The Smiley Smile Message Board

Amazon now has cover art posted for TLOS, for those who haven't seen it...

I like it. It's not what i was expecting. I've chosen not to listen to any of TLOS material as of yet. (Don't know how i did it:). I can't wait to get it all at once on Sept 2.

I hate the cover...but who cares? I like the music (well at least from what I've heard) and that's all that really matters.

Like it a lot. Uplifting colors, simple, but effective. Love oranges anyway, they shine like suns here and are good symbols for this love message to LA in the 60's.


(http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512fQTV0D8L._SS500_.jpg)

I like it. I was expecting a hopeful Brian looking at the sunrise or another crapfest like that.

And the Golden Poppy is the California state flower.

kind of reminds me of the Wild Honey cover in a way

I preferred Mark London's TLOS design for the UK program. That seemed to be more in the L.A. vein than this California crate view of nostalgia.

On first sight I'm not all too crazy about the artwork, but it sure looks nice enough. Also, I'm still VERY excited about the music and having the cover art feels like another crucial step to TLOS finally materializing.

I really like it, You know why? It lacks any pretension which it could have easily been encumbered by.  8)

looking at the design closer, it doesn't look complete. notice the penciled in sun, don't you think that should be "in your face" a little more? since the album is titled That Lucky Old SUN. not that it matters, and is that grid supposed to be there too? not complaining just observations.

Looks like a post card.

It's different...but I dig it. Very cheerful.

In the "Smoking Section" column in the latest edition of Rolling Stone, Austin Scaggs says he just received an advanced copy of THAT LUCKY OLD SUN and thinks it sounds great (he's especially taken with Van Dyke Parks' "Venice Beach" narrative). Scaggs reports of a phone interview with Brian whom he quotes as saying something like..."It's different from PET SOUNDS and SMiLE. I'll just call it a piece of art"!

Oh...I like the cover quite a bit. It would be too obvious to feature the sun prominently and, besides, BWPS already did that.

The text is awful - looks like it was knocked up in MS Word or something... Come on BriMel...

I think that cover is pretty ugly. And the font I think is especially bad. But I already know I like the songs, so that's the most important thing. Hopefully the final recordings will not disappoint me. I'd love to love it.

Considering that Brian has never been known for having good album covers, with or without the BBs, I'm not sure it's fair to blame BriMel.

Anyway, I actually like the cover. It's got a bright innocence that goes well with the music. I do hate the font.

What are you talking about?

The "Smile" album art is incredible, and Brian was totally involved with the creation behind that. Besides which, I think the album sleeve for the "Surfin' U.S.A." LP is amazing (definitively inspiring a bevy of imitations in 1963). The "All Summer Long" album cover is bossanova era perfection, as well. And what is not to like with the cover of Today!" or "Pet Sounds"? I also love the covers for "Smiley Smile," "Sunflower," "Surf's Up" and "Holland." It seems to me that Brian and/or the Beach Boys are prefectly capable of delivering a fine piece of album jacket art.

Agree -  looks like a default font coloured in by a kid. Typical of desktop publishing, not graphic design.

Thank God the music is redeeming in the extreme!

(I guess we'd've said similar about the Beach Boys dressed in their Dads' clothes feeding goats in ’66 though).

Most of them are just photos of the band. Some are more artistic, yes. I suppose I'm comparing them to the Beatles. I mean, the BBs moved into this era where album covers became high art, and they never had that. I don't place high importance on that issue-- I'm just saying.

"Surfin' USA" is frameable. Most of Del-Fi's surfing catalog from 1963 was a take-off of the sleeve design for 'Surfin' USA."

I also happen to think "All Summer Long" was a special design. In fact, the whole vibe of "All Summer Long" and 1964 in L.A. was so special to me that I devoted a whole issue of "Dumb Angel Gazette" to it. But that might have just been me going overboard. :-)

I think the only thing that Brian had that could be included in the era of high-art album sleeves would have been "Smile." Some might disagree, but I think Frank Holmes captured something there. He's an artist that came out of the comic-as-art world of the Hairy Who in Chicago, as well as the architectural style of Earl Newman (both Holmes and Newman worked at the Insomniac Cafe in Hermosa Beach), and the combination spoke to the floating balloon vibe of 1966, where, as Greg Shaw once told me, "A lot of people were reading 'The Little Prince' and 'Winnie the Pooh,' and taking them as serious pieces of literature." I didn't fully understand what Greg was getting at until I saw the "Smile" LP jacket on a full page in my new book, "Pop Surf Culture." Whatever that book's merits are, so be it. But for myself, when I turned the page from the chapter that outlined where surf culture had been in 1964-65 to the next chapter, and saw the Frank Holmes art, it blew me away.

