The White Album 50 Project: The Artwork

Oh come on, now, you didn't think I was going to stop writing about the White Album as soon as I finished writing about each individual track, did you? :-D

Almost as soon as the Beatles began recording the White Album, they bandied about different ideas for the title and also for sleeve artwork.  The challenge was to come up with something even more daring and clever than the cover of their previous album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The group had become known for producing bold, eye-catching LP covers, especially from the release of Rubber Soul on, and they were eager to do it again in 1968.  In the early weeks of the sessions, as I wrote earlier on this blog, the Beatles had planned to call the LP A Doll's House, after Henrik Ibsen's play about finding one's own independence, until the Leicester band Family beat them to punch with their debut LP, Music In a Doll's House.  And thank goodness for that, because this is what the front cover most likely would have looked like if the Beatles had been able to stick with the original title.

Dude, this is even more hideous than that album cover showing Sammy Davis, Jr. sporting a Nehru jacket!

For the record (no pun intended), the cover above was designed by John Patrick Byrne, a Scottish playwright and artist who proves here that as a fine artist, he's one hell of a writer.  Though, to be fair, he made out better a decade later with his artwork for the cover of Gerry Rafferty's City to City album.  (Byrne's rejected artwork for the Beatles' double album was used in 1980 for The Beatles Ballads, a compilation LP issued outside the United States.)  

At the time, many rock acts were trying to come up with covers more colorful and elaborate than that of Sgt. Pepper, and the Beatles themselves produced a garish sleeve for their Magical Mystery Tour double EP, showing the Fabs as the Walrus and his Eggmen from the film, that, like the music inside, was mostly a pale imitation of Pepper-style psychedelia.  The sleeve became even more garish when Capitol Records in the U.S. turned Magical Mystery Tour into an album of all of the Beatles' 1967 non-Pepper song releases, listing all the songs on the front cover with a hideous letter font.

It was Paul McCartney, now assuming more of a leadership role in the Beatles in the wake of Brian Epstein's death and the founding of Apple Corps, who took the initiative to get the artwork going.  He'd become acquainted with London art dealer Robert Fraser, who had helped put together the Sgt. Pepper sleeve, and Paul knew many artists through him, one of which was Richard Hamilton.  Hamilton, a generation older then the Beatles, was known for his "minimalist" art.  He reduced objects to their most basic elements, using simple shapes that used order and simplicity to project purity and subtlety.  Minimalist art was typified largely by paintings with mostly one color or sculptures that were no more than basic shapes.  The concept was gently made fun of in the 1969 romantic-comedy movie The April Fools (Catherine Deneuve's first Hollywood film, by the way), in which some of the characters debate whether a piece of art - a tall rectangular sculpture in the shape of a pedestal - makes its own quiet statement . . . or whether there should be something on it.

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"The White Album, Ian - there was nothing on that damn cover!" - Fran Drescher as Bobbi Flekman in This Is Spinal Tap

Well, when Richard Hamilton considered the upcoming Beatles double album in 1968, he proposed that the cover should make, well, its own quiet statement, presumably as a response to the overblown rock album artwork of the time.  He proposed a blank, white sleeve with a title as minimalist as the cover: The Beatles.  It would be the perfect counterpoint to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had a very long title and and had a front-cover photo filled with a cavalcade of faces and decorations.  I don't know if Hamilton heard any of the new songs the Beatles had recorded, but, as with the cover of Sgt. Pepper, the sleeve for the double album would reflect the music on it - simpler, sparse, and virtually devoid of the experimentation of the Beatles' 1967 output.

Paul McCartney loved the idea, but he had to check that there had never been an album simply called The Beatles.  There had been several eponymously titled albums from the group not just in Britain (With the Beatles and Beatles For Sale) or America (Meet the Beatles!, Beatles '65, Beatles VI, and others), but also in Germany (And Now: The Beatles), Mexico (Conozca A The Beatles), Japan (Beatles No. 5), and several other countries.  In fact, the group's name by itself had never been employed as an album title, and so everyone agreed that they should go for Hamilton's idea.

The final sleeve was a blank white space with the group's name embossed in white lettering, at a crooked angle, plus a nice added touch:  Each copy of the first edition of the double set would have its own seven-digit serial number, thus no two copies would be alike and each one would be an individual work of art.  In the United States, a separate set of seven-digit serial numbers prefaced by the letter A (for America) was used.  Ringo Starr got copy number 0000001 - "because I'm lovely!" he explained.  Copy A0000001 was last offered for sale in 2013, while Ringo put his copy up for auction in 2015; it sold for a whopping $790,000.  Subsequent editions of the White Album were printed without serial numbers, and the embossed white lettering of the LP title was replaced by printed gray lettering, though still askew.  (For the thirtieth-anniversary CD re-issue of the White Album in 1998, which I own a copy of, the embossed white lettering and serial numbers were revived.  I have number 0298527.)

