Local designers and artists leave their marks on Knoxville music

by Mike Gibson

In the halcyon heyday of the turntable, the sheer materialistic delight of owning a brand new album owed at least as much to visual aesthetics as to the music itself; it lay as much in gazing awestruck at splashy double-gatefold spreads as in actually spinning the platter and drinking in the myriad analog nuances etched in those fine vinyl grooves.

Remember Ralph Steadman's sprawling, twisted murals on Pink Floyd's double-disc extravaganza, The Wall? Or how about KISS Alive, its wondrous gatefold an iridescent orgy of fire and flash-pot smoke, pointy axes and platform heels, the too-crimson blood fairly dripping from Gene Simmons' vampiric maw into your trembling hands?

Perhaps the perfect paradigm was Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth platter. Its cover depicted an eerie photograph of a gnarled field-laborer tacked to crumbling plaster in a grey urban wasteland; the corresponding inner spread featured a stark black-and-white rendering of a gaunt, oracular figure holding his mystic lantern aloft from a craggy mountaintop—staring, perhaps balefully, at a tiny hamlet far below.

Neither cover nor innards contained title or text—not a single word of explanation. And none was needed. The quiet menace of the imagery seemed to speak the proverbial thousand words.

But somewhere in the queer cultural upheavals of the late 1980s, the cold precision of digital slowly subsumed analog's hissy warmth. Perhaps it pointed to our burgeoning collective preoccupation with economy, space efficiency, and technological dispatch that the LP's expansive cardboard canvas was subsequently compressed to meager jewel-box dimensions. Or maybe it was indicative of the encroaching Information Age that laborious CD/cassette "booklets" and excruciatingly wordy liner notes replaced the vivid, poster-sized simplicity of the album cover.

Whatever the case, thumbing a stack of old LPs today seems almost akin to unearthing a dusty cache of lost da Vinci sketches in some forgotten corner of the Louvre. "Opening the album cover and looking at the art was half the excitement," says local musician and graphic designer Doug Engle. "Now you're stuck with this little plastic box in your hand."

But the fine art of cover design is not yet lost, as a handful of talented local artists will attest. "The big gatefolds of the '70s were very intricate, and there was a certain value to having that extra acreage to work with," admits Cyberflix producer/designer Bob Clouse. "But there's still plenty of room for injecting some creativity into the process."

Clouse recently illustrated cassette covers and fliers for fellow Cyberflix employee Tom Appleton's band, the peppy, pop-savvy power trio Boy Genius, a group which in September signed a contract with New York's Tommy Boy Records. By Appleton's own admission, it was Clouse's striking, overamped cartoonery—the dizzy-headed mad-scientist caricature that has become the band's unofficial mascot—that first caught the eye of Tommy Boy rep Max Nichols and intrigued him enough to listen to their unsolicited demo. With the band now looking ahead to a seven-album deal, the members have asked that Clouse provide illustrations for upcoming CD covers and promotional materials.

"It's cool, because this is something I've always wanted to do," says Clouse, who designed covers and phone-pole fliers for a handful of other local outfits prior to his Boy Genius work. "Album art is really what got me into music in the first place. I grew up a total metalhead in the '80s, staring at these cool album covers from bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. I loved the whole over-the-top, comic book visual aspect of it; there are probably still some desks at my high school in Morristown with my version of Eddie (Iron Maiden's monstrous cartoon mascot) etched in the wood."

Clouse isn't alone in his abiding fondness for the now-classic marriage of music and design; for artists in general, the anything-goes aesthetic of rock art has always held a singular appeal. "When I was in high school in the '60s, I was heavily affected by the psychedelic album and poster art, the Haight-Asbury type stuff," says freelance artist Eric Sublett. "Plus, the idea that you could do these pieces of art that could very easily be distributed to thousands of people appealed to me."

"Music is one of the most open fields for graphic design because it gives you a chance to do some really creative things," says designer Chris Leather, who just happens to work at Metro Pulse. "Other areas of the field tend to be kind of boring and staid. With music, you can take a lot more chances."

Having played drums in a host of local bands, Leather boasts a sizable portfolio of covers, fliers, and press kits (including those for his own late, lamented goof-rock project, the State Champs), and recently designed the very literally in-your-face CD cover (featuring a metallic logo brandished, brass-knuckle style, by a massive fist) for popular Knoxville soul-rockers Gran Torino.

Blessed with an almost perverse talent for mixing arresting, off-kilter visuals with oddly-arranged text ("I want people to confront the design; I don't necessarily want to make it easy for them"), Leather plans to move to Chicago in January and aggressively pursue more work in the field.

"I did things backwards in that I got into a band because I wanted to do the artwork," Leather chuckles, allowing that he's a far better designer than drummer. "I'm really fascinated by the idea of influencing the overall way people think about a band, beyond just the individual flier or album cover. The trouble is that there are only so many people putting out stuff around here, so your opportunities are pretty limited."

Finding work outside the tiny sphere of Knoxville's cassette-and-flier circuit requires exhaustive networking, an abundance of talent, and a healthy dose of luck. Sublett, a former gallery owner in the Knoxville artists' colony, parlayed his standing in the local art community and his long-time association with several area musicians into work with John Prine's Oh Boy Records, taking many of the CD booklet photos for Knoxville musico-poet R.B. Morris' 1997 release, Take That Ride.

And Brandon Cottongim, bass player for Knoxville "melodic hard-core" quartet Torture Kitty, earned additional assignments from Chicago punk label V.M.L. on the strength of his subversive illustrations for Torture Kitty releases, including the band's recent V.M.L Records. CD Yardsale. Widely hailed locally as an illustrator possessed of uncommon flair, Cottongim also lent his heavy-lined, graffiti-influenced comic book stylings to Knox punk-popsters 30 Amp Fuse and their Darla Records seven-inch "Sorry."

"It's difficult to break into the business," notes Engle. Having designed local CD covers for mood-metal virtuosos Bo Deadly and his own saddleworn roots-rock combo Boondocks (now defunct), Engle says he had "serious flirtations" with two large independent labels, both of which ultimately fell by the wayside.

"The key is getting that one break with a larger label," he adds. "I'm told that once you've done even one 'big' CD cover, it gets a whole lot easier to find the next one."

Many designers still rue the decline of the LP, fretting that perhaps the shackling dimensions of the jewel box and the cassette case might snuff out the concept of covers as a significant pop-art medium. "They took so much away from the aesthetic value of the package when they phased out albums," says Engle. "The art definitely suffered."

But Clouse points out that innovative touches such as fold-out covers and so-called "digi-pack" CD lay-outs have upped the artistic ante on the digital format. And Cottongim maintains that smaller canvases are better suited to the demands of '90s' hi-tech illustrative techniques. "It's easier to make the final product look slick with a five-inch CD case," says Cottongim. "High-resolution computer graphics work a lot better in the smaller space."

Leather believes that given the rise of new graphics technologies and the prevalence of other splashy visual media ("I grew up watching MTV, and that's had as much influence on my design as anything else."), album cover art will only grow denser, more colorful, more detailed, with ever more complex cominglings of imagery and text. As for whether or not the jewel-box-sized cover can hope to match its larger, more primitive predecessor in terms of excitement, immediacy and sheer visual impact, he's dubious, and more than a little wistful.

"When I look at some of my favorite old covers on disc, it just isn't the same," he sighs, fingering a CD copy of T-Rex's Electric Warriora, its bold electric gold-on-black guitar hero image reduced to roughly the size of a fist. "I used to buy lots of vinyl just for the cover art. I'll never do that with a compact disc."