For some reason, I imagined that the TLOS cover would be a lot darker. I get a very dark feel from the songs, even the happy upbeat ones.

Perhaps a pic of a bearded, 300+ pound BW with an unbuttoned shirt chain-smoking and playing piano--drinks lined up atop it--in a dark, seedy San Diego gay bar would have hit the spot. For me it would have, anyway.

Despite what Mike Love said in "Endless Harmony," it was the combination of optimism and melancholy that sold the original Beach Boys songs so well. There was a feeling like it was the greatest moment ever, and that we have to hang on before it's too late.

People called Chet Baker and West Coast cool jazz "light" for years, before realizing that L.A. might have great weather, and the people here might be soft and weird, but it's a place that also has a heaviness, and the art that comes out of here does as well.

Uhhh... that was in reference to the idea of "darkness" in TLOS.

Perhaps a pic of a bearded, 300+ pound BW with an unbuttoned shirt chain-smoking and playing piano--drinks lined up atop it--in a dark, seedy San Diego gay bar would have hit the spot. For me it would have, anyway.

Dude, you're hilarious.

I never really looked at it that way, but now it seems like the only interpretation.

It won't be long 'til summertime is through...

I personally dont care for the cover...TOO LOUD..!!

I like it a lot - in fact its the first of his solo album covers (besides SMiLE) that I have liked. It should definitely stand out on the record store shelf (record stores still have shelves, right?)...perhaps the poppies will be printed on the slipcase of the CD/DVD combo to reveal something else underneath?

By the way, curiously enough Amazon has the vinyl edition listed for August 19th. Probably just a mistake?

http://www.amazon.com/That-Lucky-Old-Brian-Wilson/dp/B001BN731Y/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1216104021&sr=1-2

Like the cover alot. It looks really fresh and "full of life".  I agree, it reminds me a little of "Wild honey" too.

Sometimes they do that to boost sales. Perl Jam's Vitalogy (SP?) made top 50 on the charts just as a vinyl release.

I read somewhere (maybe in the same Rolling Stone notice) that the vinyl will come out a couple weeks before the CD version.

Brian's production people really should consult with us before doing anything.

Exactly!

I like the album cover a good deal-whoops all over GIOMH, which was a horrible album cover from Peter Blake of all people!

From someone who didn't get to see That Lucky Old Sun in concert (yet), does this cover resemble anything that was in the visuals for the concert?

I agree: that was the worst BW cover of all time, in my opinion.

Oh wait, the xmas album cover sucked, too. My eyes still hurt from that.

Ain't there at least two versions of that cover? I have a shiny one, but wasn't there the non-shiny one as well? At least it appears that way on some websites.

I agree though, the GIOMH cover sucked big time.

I'm astonished that anyone considers BWPS album art as good - its incredibly cheesy and utterly out of sync with the music inside, and looks as if it was designed for the supermarket shelf. I look at the BWPS cover and think of low-fat spread (margarine) or mouth freshener. The little steel engraved vignettes inside are cute, but the main logo sucks a big fat one.

Basically it's just ugly, but at the same time I love how it looks so sunny and retro. So I like it. Even though it looks like a design for on an oilcloth.

(http://www.beachboys.com/bw88.jpg) (http://www.beachboys.com/IJWMFTT.jpg) (http://www.beachboys.com/orangecrateart.jpg) (http://www.beachboys.com/imagination.jpg) (http://www.beachboys.com/roxy.jpg) (http://www.pendletones.co.uk/discography/solo/brianwilson/images/giomh.02.jpg) (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41YCGAHPFQL._SL500_AA240_.jpg) (http://pixhost.eu/avaxhome/avaxhome/2007-09-10/Brian_Wilson_presents_Smile.jpg) (http://www.beachboys.com/bw-christmas.jpg) (http://www.beachboys.com/luckysun.jpg)

The whole gallery.
I don't know, it's not the worst BW solo cover by a long shot.

