For many years 1978’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town, in my view Bruce Springsteen’s greatest album, was rather underrated. The trouble might have been that it produced no hit single, and nothing as exuberant as Born To Run on the preceding album of the same name or Hungry Hearts on 1980’s The River. The album’s title suggests an existential sense of alienation, a loss of hope and a ferocious anger, which is reflected in the songs, in their sound and in their words. The hope of Thunder Road on Born To Run gives way to the despondent resignation of Racing In The Streets on Darkness. The guitar-driven elation of Born To Run here becomes the guitar-driven anger of Candy’s Room or Adam Raised A Cain.

In the publicity blurb for the recent release of the de luxe CD/DVD set of Darkness, Springsteen describes the album has his “samurai” record. I think of it as his Scorsese album. Mean Streets, the name of Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film, might have been a great alternative title for Springsteen’s only Carter-era LP. The cover complements the feel of the album perfectly. A tired-looking Bruce stands in what looks like a rather dreary apartment. His dishevelled hair calls to mind Al Pacino in Serpico, his penetrating stare Robert de Niro’s. One almost expects John Cazale to lurk behind the closed blinds, ready to embark on some ill-fated adventure or other (alas, that wonderful actor died on 12 March 1978, exactly a week before the completion of the recordings for Darkness , which begun in October 1977).

Rarely does an album cover condense in one simple photo the whole direction of an album. Photographer Frank Stefanko’s iconic photo of Springsteen did just that – without having heard the songs or knowing what they were about.

Stefanko, who also shot the cover of 1980’s The River, met Springsteen through Patti Smith, who had a big hit in 1978 with Because The Night, one of the many songs Springsteen had recorded for Darkness and then rejected. It was the beginning of a friendship that has survived the intervening three decades. In an interview with the Internet magazine Pitchfork, Stefanko recalls doing a test shoot at his home in Haddonfield, New Jersey.  More shoots followed, but it was that initial session that generated the cover art for Darkness.

Stefanko told Pitchfork that “the original shoot was just done with my perception of how I thought he wanted to look or how I wanted him to look [...] From what I understand, when he looked at the photograph he said, ‘That’s the person that I’m writing about. That’s the person that is the Darkness on the Edge of Town character and that’s what I want on my cover.”

Springsteen recalled the shoot in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian: “He [Stefanko] was a guy who’d worked in a meat-packing plant in south Jersey. He got the 13-year-old kid from next door to hold a light. He borrowed a camera. I don’t know if he even had a camera! But when I saw the picture I said, ‘That’s the guy in the songs.’ I wanted the part of me that’s still that guy to be on the cover. Frank stripped away all your celebrity and left you with your essence. That’s what that record was about.”

In fact, Stefanko, who in 1978 was 32, had owned a camera since he was seven years old, and had been taking photos on a serious basis since the 1960s.

The Darkness photos may seem casual, snapshots taken on the fly. They were, in fact, the product of a long shoot. On the picture used for the cover, Springsteen wears a white t-shirt. On other photos taken during the same session, he wears a black shirt, and then a hideous purple paisley shirt with the leather jacket he wears on the front cover.

“We were trying to recreate these middle America, working class families; guys that were looking for redemption. It could have been done in the 70s or 50s or even the 40s. The idea was that these people transcended time or space,” Stefanko told Pitchfork. “But we were trying to get something to look like an old Kodacolor snapshot. There were a lot of black and white photographs taken in those sessions too which were very striking in their own right. But the idea of this color photograph that could have been a snapshot in somebody’s drawer worked for the album.”

From all that we learn that Stefanko had pretty awful taste in wallpaper in 1978. The new owners of the house took the right decision to paper over it, but neglected to sell scraps of it, thereby missing one of the great opportunities for profiteering from a photographer’s ugly wallpaper.

Read the full interview here.

Last November the great Cover Me blog produced a fantastic collection comprising covers of all songs of Darkness. Visit it here, and marvel at the collection from which I’ve borrowed the 2005 version of the title track by indie band The Winter Blanket, which is very reminiscent of Iron & Wine. Mary Lou Ford’s version is from a very good bootleg recording made at a gig in Moorestown, New Jersey on 8 February 2003. Mary McKee’s version of Candy’s Room is also a live recording, from her 14 May 2003 gig in Stockholm, Sweden. Because The Night, the song Springsteen rejected and gave to Patti Smith, is here in the version from the 1975-85 live collection.

