When you think about an album cover, there are a few that might come to mind. One of the most iconic ones out there, though, has to be Abbey Road by The Beatles. The image of the band crossing the street is widely recognizable and has been parodied by everyone, from Sesame Street to Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was taken by Iain Macmillan, a photographer who was introduced to the band by Yoko Ono.
After Paul McCartney did some initial sketching for what the image should look like, they did the shoot on August 8th at 11:35AM, believing it was just publicity shots. Macmillan stood on a 10ft ladder in the middle of the street and took 6 pictures. Later on, because of the time crunch, the art director and album cover designer John Kosh decided to just go with the best of six and ended up with a cover that went down in pop culture history.
What’s interesting about this cover is that it doesn’t have the name of the band or the album written on it. This brilliant decision that was suggested by Kosh was controversial at the time. The people at the record company EMI were very displeased by this idea as they thought they won’t be able to sell any records because of it.
However, the band approved it, and they still went ahead with Kosh’s vision. “It’s one of the biggest bands in the world, you don’t need to actually say who they are—everyone knows who they are, Kosh mentioned when recalling the situation years later. “But it was a major fire. I got threatening phone calls,” he laughed.
Nirvana’s Nevermind is another album cover that is widely recognizable everywhere. A baby swimming underwater and reaching for a dollar bill is quite a concept that instantly appealed to the photographer Kirk Weddle. At the time, he was marketing himself as an underwater photographer and wanted to give it a shot.
Coincidentally, his friends had just had a baby, so he paid them 200 dollars for a shoot in a pool. According to him, it was all very low budget because the band wasn’t well-known at the time and he orchestrated it all by himself. The set-up took an hour and the shoot—5 minutes. He walked away with 25 snaps, confident that he had the winning shot. When looking at the shots later, though, he realized how exposed the baby was.
Afraid that the visible genitalia of the baby might be unacceptable, Weddle set out to get photos of other babies. He took a few pictures of baby girls in a public pool, but the band wanted to go with the initial suggestion. Apparently, the frontman Kurt Cobain suggested that the only acceptable censorship for the image is a sticker covering the private parts that says “If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.” So, the image was released as it was.
The story of the cover image didn’t end there, though. That is because the baby in the photo, Spencer Elden, grew up and started feeling uncomfortable about it. He tried to reach out to people that were in the band and those involved in the production of the album, but didn’t get a single message back. His involvement was quite overwhelming for him.
“[When] I go to a baseball game and think about it: 'Man, everybody at this baseball game has probably seen my little baby penis,' I feel like I got part of my human rights revoked," said Elden when talking to Time magazine about the cover. So, he sued the surviving members of the band, the photographer, as well as Cobain’s estate.