Yes, SMiLE looks really like a washing powder box for extra white results.  :-D
Here's the single:

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Washingpowder.jpg/180px-Washingpowder.jpg)

I think BWPS looks OK... WIRWFC is easily the worst out of these covers, followed by Imagination... BW88 and the two live albums look pretty bad too. I do like GIOMH's cover art a lot, and OCA is actually one of my favorite album covers.

GIOMH is without a doubt his worst album cover.

BW 88's pretty good.  The BB were never the best for cover art, but I'd take 88 as one of the best (easily the best solo cover) - with KTSA, Symphonic Sounds, Knebworth (all versions),  the Christmas albums (all of them), GIOMH, Rarities (the one with the Brad Elliott liners), Spirit of America and the almost frightening Endless Summer -  plus various compilations featuring someone on a surfboard (excepting Warmth of the Sun, the melancholy glow of which I rather like).

The covers for the individual CDs in the GV box set are even worse than GIOMH!

Best, um, probably Surf's Up, Wild Honey, Friends, All Summer Long, Surfin' USA, POB, Holland, Sunflower, original SMiLE (though I don't particularly mind BWPS, it's just not good), Bummer in Paradise (if you have the right version), and, uh, BW 88.

The cover of TLOS looks like a cheap bootleg cover to me.  ::)

Personally, I'm often surprised how much effort bootleggers put into artwork & packing.
Perhaps it would be an idea for the next time to run a fan cover contest or something like that.

Like BW '88 the best. And "Sweet Insanity" would've been nice as well:

http://bp3.blogger.com/_SrdmfrAElJ8/Ru_1muzI4II/AAAAAAAAAHs/27t0pE0_3Zw/s320/sweetinsanity2.jpg

Really cheap looking is "Pet Sounds Live". I mean - sorry for sounding big headed - I create something like that in 2 minutes with photoshop.
WIRWFC is some kind of standard design. Saw a similar cover from at least 2 other artists.
They tried to get a good cover for GIOMH, unfortunately Blake wasn't able to create another Pepper. Wouldn't surprise me if this was the most expensive artwork for a BW solo album.

My question about the TLOS cover is, what the heck is with the oranges? Is there something about it in the lyrics? It's been a while since I've listened to one of the audience tapes of it.

Oranges are to California as Pineapples are to Hawaii, as Cocaine is to Columbia and Heroin is to Afgahnistan.

South of LA is Orange County.

I really liked the Roxy artwork; OCA is obviously even great; BW88 looks pretty good as a vinyl sleeve.

While the GIOMH artwork might not have worked that well, to me there's nothing worse in the BW catalogue than the Imagination cover art, which looks so downright soulless and cheap that it even blows M.I.U. out of the water.

As cocaine is to LA.

Um ... ya'll have a ways to go as graphic designers. Just saying.

BW88 the best? Painfully bland. The more recent covers (since London came on board) have been at least decent -- the shiny stuff makes the XMas album, and that has seldom translated in an online version. The Smile cover rocks. The embossing, the fat white box -- it gives the impression of being something fun and special. And it is.

Those of you who say you can do better in two minutes in photoshop -- let's see it. No, really, let's see it.

The TLOS cover isn't going to be in the pantheon of iconic covers, that's for sure.
But the image does draw the eye.

The cover doesn't do much for me really one way or the other, but I expect that if the contents shine the cover is striking enough that it will come to have strong positive transference reaction and will come to be seen in a more positive light. If the contents aren't up to expectations, it will seem like a cheesy cover for all time.

I think about Pet Sounds. Not a great cover really, but because of the classic, exceptional contents, I have a strong positive reaction any time I see it.

Photoshop was meant for PS Live. But that's just one man's opinion and taste.
Like London's work very much. Even bought a couple of BW tour books and they look phenomenal.
The SMiLE washing powder thing was a joke, in fact, I like the SMiLE artwork very much.
I have the shiny Christmas album and think it's great.
Ok, I better shut up now or I insult people without wanting to.

They tried to get a good cover for GIOMH, unfortunately Blake wasn't able to create another Pepper.

I have to confess ignorance about what Blake has done since the Sgt. Pepper album cover.

I know that in the mid-'60s, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones introduced Blake to the assemblage art movement happening in L.A. at the time. The top artists working in that style were Ed Kienholz, George Herms and Wallace Berman. The latter of whom was one of the characters on Sgt. Pepper. I've always seen Blake's as another great assemblage tableaux. Though many of the assemblagists have continued doing sculpture using dolls, 7-Up bottles and other discarded items, as well as collages... and they do it quite well. Unfortunately, Peter Blake's attempt to do a collage for BW came off as completely uninspired. He was reaching for something, but perhaps the recorded material just wasn't there to guide and inspire.