Mary Lou Ford – Racing In The Streets.mp3
The Winter Blanket – Darkness On The Edge Of Town.mp3
Maria McKee – Candy’s Room.mp3
Bruce Springsteen – Because The Night.mp3

…

Previous great covers

* * *

The cover photo of Beatles For Sale is probably my favourite of all Fab Four pics. The lads look as tired (because they were exhausted) as half of the hurriedly compiled album sounds. The photo evokes late autumn, mainly because it was taken at that time of the year during a session in London’s Hyde Park (the LP was released on 4 December 1964). The photographer was Robert Freeman, who shot the photos for four other Beatles album covers: Please, Please Me, With The Beatles, Help! and Rubber Soul

The cover versions: Both covers come from radio sessions at KCRW, recorded in 2003. The Eels version was released on CD on Sixteen Tons (Ten Songs); I don’t think the Dandy Warhols slowed down and quite lovely take has ever been issued on CD.
Eels – I’m A Loser.mp3
Dandy Warhols – Eight Days A Week.mp3

.

Almost exactly a year later, on 3 December1965, the Beatles released another LP, Rubber Soul, with cover art that evoked autumn. I’ve always imagined that on the photo the four were looking down into a well. What actually happened was that photographer Freeman was projecting a series of photos he had taken at Lennon’s place on an LP sleeve-sized cardboard, to give an idea as to how each option would look as a cover. At one point, the cardboard had slipped, and the image was projected at an angle. According to Paul, the Beatles really liked the effect, and asked Freeman whether he could recreate it. As we know, he could. The title Rubber Soul was a pun of a criticism McCartney had heard from an American musician of Mick Jagger, whose singing was described as “plastic soul”. The Rolling Stones almost inspired a much worse pun when the Beatles considered naming their next album, which we know as Revolver, “After Geography”, as pun on the Stones’ LP Aftermath. Happily, sanity prevailed.

The cover versions: There are at least two wonderful remakes of In My Life: that by Johnny Cash on his American IV album (which every human being should own) and José Feliciano’s 1968 cover on the excellent Feliciano! album, a fiesta of outstanding covers (check out his version of Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying). I’m posting the José version. Buddy Rich’s 1967 jazz version of Norwegian Wood is just brilliant, preferable even to the original.
José Feliciano – In My Life.mp3
Buddy Rich – Norwegian Wood.mp3

.

Much as we may take it for granted on account of its ubiquity, I like the Abbey Road cover a lot for its simplicity. It is a great snapshot in time: the particular movement, the way the cars are parked (especially the VW Beetle with its supposedly cryptic license plate), the transience of Paul’s cigarette. I enjoy looking at the photo, imagining the scene at that precise moment. Seconds previously, a car had gone over the zebra crossing — we see the back of it as our four friends parade in single file. The distance of the car to the zebra crossing would suggest that John began leading the guys across the road the moment the car had passed, doing so fairly briskly (George clearly is striding hard to keep up). And in the background, there is a group of people and a single individual (one Paul Cole, a tourist speaking to a policeman in a black van) witnessing the scene with some interest. They surely had no idea that they would feature on the cover of what may be the greatest album of the 1960s, nor probably did the owner of the legs and blue dress we see flying by on the back cover.

The photo was taken on 8 August 1969 at 11:35 by Iain MacMillan, a friend of John and Yoko’s, who stood on a step ladder as he shot the Beatles walking over the zebra crossing twice in both directions. Reportedly a police man stopped the traffic for a short while to let the shoot, all of six photos, go ahead (clearly he stopped the traffic only in the left lane; the sequence shows that as the four cross the road again, they have let a black cab pass as a doubledecker bus approaches). One of the photos, taken before the Fab Four cross the road, shows an old lady approaching the Beatles as Paul fixes Ringo’s collar.

The cover versions: Isaac Hayes did with Something what he did with so many other tracks he covered: taking the song on a musical detour of kinds that the composer never dreamt of before arriving back at the source material. This is no longer George Harrison’s song; it is very much Ike’s. Fans of German curiosities may enjoy Teddy Lee’s Maxwells Silberhammer, in which the singer (who apparently enjoyed a fleeting but not very successful career in around 1970) turns Maxwell into a teenage druggie who robs banks with the aid of the titular tool to support his habit. But not to worry, it eventually turns into the murder song we know and underestimate on Abbey Road.
Isaac Hayes – Something.mp3
Teddy Lee – Maxwells Silberhammer.mp3

.

