3 ALBUM COVERS ART DIRECTED BY ME IN THE 1980s

↑ Art Direction by me, LP cover for 1986 compilation for Warner Special Products based on a single black and white pic, photographer unknown. Do you think it's bright enough?

   

Having black over polychrome was a surf-redolent graphic technique a la art director extraordinaire John Van Hamersveld:  it never was used in mid-1960s psychedelia, hence my contrarian application to make sure it was seen as a newer compilation.

 ↑ Art Direction by me. Another deliberately over the top retro LP cover by me with a single black and white pic as basis, probably mid-1980s. It was released by one of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band to look like a bootleg, but it wasn't. The imprecise printing registration of the flowers deliberately emulated a Warhol-ian "Pop Art" technique, one even used today by fine artist Niagara.

↑ Art Direction by me for 1982 LP cover, the first live Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris music sanctioned by the estate. Fittingly, more respectful tone. The pic, reputedly by a girlfriend of a Rolling Stone, was in bad shape but restored by the Charles Wild Studio, and I did the airbrushing for the font.

I was working with some of the same people involved when i art-directed Sid Griffin's biography Gram Parsons: A Music Biography. It was important to them to have quality images that were rare, that Gram's public wouldn't have seen before. That's why we had L.A.'s best retouchers restore this battered photo for the album cover, and why we had a screen capture from a rare Burritos video shot in 
Marina Del Rey for the book cover.↓

 Having a genuine wooden angel hovering over this sensitive but doomed singer/songwriter was the perfect image for the Fallen Angels band. We didn't have to do the oldskool pre-digital version of Photoshop of masking something in and airbrushing the join lines out, this is the way the photo was shot. It's just that the only extant print was beat up and too rectangular, hence the retouching.