Jellyfish was an Nineties power pop band influenced by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Queen. They had a fervent cult following but never broke through to the mainstream.
I guess the cover of their second and final album, Spilt Milk, somehow didn’t appeal to record-store browsers…
Here the cover artist remembers the process of creation:
“I can’t remember where the little girl came in, but I do remember the casting call from hell. It’s very uncomfortable to put out a call requesting lots of young girls in ballet tights and tiaras, knowing full well you’re going to chose the saddest and most pathetic one you can find… I shot the studio interior first, then the little girl. We tried everything to make her cry, but in the end, used glycerin for her tears, although I know mine were real.”
It’s known as “minimalism” and it’s a very clever concept, especially in this case. Their last full studio album, “Sgt. Pepper,” was perhaps the busiest album cover up to that point,* so it was smart to go in the extreme opposite direction.
The design was iconic, revolutionary, and extremely sophisticated. It may seem less so now, but only because it is so iconic.
*Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine were that way. Too.
The cover and title (The Beatles) of the “white album” were a statement that the band had reached a level of success where they only needed their name on a record to sell millions of copies. It also came out in the aftermath of the “bigger than Jesus” kerfuffle and perhaps the band wanted to show that just like the unadorned Gideon Bible (referenced in “Rocky Raccoon”) they didn’t need any more than two words on the cover and no pictures to end up in the hands of the masses.
And I’m pretty sure the album originally had no words on the front. I remember being surprised by “The Beatles” type on later versions (embossed, then printed in grey), and thinking “Oh, some record exec felt like no one would know about The Beatles or the well-known, nay, iconic, album. So they had to dumb it down and label it.”
Oh it’s great. Maybe if you’re grooving off “Moonchild” it might be jarring, but apparently Greg Lake had no idea what to name “Twenty First Century Schizoid Man” until the painting was unvieled before them (which was done just before the damn thing had to get right to press). (Lizard being KC’s coolest cover)
The cover is one of the greatest, the perfect illustration of “21st Century Schizoid Man” that starts out the album and King Crimson’s career (The back cover perfectly illustrates the album’s title song).
One of my first Covid masks was based on that cover. I work at a college, and one of the students recognized it immediately. This was an album that came out in his grandparents’ generation and still stuck in his mind. That’s the very definition of great album art.
It really is iconic, and I’m saying that as someone who is mostly indifferent (but on the favorable side) to King Crimson. (I did get to see them once about twenty years ago – they played an outdoor show about 1/3 mile from where I was living at the time in Budapest. Great fun, and pretty intimate crowd for an outdoor performance.)
I’ve often wondered whether the cover of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band album The Roaring Silence (aka Waiter, There’s A Yawn In My Ear) was inspired by that cover.
I’m too lazy to look if anyone else has mentioned this one, but Ron Nagle’s 1970 album Bad Rice is top-notch in terms of writing, performance, and production but has such a god-awful cover that it is no wonder that it sunk like a stone into the pool of obscurity.
I’m 63, and at this point in my life I’ve acquired approx 50% of my music without ever seeing the cover art. (And for comparison probably never saw any existing official video accompaniment for 65% or higher, and most of that after I’d already acquired the music).
I would think that the ratio for album art, at least, would be even worse for younger folks. I mean, I come from an era where one acquired music by going into a store and buying the physical album. Vinyl, originally, then (somewhat overlapping) cassette tape, then CD. But do you younger folks who download the music you’re interested in ever see an album cover? Why would you? Or do you fetch it as part of the download? Just curious how you experience it.
Where have you been acquiring your music from? I’m not familiar with all the places people buy/stream music from nowadays, but the ones I am familiar with typically display album art.
Well, streaming services usually display the front cover, but only a small lo-res image, and I don’t know any service where you can see the whole album art, with back cover, inner sleeves and liner notes. That’s a pity because technically this would be so easy, but obviously it’s too much effort/cost.
Hey Now Hey is not considered one of Aretha Franklin’s best albums, but she released it around the peak of her career, and it includes “Angel,” one of her most transcendent songs.
Imagine giving the Queen of Soul an album cover like this. The Atlantic Records art department must have been a chain of fools.