If I had to pick just one Beatles cover to decorate my wall, it would be that of With The Beatles, the group’s second LP. The photo was taken on 22 August 1963 in a corridor in the Bournemouth Palace Court Hotel, not an establishment generally associated with great moments in rock ’n’ roll. Photographer Freeman was given instruction to recreate the shadow-and-light effect often employed by their Hamburg-days friend Astrid Kirchherr, the girl in whose arms original Beatle Stu Sutcliffe died (see here for Kirchherr’s pictures). Freeman achieved the effect by using natural light coming through a window at the end of the corridor.

Kirchherr never shot a Beatles cover, but her sidekicks Klaus Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer were involved in cover art. Voormann designed the Revolver cover; Vollmer’s photo of Hamburg-days Lennon appeared on the cover of John’s 1975 Rock ’n’ Roll album.

Now seems also a good time to dismiss the story that Astrid Kirchherr “invented” the Beatles mop top style (known in German as Pilzkopf, or “mushroom head”). It was already a hairstyle popular among the art student set (the “Exis”, or existentialists) and sported by Vollmer, whose example the Beatles would follow.

Musically, With The Beatles shows only hints of the impact the group would have on music. Almost half of it comprised cover versions. It was a remarkable album for what it did not include: a single. At a time when releasing LPs as a clutch of singles plus loads of fillers was the norm, the Beatles took a conscious decision not to include their most recent hits, such as She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand, on the album. The gamble plaid off: the album was a massive hit in an age when pop LPs didn’t sell well. So it can be said that the success of With The Beatles helped raise the status of the humble LP. Within four years, the Beatles would release the benchmark LP of the 1960s, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The cover versions: The Rolling Stones were struggling for a first hit when John Lennon and Paul McCartney shared a cab with Stones manager Andrew Oldham and let his group have their song, I Wanna Be Your Man. The Stones recorded it first, so the Beatles technically covered their own composition. The Stones had their first UK Top 20 hit with it, reaching #12. During the Stones’ version’s 12-week run in the charts, the Beatles spent seven at #1, with She Loves You and its successor at the top spot, I Want To Hold Your Hand. The present version of All My Loving comes from that opinion-splitting film Across The Universe, of which I am not a fan. Sturgess version starts off quite nicely in a capella, then turns into a bass-driven exercise with a decent instrumental interlude. One of the better moments from a soundtrack that includes my friend Bono singing — oh, but of course! — I Am The Fucking Walrus. The tosser.
The Rolling Stones – I Wanna Be Your Man.mp3
Jim Sturgess – All My Loving.mp3

.
More great covers

The message of the cover of Curtis Mayfield’s 1975 album There’s No Place Like America Today is unambiguously direct: the American dream is a lie when there is so great a disparity in the experience of comforts among Americans. The happy, white middle-class family is symbolically running over the (mostly black) poor on their way to a promising future. Curtis Mayfield, always the most eloquent political spokesman among the soul men, is calling bullshit on the great American delusion. Note also how the billboard serves as a front — a physical barrier as well as a tool of propaganda — for the capitalist palaces and at the same time shields them from the poor in the welfare queue. It’s also striking that the Rockwellian billboard image recalls the 1950s, while the welfare line evokes the Great Depression, communicating the notion that the great lie and the divide between American affluence and poverty transcends generations.

The cover illustration was by the artist Peter Palombi, whose striking airbrush art decorated many living room walls, magazines — including a 1974 cover of the Rolling Stone (right) — and album covers (such as Eddie Harris’ This is Why You’re Overweight, George Benson’s Breezin’, The Ventures’ 10th Annversary Album, I.O.B.’s Impact Of Brass) in the 1970s and ’80s. It was based on a photo by Margaret Bourke-White taken in 1937 in the aftermath of the Louisville floods (see the photo here; thanks to Colin and Stephan for referring me to the pic). Note how the mother in the photo is smiling; in the cover art she looks positively pissed off; at American male chauvinism perhaps?