The SMiLE washing powder thing was a joke, in fact, I like the SMiLE artwork very much.

I can't speak for Mark London, but he would probably appreciate the comparison to a washing detergent box. Warhol used Brillo as the centerpiece for one of his first pop-art exhibitions.

IJWMFTT, OCA and SMILE and I suppose Imagination are all right. Everything else looks terrible. TLOS is probably the next best.

Agreed, it is hideous.  I am partial to 88

I don't have GIOMH, so I can't really see too well what is happening there. I've seen the cover, but it's been a while. What are those buildings in the background? It looks like New York City. And what's with all the grey space on the bottom half? It looks like he just gave up, but at least some cobblestone pavement or something... jeeez. Looks like a totally unfinished piece of art.

I actually am a graphic designer.  :)

And I don't want to brag, but I could literally recreate the cover of "Pet Sounds Live" in Photoshop in two minutes.

Do it, then.

Edit: And apparently it was done. Cool!

Ohhh a challenge

All you have to do is take that picture of Brian, crop it, set the mode to grayscale and then a yellow monotone... Maybe give it a 'paint daubs' filter or adjust the brightness/contrast for a clearer effect... Type 'Brian Wilson', 'presents' and 'Pet Sounds Live' in the Cooper Black font... Copy the text layers a few times, enlarge them and set them to about 10-15% capacity... And you're done. That's less than 2 minutes work for anyone who's a bit handy with Photoshop...

Europe got the non-shiny one. It was a mistake and Brian (well,...) said he wasn't very happy about that on his message board. He wanted it to be shiny.

I love the BWPS cover, btw. Looks like a cartoon. The music is a cartoon. It works.

I have the vinyl editions of 88, GIOMH, Smile, and What I really want for Xmas. 88 was pretty cool with a nice texture and embossed layers. GIOMH was just OK, though I think fairly happy looking. Smile was the best, it was embossed, had a nice gatefold sleeve and even bonus cuts. Xmas wasn't shiny ans was kind of bland. The new one looks happy and bright. Not brilliant, but I am surprised that no one mentioned OCA in conjunction with it.

I suppose the '88 minimalism works for a lot of people better than I ever imagined. Ten years ago, I can't imagine anyone would have found it's ephemeral nature to be valeuable in the least. But I have to admit, stock '80s motifs don't offend me nearly as much as they used to.

Being the age I am, when I think of 80s album covers I'm thinking about men in makeup, lots of bare (or stockinged) female legs and cleavage shots, motorcycles, cars, hell-flames and the occasional, laughable "satanic" image. God, my 80s sucked. But they were amusing for a young teenager, I suppose -- a necessary evil.

Well, besides hair metal, what else did you listen to back then?

Hip hop. I was aged 4-14 in the 80s, and so that was the bulk of my listening. Anything lighter or poppier was frowned upon! (Never mind how light and poppy most of that hair metal was; I didn't notice at the time--possibly dizzied by all the fancy designs on the Gibson Flying Vs and B.C. Rich Warlocks.)

Wow! I was the same ages in the '80s. I didn't really realize that there even WAS an alternative type of music in '80s until probably 1989. That was like the wake-up year for me, discovering Lush, Jane's Addiction, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Primus, the Pixies, etc. I suppose before that, I knew a little bit of R.E.M., and my babysitter, who was also the best skateboarder in our town, liked the Cramps and '50s music, so my group got turned out to that. KROQ in the late '80s, and before Nirvana hit... that was an amazing station.

I knew of some of it, but it took a while to take. If there weren't whammy bar dives, finger-tapping and lightning-fast arpeggio guitar solos, it wasn't cutting it for these then-tender ears. Well, except the hip-hop of the day, which I also loved. Typical stuff, mostly: Kool Moe Dee, Run DMC, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, etc. (Thread successfully hijacked.) My tastes were pretty vanilla for my time and place. In the early 90s I began more aggressively mining the past--mostly the late 60s or 70s guitar heroes--and only got a lot more interestingly diverse in the mid-90s.

Back to the cover sleeve for the new album.

Thanks for the indulgent moment, folks...

For those of you interested in what I was listening to in the 80s and why, well, I'd be glad to let you know. I'm bringing that conversation elsewhere.

