Queen’s 1977 album News Of The World was a monster hit with a monster robot on the cover. In this instance, the cover art is as interesting as the music.  The Wikipedia entry for the LP is one of the best I’ve run into and it does a fine  job of discussing the artwork and its genesis:

The album’s cover was a painting by American sci-fi artist Frank Kelly Freas. Taylor had an issue of Astounding Science Fiction (October 1953) whose cover-art depicted a giant intelligent robot holding the dead body of a man. The caption read: “Please… fix it, Daddy?” to illustrate the story “The Gulf Between” by Tom Godwin.^[12] The painting inspired the band to contact Freas, who agreed to alter the painting for their album cover, by replacing the single dead man with the four “dead” band members (Taylor and Deacon falling to the ground). The inner cover (gatefold) has the robot extending its hand to snatch up the petrified fleeing audience in the shattered auditorium where the corpses were removed.^[13] Freas said he was a classical music fan and did not know Queen, and only listened to the band after doing the cover “because I thought I might just hate them, and it would ruin my ideas”, but eventually liked their music.^[12]

Since the magazine cover art preceded the LP by 24 years, we’ll start with it:

How’s that for a little taste of Pulp Fiction Thursday on a Wednesday? Here’s the evil robot bothandling the guys in Queen. Brian May is a goner, y’all:

More News Of The World natterings after the break. Guaranteed to rock you.

Continue reading “Album Cover Art Wednesday: News Of The World”

I’ve largely steered clear of photographic album covers thus far. Most of them feature rather pedestrian pictures of a band trying to look wicked awesome and are of dubious artistic merit. Raeanne Rubenstein‘s Pretzel Logic cover is an exception to that rule. My favorite bit is the sign whereon pretzel is misspelled. It’s an apt visualization of Becker and Fagen’s mordant and sardonic wit. They were snarky before the word existed.

Musically, Pretzel Logic saw Becker and Fagen drop their original band mates in favor of working with killer session musicians. They were predominantly a studio band until reuniting in the mid-1990’s The title track is perhaps my favorite Steely Dan numbah.

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We’re still stuck in the Seventies on this feature, which is appropriate as my copy of Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge arrived yesterday. On time and the UPS man actually knocked me up. I mean that, of course, in the British meaning of the phrase…

Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks were an oddity when they burst on the San Francisco music scene. An acoustic band more influenced by Django Reinhart, Johnny Mercer, and Bob Willis than the Beatles. That’s why it clicked so well. The different rocks even when there’s a fiddler involved.

Continue reading “Album Cover Art Wednesday: Striking It Rich”