Released in 1975, There’s No Place Like America Today coincided with the winter of exhausted inner city discontent that followed the hot, heady days of the civil rights era, Malcolm X and Black Panthers. Like his more freestyling contemporary Gil Scott-Heron, Mayfield articulated the frustrations and doubts of African-Americans, liberated from American apartheid but not from prejudice and racism and economic oppression. But the album is not a political tract; rather, it delivers potent social commentary – the fate of Superfly gangster Billy Jack in the set’s funkiest track, the triumph of egotism over communal aspirations in Hard Times (written in 1969 and first recorded by Baby Huey, but prophetic in its anticipation of the 1980s mindset), the lingering pain of oppression in the melodically lovely When The Seasons Change, a call for (black) solidarity in Love To The People, the exhausted sorrow in Blue Monday People…

Even when Mayfield seems to leaven things with a gospel number, it is within the context of social anguish which Mayfield proposes can be redeemed only through Jesus. The solitary love song, the beautiful So In Love, is an oasis of tranquillity in this wasteland of despondency. It may seem a random inclusion, but it isn’t — love, honest and faithful, offers relief from and sustenance in an unjust society. In the context of There’s No Place Like America Today, the love song is not an exercise in banality (with Curtis, it rarely was anyway) but a profound statement.

Curtis Mayfield -  So In Love.mp3
Curtis Mayfield -  Billy Jack.mp3

.

More album covers

Ira and Charles Louvin (whose real surname was Loudermilk) were hugely popular country/gospel artists in the 1950s. Elvis Presley was a huge fan, and his mother Gladys ranked the siblings as her absolute favourites. The brothers were of contrary character: Charles (who at 82 is still recording and performing, having supported acts like Cake and Lucinda Williams on tour) was easy-going, kind and tee-total; Ira a highly-strung, ill-tempered alcoholic. Elvis had just released his first single when he got a gig supporting Hank Snow at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. At country music’s Mecca, he ran into the Louvin Brothers and made it a point to gush at his heroes the way fans tend to. Ira, inebriated (and not with the spirit of the Lord) reportedly brushed him off, saying that he had no interest in talking to “a white nigger”. As noted, Charles was the charming one.

Were it not for the artwork on the cover of Satan Is Real, the Louvin Brothers might well have been forgotten outside the circles of their ageing fans and assorted country aficionados, despite their enormous influence on the genre, on Elvis and Johnny Cash, and especially on harmonising acts such as the Everly Brothers and Gram Parsons’ various platforms. The Byrds covered The Christian Life, from Satan Is Real, during Parsons’ stint, though his voice was for contractual reasons overdubbed. Parsons also turned the Rolling Stones on to the Louvin Brothers — sadly for fans of irony, that was just after the release of Sympathy For the Devil — among other country acts.

The iconic cover, we should not be surprised to learn, was Ira’s idea. In the photoshoot, set in a rock quarry, the 3,7m (12 ft) Satan was made of plywood, built by Ira himself, and his furnace which the Louvins are cheerfully dancing away from, was created from burning kerosene-soaked tyres. In the age before Photoshop — the blue screen of the still image — they actually had to pose before the flames which nearly engulfed them as all hell started to break loose when the overheated rocks started exploding and the fire started to go out of control.

The brothers’ contrast in temperament find expression on the cover. They may be dressed in identical white suits of Christian purity and pink shirts (as popularised by Ira‘s “white nigger”), but where Charlie looks positively angelic, Ira gurns almost demonically as he contemplates with terror how he may be destined to sup with Lucifer one day.

The grotesque cover and the bombastic title suggest that the sound of Satan Is Real should be as trite as a 3-D image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Well, yes and no. Of course, the lyrics are for a great part traditional fire and brimstone stuff with little reference to the finer points of progressive theology. Sinners are Ira and Charlie’s compadres in the wicked world, and to the enlightened brothers the friendly thing to do is to kick their friends’ sinning arses to the nearest Pentecostal church where they can repent. Nonetheless, the lyrics are delivered with sincerity, and whatever self-righteousness there may be is accompanied by an acknowledgment of their own sinfulness.

But the music lover will likely not turn to the Louvin Brothers for counsel in the dogmatic realm. They’ll tune in because the music is great. Now and then a spell of kitsch sets in — Ira’s spoken sermon in the title track, for example — but then one listens to the harmonies. Hell, these good ol’ boys sure could sing! For sanctimonious country kitsch, Ferlin Husky is your go-to man; the Louvin Brothers were consummate country harmonists and musicians (Ira’s mandolin-playing too is exquisite).