Opening the gatefold, one finds on the left the track listing printed in dignified, gray lettering in the Sabon font, each title separated by a colon.  In keeping with the minimalist theme, there's no delineation between the last track on one side and the first track of the next.  To the right are black-and-white photo portraits of each of the Beatles, taken by John Kelly.  That's it, and that's all.  

Until you open the record wallets.

By keeping the cover stark and simple, the Beatles and Hamilton were able to pass the savings onto the fans in the form of goodies cooler than any prize ever found in a Cracker Jack box.  There was the collage poster, of course, which Hamilton conceived before he considered the cover, tacking up photos supplied by the group and then strategically adding white space between them to give them some sort of proportion.  "He explained that this was so the whole picture could breathe," Paul McCartney later said.  "You could see through the density, which was a great idea and gave me my education about negative space."

The pictures included are a curious and revealing look into the Beatles' personal and public lives.  There are numerous Mad Day Out outtakes, stills from the "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" promotional videos, and proofs of their visit to India, as well as a naughty doodle from John Lennon of himself and Yoko - and a very naughty picture of Paul wearing an open robe with nothing underneath, hiding his privates behind a pillar!      

Other notable snapshots include Paul in disguise while traveling abroad in late 1966, John, Paul and George Harrison trying out brass instruments with Brian Epstein looking on, John and Ringo wearing Napoleon hats while in France in 1964, Paul soaking in the bathtub, Ringo posing with Herb Rooney of the pop group the Exciters, with whom the Beatles toured in 1964 (I always thought that was soccer star Pele!), the Beatles with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and even Ringo dancing with Elizabeth Taylor.  And look at John, will ya?  Whom could he be talking to on the phone - and about what - while Yoko Ono sleeps beside him?  The photos, like the double-record set, are sprawling and comprehensive, but their scattered nature betrays the fractured nature of the band.  Consider the pictures in the lower-right-hand corner of the poster; you have black-and-white shots of at least three of the Beatles looking like something is very wrong.  Ringo looks depressed, George looks distracted, and Paul is deep in thought.

Turn the poster over, of course, and you find a lyric sheet.  Once again, the Beatles, even though they couldn't control how people interpreted their songs, were going to make sure that at least the fans would get the words right.  This was the third time the Beatles offered a lyric sheet with a record release, after the Sgt. Pepper LP and the Magical Mystery Tour double EP.  (The American Magical Mystery Tour LP was also issued with the lyrics for the songs from the film of the same name, but not with the words for the supporting singles on side two.)   It would also be the last. As their partnership deteriorated through 1969 and 1970, they couldn't be bothered to include lyric sheets for Abbey Road or Let It Be.

And finally . . . color versions of John Kelly's White Album portraits, suitable for framing.  Of course, these went up on the walls of bedrooms and college dorm rooms all over the world, and John Lennon's picture became iconic in its own right, with his pensive, inquisitive expression.  And I'm sure it led to spikes in sales of granny glasses and denim jackets.

Again, though, the pictures spoke to the disjointed, discordant nature of The Beatles . . . and the Beatles.  They were attached along perforations, but in tête-bêche style; that is, if you tried to display them without separating them, two of them would be upside down.  By the way, why didn't they pose for a group photo?  And did you notice that none of them are smiling?  (There were outtakes showing the Beatles smiling for Kelly's lens, though, obviously, none of them made the cut.  I've already shown a couple of those outtakes in this blog.)  In the spirit of the symbolic title they almost used for the White Album, they were clearly in their own separate rooms while making music in the doll's house that was EMI Studios.  Literally as well as figuratively; sometimes, John and Paul would be working on two different tracks in two different studios at the same time.

The White Album's artwork left as much room for interpretation as the music, but for the most part, the fans didn't analyze it - they took Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph Gleason's advice for approaching pop and just dug it.  High-quality portrait photos, a cool poster with the words to all the songs on the back, and a simple, basic antidote to the pretentious LP artwork then filling record stores (Remember record stores?  They were popular before the days of Amazon and streaming!) were indicative of how the Beatles respected and valued their fans.  Value for money and impeccable taste with the packaging of the music as well as with the music itself show how the Beatles re-wrote the rules for how to sell recorded music.

Too bad those rules have since been re-re-written.