To take things back to the topic of album design, I think it is indeed right to point out that design for Brian Wilson solo has been largely directionless.

I don't want to dive too deeply back into where the Beach Boys fit into this, only to say that they almost uniformely fit into the graphic design modes of the time, up through the early '80s, for better or for worse.

The "Pet Sounds" and "Smile" covers are iconic for more reasons than just great music. The Cooper font used on "Pet Sounds" is a bold serif, and has become a sort of signature font for Brian's artistry... i.e. when he is choosing to be artistic. The "Pet Sounds" album cover has a very distinct graphic design, in that, front-and-back, "Pet Sounds" is sort of a surmising statement of where the Beach Boys came, and also where they were at present. There are four fonts used on "Pet Sounds," not including the record company logotypes. Clearly the wood-work type on the back, outlining the song titles, is more of a '50s style font, and has a Smokey the Bear quality to it. But no matter what, having the Cooper font as large as it is on the front, and set atop a straight green backdrop... it's the perfect setting for what could have been a jumbled mess of an album jacket. Alas, the font and coloring of the top border of "Pet Sounds" allows the picture on the front cover to sort of stand there in all of its odd glory. The back cover is another Mondrian style design, much like the "All Summer Long" album jacket.

Only once did the Beach Boys ever go full-on Modernism and employ Helvetica, and that was the 1963 "Little Deuce Coupe" album jacket. Oddly enough, that was also the only album pre-dating "Smile" that doesn't feature the band on the front cover. "All Summer Long," again, went with a Mondrian style design, but was also much, much busier than your typical Modernist graphic designer would have liked. The storyline of that cover harkens back to the '50s... it is very busy... and the way it was all put together was very much in the vein of L.A.'s assemblage art movement. All of that was about to change with the advent and popularity of Ed Ruscha. His impact, as well as that of hardcore Modernism in '60s graphic design (and advertising), was the major influence on the Beach Boys' "Today!" sleeve. Itself a failure, mostly because of the use of that red font, but the Beach Boys' picture and the framing is a beautiful thing to behold. The "Summer Days" album jacket is a bit slapdash and confused... lots of space for a big, bold font, but it's a serif font, sort of pushing it back to the old world, which I suppose fits the contents perfectly. The minimalism of "Summer Means New Love" and the intro to "California Girls" are not the rule on that album. So it was that "Pet Sounds" sort of stood as their defining '60s design.

That is, unless you love the wide-ranging styles that psychedelia inferred, and therefore, "Smile" takes the cake. I think "Smile" is beautiful for that reason alone. It employs a hand-drawn font. Mark London later isolated the beauty of that font for BWPS. The interior gatefold was way busy, but that's assemblage art for you, and he doesn't apologize for that. I certainly encouraged assemblage in Mark's graphic design for "Dumb Angel #4: All Summer Long." But I was really, really inspired by Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz at the time, as well as pop-art, so we went for the gusto and made that issue all pop.

Anyway, I don't think the "Smile" font or graphic design really hold the weight that the actual Frank Holmes drawing does. It's a very evocative drawing, and it sort of calls an end to graphic design on Beach Boys packages, as much as it called an end to putting a picture of the band on the cover. It was neither like the "Little Deuce Coupe" album jacket, nor like the eight or so other LP jackets that came before it. It was something different. Which is why it's the one that sort of stands out across generations, for people who are truly into the more modern and (dare I say) alternative side of rock and pop music.

That Brian Wilson has probably never had as great a design as "Pet Sounds" or 'Smile" since speaks volumes to the notion of autonomy in his work. I hate to say it, but it's the only way I can think to put it. That's why the "Pet Sounds Live" sleeve seems so slapdash and unimportant. It's as though Brian's past is being pasted onto his present, in an effort to say, "He's back!" In the 2000s, however, the Brian Is Back campaign didn't promise a return to hitmaking, as much as it promised a return to serious artistry. Thus far, it hasn't delivered. And maybe that's why we feel disappointed with the TSOL album jacket artwork. An autonomous Brian piece of music seems to demand more graphically.

I personally don't think that the "Pet Sounds" cover is that great by itself. I think it probably became good because of the music that we associate it with. If it would've been the cover of a really bad album, I don't think anyone would ever have even noticed anything good about the cover... It's like with the name 'The Beatles' - it's basically a really bad name, but we like it because of what we've been associating it with for decades.