Two of the tracks address the problem of alcoholism, referring with not too much of a subtle touch to drunkards, of whom Ira was one: The Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea (a cover of the Carter Family song) and The Drunkard’s Doom. In a cruel twist of irony, Ira and his fourth wife, Ann, died in a fiery car crash after being hit by a vehicle operated by, you guessed it, a drunken driver in Williamsburg, Missouri. At the time, a warrant of arrest was out for Ira — for drunk driving.

The Louvin Brothers – Satan Is Real.mp3
The Louvin Brothers – The Christian Life.mp3
The Byrds – The Christian Life.mp3

.

More album covers

Josh Rouse marked his 30th birthday in 2002 with an album inspired by the year of his birth. It might easily have turned out as a pastiche of the worst clichés. Happily, it didn’t: the sound is contemporary. Rouse evokes rather than recreates what he imagines were the sounds of 1972. Imagine the concept as the subtle but essential spice in a delicious meal. The album borrows its influences wisely: James, a song about alcoholism, is a psychedelic soul workout, with Jim Hoke’s excellent jazz flute and Rouse’s falsetto positioning the song closest to 1972. Elsewhere, swirling strings and saxophone (also by Hoke), handclaps and Latin percussions serve as a marker for the ’70s influence being filtered through Rouse’s sound.

People of my age, who were little kids in ’72, are likely to associate the era with sunshine (it never rains in nostalgia, except when rain was a reason to feel good). The album, and especially the title track, captures that summer feeling; a sound of sunny carelessness even when the lyrical subject matter is heavy.

While musically 1972 is not a work of retro recycling, the cover is an artful facsimile of early ’70s sleeve art. The colour scheme — yellow, brown, light-blue, orange — could work only in the ’70s; the curves and variety of groooovy and sensible typefaces; and the tracklisting on the front cover are a true throwback; and the pic of Rouse, with the cap, completes a faithful recreation of 1972, all the time remaining just on the right side of overcooking the retro concept (which in less skilled hands might have included a platform boot here and an Afro there).

The album is one of my favourites of the decade; the cover one of my favourites of all time (even if the chat-up line in the otherwise excellent Under Your Charms is breathtakingly cheesy).

Josh Rouse – Sparrows Over Birmingham.mp3
Josh Rouse – Under Your Charms.mp3

.

More album covers

How many albums are there which bear the name of one of the artist’s most epic song which does not appear on it? Winter In America, the song, made its appearance a year later, on 1975’s The First Minute Of A New Day album, written at the decree of one Peggy Harris who created the artwork on the inner sleeve, and who believed there just should be a song called Winter In America.

Winter In America the LP is so consistently brilliant, it does not suffer from the absence of a title track. It was originally supposed be titled Supernatural Corner, the name of the painting on the cover and an allusion to a haunted house which Scott-Heron and Jackson had shared in Washington, DC (on the corner of 13th Street, #1 Logan Circle, fact fans). As an album title, it would have evoked nothing of the lyrical bleakness in most of the songs. When the putative title was dropped, so was a song by that name.

Inner sleeve artwork by Peggy Harris

The title Winter In America is an eloquent metaphor of the United States in 1973/74, a time of oil crises, Watergate and Nixon, financial turmoil, urban decay, the absence of inspiring leaders in the mould of the assassinated Martin Luther King Jr, Robert F Kennedy and Malcolm X, and the continued alienation of African-Americans a decade or so after the heady the days of the civil rights movement. In the liner notes, Scott-Heron explains: “Winter is a metaphor: a term not only used to describe the season of ice, but the period of our lives through which we are travelling. In our hearts we feel that spring is just around the corner: a spring of brotherhood and united spirits among people of color. Everyone is moving, searching… We approach winter, the most depressing period in the history of this industrial empire, with threats of oil shortages and energy crises. But we, as Black people, have been a source of endless energy, endless beauty and endless determination. I have many things to tell you about tomorrow’s love and light. We will see you in Spring.” And if this sounds too much like hippie-talk, Scott-Heron provocatively adds: “In the interest of national security, please help us carry out our constitutional duty to overthrow the king.”

