Album Covers Research

As far as album covers are concerned, there's arguably none more iconic than The Velvet Underground's self-titled debut. With Andy Warhol as their manager, producer and album artist - the sleeve produced was bound to be something special. Early copies of the album invited the owner to "Peel slowly and see"; peeling back the banana skin revealed a flesh-colored one underneath. At the time of it's release, the conventions of society (particularly in New York) were being challenged more than ever - after dark, transexuals such as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn would gather round Central Park to discuss the struggles of living in a man's world, advertisements and mundane objects were being proposed as pieces of art and more importantly - in a world where idyllic  uniformed bands such as Buddy Holly, The Beatles and The Beach Boys were singing about peace, love and happiness, one band in particular were emerging from the counterculture, rapidly gaining notoriety in the underground scene for its experimentalist performance sensibilities as well as Lou Reed's song writing which often focused on controversial subject matters expressed in many of their songs including drug abuse, prostitution, sado-masochism and sexual deviancy. The Velvet's were a band whose ideals were solely based on deviating from the norm and speaking out for the outcasts of society, with that in mind, the fact that the album cover was created by radical pop-artist Andy Warhol seems particularly fitting. Warhol's actual participation in the album's production amounted to simply paying for the studio time - his fascination with human behaviour, simplicity and objects being stripped down to their most absolute form meant that the album was virtually made up of live recordings from the studio that day - warts and all. Because of his obsession with simplicity, a basic - and perhaps easily copied - print of a banana is an accurate virtual representation of The Velvet Underground - the house band for Warhol's factory. An often repeated statement in the music industry made about 'the banana album' - as it later became known - is that although a mere 30,000 copies of the album were sold at the time, every single person who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band - a legacy which was created not only by the songs and compilation of the album, but also by it's iconic sleeve.

An album cover in particular whose infamous legacy almost exceeeds the recognition for the actual art is Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols. The controversy surrounding it's release was pitiful. London police visited the record company's store branches and told them that if they continued to display images of the cover in their windows then they would face prosecution for indecency under the 1899 Indecent Advertisements Act. Meanwhile advertisements for Never Mind the Bollocks appearing in music papers attempted to politicize the issue, showing newspaper headlines about Sex Pistols controversies that were underlined with the message
"THE ALBUM WILL LAST. THE SLEEVE MAY NOT."


The obscenity case was heard at Nottingham Magistrates' Court on 24 November. When the overseeing magistrate inquired about his line of questioning, the barrister stated that a double-standard was apparently at play and that "bollocks" was only considered obscene when it appeared on the cover of a Sex Pistols album. The prosecutor conducted his cross-examination "as if the album itself, and not its lurid visage, was on trial for indecency". The chairman of the hearing was forced to conclude:

"Much as my colleagues and I wholeheartedly deplore the vulgar exploitation of the worst instincts of human nature for the purchases of commercial profits by both you and your company, we must reluctantly find you not guilty of each of the four charges."

Initially, Nirvana's Nevermind was planned to be named Sheep - an inside joke Cobain created directed towards the people he expected to buy the record. He wrote a fake advertisement for Sheep in his journal that read "Because you want to not; because everyone else is." As recording sessions for the album were completed, Cobain grew tired of the title and suggested that the new album be named Nevermind. Kurt liked the title because it was a metaphor for his attitude on life and because it was grammatically incorrect - which could also be seen as metaphorically representing their raw, unrefined sound.

The Nevermind album cover shows a baby boy, alone underwater with a US dollar bill on a fishhook just out of his reach. The whole image promotes the idea that the entire human race is born with preconceived ideas that allow for the running of a capitalist society - even as innocent, virtuous babies we know to gravitate towards money. According to Cobain, he conceived the idea while watching a television program on water births with Dave Grohl. Cobain mentioned it to their art director Robert Fisher who then sent a photographer to a pool for babies to take pictures. Five shots resulted and the band settled on the image of a three-month-old infant named Spencer Elden. However, there was some concern because Elden's penis was visible in the image. Geffen prepared an alternate cover without the penis - as they were afraid that it would offend people - but retracted the changes when Cobain made it clear that the only compromise he would accept was a sticker covering the penis that would say, "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet paedophile."

The cover art for Is This features a photograph of a woman's nude bottom and hip, with a leather-gloved hand suggestively resting on it. The sleeve has often been seen as a reference to Smell the Glove - the name of a fictional album by the mock heavy-metal band Spinal Tap in the mockumentary film This Is Spinal Tap. The film was so ironicaly accurate about the lives of rockstars that people such as Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Jerry Cantrell, Dee Snider and Ozzy Osbourne all reported that they could perfectly relate to the fictional band. Singer, Tom Waits claimed he cried upon viewing it and Eddie Van Halen claimed that "Everything in that movie had happened to me".

In the mockumentary, the original cover of Smell The Glove, according to recording company representative Bobbi Fleckmann featured "a greased, naked woman on all fours with a dog collar around her neck and a leash, and a man's arm extended out...holding on to the leash and pushing a black glove in her face to sniff it." Fleckmann suggests that the cover is sexist, leading band member Nigel Tufnel to wonder, "what's wrong with being sexy?". The production company, Polymer Records, ultimately refused to release the cover because of pressure from retailers such as Sears and Kmart and gave the album a solid black cover instead. The cover for Is This It was included in the book The Greatest Album Covers of All Time, in which Grant Scott,concluded, "It’s either a stylish or graphically strong cover or a sexist Smell the Glove travesty." Ironically, The Strokes album cover also created a similar amount of controversy. Although British retail chains HMV and Woolworths objected to the photograph's controversial nature, they stocked the album without amendment.
Alike Nirvana, The Strokes deliberately left out the grammatically correct question mark from the album title because aesthetically, "it did not look right". For the American market and the October 2001 release, the cover art of Is This It was changed to a psychedelic photograph of subatomic particle tracks in a bubble chamber. According to the band's manager, frontman Julian Casablancas phoned him before the Japan and Europe release and said, "I found something even cooler than the a** picture." Later though, the band admitted that they changed the US cover in fear of receiving a 'Smell The Glove' reaction from America's conservative retail industry.