Before he became just about the most important person in the world in the 1960s, Andy Warhol made a living as a graphic designer. He did a whole slew of album covers and, as is well known, a good many book jackets as well. Often he enlisted his mother to write the scrawled text, as we saw in this delightful mock cookbook from 1959, her handwriting was his secret weapon until he made the silk screen his signature medium of choice.
For most of these albums, he was responsible for the drawing if not necessarily the layout. In the case of the Monk album above, we know it’s his mother’s handwriting and he may not have done the layout, so it’s unclear exactly how much credit he should get, but then again, that was more or less his method at The Factory!
Count Basie, s/t, 1955
Kenny Burrell, Volume 2, 1956
Kenny Burrell, Blue Lights, 1958
Artie Shaw and His Orchestra, Both Feet in the Groove, 1956
Frank Lovejoy, Night Beat, 1949
Jay Jay Johnson, Kai Winding, and Bennie Green, Trombone by Three, 1956
Moondog, The Story of Moondog, 1957
The Joe Newman Octet, I’m Still Swinging, 1956
Cool Gabriels, s/t, 1956
Johnny Griffin, The Congregation, 1957
Various artists, Progressive Piano, 1952
For an exhaustive look at Warhol’s cover art go to this site http://rateyourmusic.com/list/rockdoc/andy_warhols_record_cover_art/1/
Great list, of course. But the link to the “Tromboone by Three” cover goes to the wrong version of the cover art! The one you link to was by MAD magazine’s illustrator Don Martin, not Warhol. See my list at http://www.rateyourmusic.com/rockdoc for the correct one.
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Good point. My link goes to Amazon which only has the Don Martin cover (if you want to buy the album).Your link is very good and informative. Obviously it is impossible to buy 16 r.p.m. records now and they were pretty rare in the 50s and 60s. The format went the way of many things into oblivion. Mind you I imagine the sound quality wasn’t great, but an interesting piece of history. Thanks.
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Thanks for the correction.
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