I don't think "Pet Sounds" is a great cover either. I DO think that there are some design elements that ALLOW it to be iconic. The music certainly guides it to its "classic" status, and while the cover is VERY busy on the back, and somewhat marginal on the front, the Cooper font and the strong green background sort of invite its name to stand out. Therefore, since the music delivered in such a huge way, the boldness of that font has sort of become emblematic of Brian Wilson when he is creating serious music.

You said:
Only once did the Beach Boys ever go full-on Modernism and employ Helvetica, and that was the 1963 "Little Deuce Coupe" album jacket. Oddly enough, that was also the only album pre-dating "Smile" that doesn't feature the band on the front cover.

When in fact, "Surfin' U.S.A." also does not feature the band on the front cover.

The "log" typeface on the original PET SOUNDS backside is ghastly and completely wrong for the album. I think from SMiLE through IN CONCERT you have some very good album covers. I dislike the FRIENDS cover which looks like something you'd find on the cover of an in-flight airline magazine circa '68 (the back cover does too, but at least it's a pretty picture). SMILEY SMILE's cover is excellent, better than the album really. SURF'S UP and HOLLAND are probably the best. During this period, PET SOUNDS was reissued with the superior backside featuring the subtler (Times Roman?) font style and that great photo of the spilled bag of peanuts (the perfect compliment to the front cover).

From 15 Big Ones on, all of the Beach Boys album covers were mediocre to horrible. Compared to these, Brian's solo album cover art has been an improvement.

For those who wonder whether anyone was doing great cover art in the 80s, check out the work of Peter Saville; I'd be happy to hang prints of most of his work on my wall (I know I derailed the thread again, but thought I included enough on-topic content to justify it).

When in fact, "Surfin' U.S.A." also does not feature the band on the front cover.

Ha! Not sure what I was thinking! I grabbed all of the LPs and had them sitting next to my desk when I wrote that. I must have just glossed over the whole lot up to "Smile" and only noticed the "Little Deuce Coupe" LP.

The "log" typeface on the original PET SOUNDS backside is ghastly and completely wrong for the album.

Ghastly is one way of putting it. I wouldn't praise it, by any means. But I can dissect it and know what the designers were trying to do. The problem is that it was Capitol in-house, and the designers were likely '50s fuddy-duddy designers. Some good ideas, but certainly not cutting-edge.

I think from SMiLE through IN CONCERT you have some very good album covers. I dislike the FRIENDS cover which looks like something you'd find on the cover of an in-flight airline magazine circa '68 (the back cover does too, but at least it's a pretty picture). SMILEY SMILE's cover is excellent, better than the album really.

I agree. SS, WH and Friends all employed a painting, like Smile had, and it worked in cememnting those albums as more personal statements than the hardcore Capitol hit albums of the early-to-mid-'60s.

SURF'S UP and HOLLAND are probably the best. During this period, PET SOUNDS was reissued with the superior backside featuring the subtler (Times Roman?) font style and that great photo of the spilled bag of peanuts (the perfect compliment to the front cover).

I like the Cooper font better, and the green backdrop. But that's just me.

From 15 Big Ones on, all of the Beach Boys album covers were mediocre to horrible. Compared to these, Brian's solo album cover art has been an improvement.

Hmmm. I rather like Dean Torrence's design for "Love You." The sleeve for "MIU" still has that hippy-surf feel to it, though the sun is fading quickly on the Beach Boys' relevance. People were still (barely) giving them a chance at that time. Everything after that... blech.

I'm glad someone is indulging me in this design argument.

I like the "LA (Light Album)" cover. Twelve postcards by twelve different artists, one for each song, one for the band name and one for the album title. That's a pretty cool concept.

I always thought that the "Wild Honey" cover could've been really cool if they would've used a cartoon style drawing of that same design with brighter colors... Instead of that somewhat pale photograph... And the typography is obviously rubbish.

I like the "LA (Light Album)" cover. Twelve postcards by twelve different artists, one for each song, one for the band name and one for the album title. That's a pretty cool concept.

I like the concept more than the actual execution. The postcard for "Love Surrounds Me" is awesome, though.

I always thought that the "Wild Honey" cover could've been really cool if they would've used a cartoon style drawing of that same design with brighter colors... Instead of that somewhat pale photograph... And the typography is obviously rubbish.