The huge black canvas which frames the jazzy, vibrant colours of the crookedly pasted Supernatural Corner illustrates the contrasts that run throughout the album: the desolate, righteous anger contrasting with moments of joy. The contrast finds expression also in the songs. The exquisitely furious proto-rap H20 Blues (which may make the first reference in pop to Ronald Reagan) has the listener laughing and cheering and seething and taking up imaginary arms to usher in an overdue revolution which would overthrow “King Richard” Nixon and the rotten system he represented; while the beatific and tender Your Daddy Loves You speaks of marital problems, overcome by a shared loved for a little daughter (it ought to be the anthem for every parent).

Supernatural Corner, the artwork, was created by one Eugene Coles, at the commission of his old university friend Scott-Heron. The collage depicts urban decay in lively colours — it has the unmistakable feel of African art – which communicate at once chaos and hope. And grooving on the right is Brian Jackson, the wonderful jazz flautist, himself.

My copy of the LP has long been lost, which is a pity because apparently it is quite rare. The cover was of very sturdy cardboard and, if I recall correctly, the disc was one of those thick vinyl records that were more common in the ’50s and ’60s.

Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson – H2O Blues.mp3
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson – Your Daddy Loves You.mp3

.

More album covers

Edit on May 21: And welcome to visitors coming here from The New Yorker, which flagged this post today.

In fact, it isn’t even whipped cream the nice lady is covered in, apart from the dollop on her head. Dairy products are not popular among photographers as these have a strange way of melting and going off under the hot lights. So the vaguely Mexican-looking model going by the widespread Latin name of Dolores Erickson, is in fact enveloped in shaving cream. You wouldn’t know it from the photo, but the beautiful, Seattle-born Dolores was three-months pregnant at the time. Then 28 years old, she had been a model for 13 years. And she boasted the title of her hometown’s “Miss Longshoreman” on her resumé.

Dolores had been an old friend of Alpert’s. For the photo-shoot, by the art director Peter Whorf who paid her the going rate $1,500, she wore a strapless bra and chiffon (to complement the shaving cream). At one point, the story goes, her bra slipped a little, as Whorf kept on shooting. The resulting pictures were tame by today’s standards, Dolores would later say. Still, she hid them from her very conservative husband so as not to upset him. In such a culture, the eventual LP cover (which at first Alpert didn’t like) must have seemed nearly obscene.

This was not her first or last LP cover. Dolores puts the number of her album cover appearances at 17, though only four are normally referred to by name. These include the LP sleeves of Nat King Cole’s The Touch of Your Lips (1961), The Sandpipers’ Guantanamera (1967), and Cy Coleman’s Piano Witchcraft (1963). Today, Dolores is an impressionist painter living near Seattle.

When Whipped Cream And Other Delights was released in 1965, truly innovative cover art was a nascent phenomenon. So it is not particularly astonishing that the cover of Whipped Cream, like many of its near contemporaries (almost every Beatles album to start with) has been widely parodied, with mixed results. Find imitation covers (including a rather disturbing one involving tomato sauce) at The Beauty of La Musique, one of my favourite blogs.

Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass – A Taste Of Honey.mp3
Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass – Love Potion No. 9.mp3

.

More album covers

When the Mamas and the Papas’ If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears album was released in early 1966, the two mamas and the two papas were still sharing a house, a situation which soon changed after Michelle Phillips was caught having an affair (or in Michelle’s version, a one-night stand) with Denny Doherty. The story goes that when the photographer was at the group’s communal house to shoot the cover pic, the lively four decided to play a game of hide-sand-seek with him. As they were hiding in the bath, the photographer opened the door and snapped the winning image. The subjects’ facial expressions on the photo give no clue that the story might be apocryphal.

The positioning is remarkable. John Phillips, on the far left, was married to Michelle. At that point Michelle had her affair (or secret exchanges of affection) with Denny. Meanwhile, Cass was in unrequited love with Denny, a life-long love that would never be romantically reciprocated. Note that Michelle is lying in Denny’s arms, her boots metaphorically directed at her husband. And poor Cass is putting on a jovial face when surely she would want to be the one in Denny’s arms.

As noted, at the time the album came out, Michelle and Denny (who was deeply in love with her) had not been caught out yet. So the story that John wrote Go Where You Wanna Go as a bitter commentary about Michelle’s tryst with Denny is not correct. It is, however, inspired by a previous extra-marital affair Michelle allegedly had conducted. So here he has his wife crooning about her inability to exercise fidelity. Eventually, John expelled Michelle (one of the most gorgeous women in pop ever) from the group, after her affair with the Byrds’ Gene Clark, but soon took her back.

