Adrastos, Album Cover Art, Art, Fog Of History, Music

Album Cover Art Wednesday: Evolution

At the risk of confusing Bobby Jindal, I believe in Evolution or at least the Hollies LP by that name. In 1967, every rock band did 2 things; they paid a visit to the psychedeli and/or released a concept album. Evolution was the Hollies turn at bat, and both the music and the cover are pretty darn good or as the kids said back then groovy, baby.

Here’s what little I was able to find out about the cover:

The cover shown [on Wikipedia] is the US/Canadian cover, which used the same Karl Ferris photograph but differed from the UK cover by dispensing with The Fool’s overall cover design. Instead, the US Canadian cover put The Hollies’ name on the cover in more conventional psychedelic-influenced lettering, placed the album title on the cover in a normal font, and then overlaid a paisley-patterned image to be more consistent with US visions of psychedelia.

Apparently, I was drawn to the original cover. I’ve never thought of myself as an originalist. I hope Scalia doesn’t get any ideas. I have, however, been called a fool, but never The Fool who were the design collective who, uh, designed the LP package. Here’s the cover:

evolution

The entire package was quite evolutionary as it were. But I was only able to find a mediocre scan of a tattered copy of the album’s back cover. I quite like it:

evolution_back

In the interest of completism, here’s the US/Canadian version of the LP cover. It’s still good but much more literal. There were also changes made to the music itself as I will discuss in a moment:

Hollies_Evolution_US_Cover

Posted below is the *original* UK release of Evolution. The hit tune Carrie Anne was added by Epic records as the first track and they omitted the penultimate tune on the UK version,  Leave Me. Capitol did much the same to the early Beatle LPs.  Epic also dicked around with the running order. I prefer the UK edition since it was as the Hollies wanted it, but the whole “let’s omit the single so more people will buy the 45” thing was common then, but deeply silly:

Speaking of said hit song, here are the Hollies rocking the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Dig that crazy set, man: