This is the very first in what I hope will be a long and successful series in which I pose the simple question “what is your favourite album cover and why?” Obviously this is a deeply personal question as it’s completely subjective. Favourite cover’s might be the result of fond memories or because it’s the work of a favourite designer or well…any reason really! I’ve started by contacting a number of my favourite bloggers and first up is Grace Bonney. Her hugely successful blog Design*Sponge is a constant source of inspiration and is jam packed with all the little things that make a house a home.
As you can see from the title of this post Grace chose Hendrix’s second studio album Axis: Bold As Love.
“I remember being really young and plopping down in front of my Dad’s album collection at the bottom of a big armoire. Mostly I remember seeing a lot of Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor and thinking “sooo not cool” but then I flipped to this album and officially had my mind blown. I’d never heard anything like it and the cover was so crazy and trippy- it remained a favorite of mine for years, and was the first album I took into my guitar teacher when I was 13 and asked him to teach me the songs. I still remember him laughing and saying “you realize this is a beginner’s class and you’ve brought me a HENDRIX record, right?”
Here you can see the artwork in all its gate-fold glory. The artwork itself was not much liked by Hendrix, he stated he’d preferred it to have reflected his American “Indian” (Native American) heritage. However the album followed a trend at the time for incorporating Indian elements into artwork. The album artwork is the blending of two images, a Hindu devotional painting known as Viraat Purushan-Vishnuroopam that was available as a mass produced poster and a painting of the band by Roger Law (co-creator of Spitting Image fact fans).
Although not the exact version of the poster used it none the less shows how the original was incorporated into the artwork.
It doesn’t quite compare to the Hendrix album does it?