John was not above punishing his bandmates in lyrics. The line “…and nobody was getting fat except for Mama Cass” in Creeque Alley on the Deliver LP was particularly cruel on Ms Elliott, who suffered life-long self-esteem and, indeed, romantics problem owing to her obesity (in the end, rapid weight-loss possibly contributed to the heart attack that killed her in 1973). Cass, whom John didn’t want in the group in first place and whose stardom he resented, sang the line with breezy gusto. Deep down it must have hurt. Likewise, having Cass and Denny dueting on a song about unrequited love titled Gad To Be Unhappy, with the line, “Like a straying baby lamb with no mama and no papa, I’m so unhappy” seems like a calculated insult quite in keeping with John’s character.

But romantic intrigue isn’t what the cover of If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears is famous for. Its notoriety derives from the depiction of – gasp – a toilet. Soon, the toilet would be covered with an overprint and/or stickers advertising featured hits and awards won. A later cover simply cropped the picture closer to eliminate the bog (see The Gentlebear). It is bizarre to think that a humble toilet, by then standard issue in most American homes, should have posed such a threat to the moral susceptibilities of a nation which was pretty tolerant of atomic testing, McCarthyism, racial violence and other such sordid activities.

It must be said, however, that the state of the toilet does not hint at meticulous housekeeping standards chéz Mamas & Papas. Perhaps the guardians of American sensibility were more concerned about the effect the cover might have on the nation’s proud housewives, now at risk of corruption by Cass and Michelle’s slovenly disregard for brush and bleach (they would not, of course, hold the lazy guys accountable).

The Mamas and the Papas – Go Where You Wanna Go.mp3
The Mamas and the Papas -  I Call Your Name.mp3

.

More album covers

Line up Smiths covers — LPs and singles — and you’ll get a quite lovely gallery of photographic character studies, of people well-known and obscure. Some might be described as homoerotic, but I reject  its generalised (mis)application, as meaningless, misleading and, indeed, homophobic. Suffice it to say that The Smiths had no hang-ups about featuring attractive young men on their covers. The individual on the cover photo of Hatful Of Hollow, taken by Gilles Decroix, is one Fabrice Colette, who is sporting a tattoo of a drawing by the French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau.

As we know, The Smiths were beloved by students. The cover design hints at the slapdash quality of the amateur designer, with the band featuring the title and the artist’s name’s legend pasted on skew, and the 6pt letraline rule not centred. The shoddiness, which may or may not have been deliberate, adds to the non-corporate, Indie charm.

On the original cover — the one I would hang on my wall — the photo of Colette is inset to a blue, almost cyan, background. When the album was re-released in 1987, the blue background was ditched, and the image cropped — minus the Cocteau tattoo. Happily, the horizontal alignment of the type remains skew, albeit less conspicuously than on the original. The look of the reissue cover is more in keepoing with the style of subsequent Smiths cover art — and yet I prefer the big blue frame of the original cover, clumsy design and all, as a reminder of how fresh, raw and unspoiled by expectations The Smiths were in those early days.

.
The Smiths – Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.mp3
The Smiths – Hand In Glove (single version).mp3

More album covers

Chaos, confusion and commotion were exactly at work in the scene the image captured. It was taken in a Catholic neighbourhood of Belfast in 1971. The British government had just announced that “suspects” could be indiscriminately detained without trial at Her Majesty’s pleasure, leading to people fleeing their homes in panic (other versions of the event speak of evictions). Among them was Anthony O’Shaughnessy and his brothers, seen in the photo which was first published to illustrate a news report in London’s Evening Standard. While the guy in the denim jacket urgently leads a boy away, Anthony defiantly stares into the camera. In the midst of a tense buzz, he looks detached, almost cool.

Emerging from the trauma of such upheaval, and the longer agony of The Troubles, one might expect O’Shaughnessy to be a bitter man. Apparently not: now in his early 50s, he is evidently a man of peace ready to forgive those who were on the other side.

The Dexys cover appeared without O’Shaughnessy’s knowledge. Legend has it that some time later he turned up at a Dexys gig with a big cardboard cut-out picture of himself.

[Edit: Anthony has responded to this post in the comments section. Thanks, Anthony.]

.

Dexys Midnight Runners – Burn It Down.mp3
Dexys Midnight Runners – I Couldn’t Help If I Tried.mp3

More album covers