bill added afterward.
According to Joe Taysom, Far Out Magazine music editor, the album cover is a stroke of genius. “It perfectly summed up the societal expectation to spend your entire life chasing money from the moment you come out of the womb, all the way up until the day that you end up in the casket. It was a theme that ran throughout the band’s work and the cover, therefore, acts as an extension of the LP it holds.”
“Okay, throw the baby in the pool now.”
With those words, uttered by photographer Kirk Weddle, 4-month-old Spencer Elden was on his way to fame (though not fortune) as the baby on the cover of Nirvana’s chart-topping album, Nevermind. You know the picture: “The little fella is submerged in chlorinated depths, his baby penis protrudes beneath his chubby tummy, and his arms are outstretched in that ‘please pick me up and carry me out of the store’ kind of way. Inches away, a dollar bill on a fishhook tempts him.”
It was Spencer Elden who was the naked baby on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind. He has a great pick-up line with the ladies: “Want to see my penis . . . again.” In a 2007 interview with MTV, Elden said, “It’s kind of creepy that many people have seen me naked.” “I feel like the world’s biggest porn star.” His parents were paid just $200 for the session, but Elden has been paid more than that a handful of times to recreate the famous photo. He wears a bathing suit for those, though.
As an adult, Elden sued the bad over alleged “commercial child sexual exploitation.” After his complaint was dismissed, a second amended complaint sought damages for what Elden called “lifelong loss of income earning capacity, loss of past and future wages, past and future expenses for medical and psychological treatment, loss of enjoyment of life, and other losses to be described and proven at the trial of this matter.”
The lawsuit alleged that Elden was sexualized because the image of the naked baby grabbing at the dollar bill made the baby resemble “a sex worker.”
MAY: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
Another iconic album cover is the cover of the Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Originally conceived as a photo showing the outfitted Beatles playing in a park amid a crowd of fans, the concept evolved into what it became, where they are standing in their Sgt. Pepper costumes amid cutouts of their personally selected heroes.
The cover image was created by Jann Haworth and Peter Blake, (winners of the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts, for their work on it.).
“I suggested that they had just played a concert in the park. They were posing for a photograph and the crowd behind them was a crowd of fans who had been at the concert. Having decided on this, then, by making cut-outs, the fans could be anybody, dead or alive, real or fictitious. If we wanted Hansel and Gretel, I could paint them and they could be photographed and blown up. I asked the four Beatles for a list, and I did one myself.”
Both John and Paul gave Blake their list, while George suggested only Indian gurus, while Ringo said, “Whatever the others say is fine by me.”
Those lists included Jesus (he was cut from the cover due to Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment years before”), Hitler; (who was actually in the set-up, but is covered by the Beatles, themselves, as it was felt he was too controversial), Gandhi (over concerns that India wouldn’t print the album; a palm frond replaced the image of him sitting under a palm tree.), and actor Leo Gorcey, known from his roles in the Dead End Kids, The East Side Kids and, as an adult, The Bowery Boys.
Gorcey wasn’t included because he requested $500 ($4,200 in 2024 dollars) to use his likeness; bad decision. Mae West initially refused, asking, “What would I be doing in a lonely-hearts club band?” After a letter explaining the concept, she agreed to be included.
The only people from the cover still living are Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, and Dion DiMucci (Remember Dion and the Belmonts? “The Wanderer?”)
Notable by his absence is Elvis Presley, who, Paul McCartney later said, was “too important and too far above the rest to even mention.”
What else is on the cover?
The Beatles‘ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has a widely recognized album cover that depicts several dozen celebrities and other images. The image was made by posing the Beatles in front of life-sized, black-and-white photographs pasted onto hardboard and hand tinted.
Who’s Who on the cover:
- (Top row) Mae West, Lenny Bruce, W.C. Fields, Fred Astaire, Bob Dylan
- (Second row) Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Stan Laurel, Karl Marx, H.G. Wells
- (Third Row) Marlon Brando, Lewis Carroll
- (Front row) Shirley Temple, Albert Einstein, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Shirley Temple
Not only a groundbreaking design for the time, but the artwork also broke the bank, costing almost £3,000 ($3,900) to create – well over £50,000 (64,300) in today’s money and more than any other pop album sleeve at that time.
Did you realize the album cover includes eight Beatles? It, of course, the Pop-Edwardian clothed Beatles gathered around a grave. Said TIME, “ Look closely and you’ll find four wax dummy Beatles as most people remembered them when they first came on the scene: “Nicely brushed long hair, dark suits, faces like sassy choirboys,” TIME observed. “The other four Beatles are very much alive: thin, hippie-looking, mustachioed, bedecked in bright, bizarre uniforms. Though their expressions seem subdued, their eyes glint with a new awareness tinged with a little of the old mischief.”
As for the grave in the foreground? It has THE BEATLES spelled out in flowers trimmed with marijuana plants. Who knew? Will I didn’t; I was in seventh grade when the album came out.
So who was Sgt. Pepper? I know that is one of the remaining questions you have. According to Paul McCartney, he recalled saying ‘Think of names.’ “We (Beatles road manager Mal Evans) were having a meal, and they had those little packets marked ‘S’’ and ‘P’ for salt and pepper. “We had a little joke about it, and I said ‘Seargeant Pepper’ just to vary it…just playing with the words.” McCartney added “Lonely Hearts Club” to the end of the album title, “because why would a Lonely-Hearts Club have a band?”
Use a cool interactive tool to look at everyone on the cover? Check it out here.
The album cover was summarized by TIME: “With characteristic self-mockery, the Beatles are proclaiming that they have snuffed out their old selves to make room for the new Beatles incarnate, and there is some truth to it.” TIME declared in its Sep. 22, 1967, cover story on how the rock band was revolutionizing pop music. “Without having lost any of the genial anarchism with which they helped revolutionize the lifestyle of young people in Britain, Europe and the U.S., they have moved on to a higher artistic plateau.”
Annette Kurman can be reached at annette.kurman@gmail.com
