albums came a need for eye-catching cover art that telegraphed the
eccentricity of the new rock. In competition with the visionary psychedelic
posters that advertised San Francisco’s music palaces, simple photographs
of band members were no longer sufficiently engaging to attract record
buyers by the late 1960 s. With the art-based collage on the Beatles’
Revolutionin 1966 and the elaborate fantasy photograph onSgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Bandin 1967 , concept album art became a viable
alternative to studio photography. Record company art director/designers
were unleashed to test the limits of conceptual presentation.
The veteran Bob Cato ( 1923 – 1999 ) was among the more
conceptually astute. During ten years as an art director and, subsequently, as
the vice president of creative services for CBS/Columbia Records, working
with such decidedly contrasting musicians as Leonard Bernstein, the Band,
Glenn Gould, and Johnny Mathis, Cato developed or directed the creation
of some of the most memorable record-album covers of the 1960 s. As a
student of and assistant to the legendary art director and designer Alexey
Brodovitch, Cato cut his art directorial teeth on the fashion magazine
Harper’s Bazaar,where Brodovitch had transformed editorial and fashion
design with his innovative mixture of white space, elegant typography,
photography, and modernist art. The former New York Timesadvertising
columnist Randall Rothenberg says that these “were characteristics that
would also define Cato’s own work during the next several decades.”
Many of Cato’s album covers featured his own photography, but
for others he enlisted some of the era’s most influential painters, designers,
and photographers, among them Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg,
Francesco Scavullo, and Irving Penn. But Cato did more than just conceive
and execute album covers. “He was also intimately involved in the
conception and even the naming of the recordings themselves,” says
Rothenberg. One of these was Cheap Thrills.
As was customary at CBS, Joplin came to see him about the design
of her record. Originally, Cato wanted to shoot the group in a fabricated
“hippie pad,” but Big Brother balked at the pretentious set. Instead, both
Janis and Cato agreed that Crumb’s artwork was a perfect way to give the
album a look sufficiently raw to match the music. Crumb worked without
interference. Joplin wanted a title that was synonymous with her life and the
epoch in which she lived, insisting that the album be called “Sex, Dope, and
Cheap Thrills.” Given her soaring popularity, CBS records executives were
tempted to give in. Nevertheless, “the title didn’t seem quite right to me,”
Cato wrote years later in an unpublished memoir. “It said too much, gave
away too much. Besides, even in the 1960 s, the recording business was still a
business, and there was only so much you could get away with.”
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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