Dylan
Milton GlaserBob Dylan arrived in New York in January
1961 at the age of twenty-one. In five years
he produced seven albums and came to
symbolize a generation caught between the
unprecedented consumer prosperity that
followed World War II and the Cold War’s
chilling rhetoric of mutually assured
destruction. The 1960 s generation adopted
Dylan, projecting onto him its collective
hope and cynicism. On July 29, 1966, it was
reported that while riding his motorcycle
on the back roads in Woodstock, New
York, the back wheel locked, and Bob
Dylan was thrown over the handlebars and
seriously injured. Rumors abounded. Some
thought he was dead, and some thought it
was a ruse to cover up a recovery from an
overdose. Whatever the truth, the words
and the music stopped.
After six months without any new
Dylan material, Columbia Records was in
a nervous panic. To fill the gap, Columbia unilaterally decided to issue a
greatest hits album pieced together from previous album cuts. Creative
director Bob Cato and art director John Berg had a dramatic, backlit photo
by Roland Scherman of a closely cropped profile of Dylan playing the
harmonica, his wild hair bathed in a corona of light. Dylan had previously
rejected it as cover art. But because he was in breach of contract, Dylan
could no longer control what his recording studio did.
It was further decided to include a free poster in each new greatest
hits album. Columbia decided to use the Scherman photographic profile on
the album cover, but needed someone to design the poster. The Scherman
profile triggered Berg’s memory of Milton Glaser’s (b. 1929 ) playful and
inventive silhouettes that captured the essence of gesture and content
through minimal means.
The hallmark of Glaser’s work was an aggressive mining of visual
artifacts and archetypes from diverse and unexpected sources. In addition to286