I've thought about that cover a lot myself. Without sounding too prententious, I know this about "Wild Honey." The stained-glass was done by Arnie Geller, Brian Wilson's cousin by marriage. The image on the cover of "Wild Honey" is a photograph of one section of that stained-glass pattern. It was handed in to Capitol Records and given over to their young in-house designer, the recently-hired John Van Hamersveld. One of Van Hamersveld's first jobs for Capitol was to lay the "Magical Mystery Tour" EP onto the dot-pattern clouds for the LP version. He also created the first Hearts & Flowers album jacket. Van Hamersveld was a student at the Chouinard Institute, which was L.A.'s most experimental art school at the time (later became Cal Arts). He cut his teeth as a designer for "Surfer" magazine, then "Surf Guide," from 1962-65. His crowning achievement in surf design was the poster for Bruce Brown's "The Endless Summer." That poster still stands as sort of like the American flag of Southern California. You can ride your bike through neighborhoods in San Diego, Orange County and L.A., and you see the poster pinned-up in so many two-car garages.

Anyway, I think the hand-drawn font of "Wild Honey" was one of Van Hamersvled's first steps away from using Swiss typography in the '60s. A school of psychedelic poster artists was emerging, and successfully rejecting everything that Modernism had implied. Van Hamersveld got much, much better at psychedelic lettering after "Wild Honey," when he started the Pinnacle Poster Company, and (along with Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso) created some of the best psych posters of the era.

But I agree, "Wild Honey" seems like a quickie design. Maybe that's the way it was meant to be, though. It kind of has the same off-the-cuff feeling that the music itself does.

I like the one with the band name a lot (top left). That image was used for the cover of the Italian "Here Comes the Night" 45. It looks pretty great as a single cover.

I love the art for the Beach Boys Love You album, personally.

I just wanna say I LOVE the cover of Wild Honey, more than Smiley Smile, even. I think it's their best cover, followed by Holland, Surf's Up and Smiley Smile.
Worst: 15 Big ONes.

I like this cover too, and the album sleeve.  It's one of those covers you can pore over.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v96/Compost/LAFront.jpg)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v96/Compost/LABackCover.jpg)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v96/Compost/LA1.jpg)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v96/Compost/LA2.jpg)

I love the look Dennis is giving a super-square looking Mike in this shot:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v96/Compost/1.jpg)

That picture of Brian playing bass is so cool.

I can't believe no one's said anything about the KTSA cover yet.

I don't think LA works like a cover. No hierarchy or strong elements.
And most of the postcards are hideous anyway. What's with "Baby Blue", Night of the Living Dead?

I like Good Timin' - even though it's chintzy - and Full Sail the best.

My girlfriend got quite the kick out of the Love Surrounds Me postcard on the LA Light insert. (After it took her a couple of seconds).

 That's it exactly - the image would be perfect for "All I Want To Do", but cactus as penis cheapens a really beautiful song. Sumahama and Angel Come Home are appealing, but too many of the illustrations look like someone in a high school art class knocked them off in a weekend.

The opposite of the LA Light album cover: good execution, terrible concept.

I've got a picture disc LP of this album. It's got the top right image (the one with the album title) on one side and the photos of the band members from the inner sleeve of the regular LP on the other side.

the image would be perfect for "All I Want To Do", but cactus as penis cheapens a really beautiful song.

Ah. It's funny. Jeez. The sexuality thing belongs to Dennis, in the Beach Boys world, and has been sorely missing since his death. John Stamos was no replacement for Dennis Wilson.

I've got no problem with sexuality (or humor); the postcard image would be fine if associated with "Wild Situation" or "Time For Bed" (to name two songs of the same vintage), but "Love Surrounds Me" is such an emotional composition that the illustration comes off as an insult to the sincerity of the song. I feel the same way about the "Good Timin'" postcard!

"Love Surrounds Me" is emotional, but it's also dripping with lust and longing. Don't ruin it for me, Roger! It's the one card on that LP cover that I really, really love.

 ;D

Wait a minute...we're talking about the postcard for "Love Surrounds Me"? Oh, that one's sublime! Peter Saville himself could not have done better.  ;)

Nice...

I've always been partial to the Imagination promo art -- pretty disturbing, actually.

(http://i21.ebayimg.com/07/i/000/c3/32/f1d3_1.JPG)

I can't believe anyone likes the 'Friends' cover - it's hideous! They could have at least got someone who could draw.

I love the Friends cover, and that Imagination promo, if that is the real thing... incredible.

Brian -- It absolutely is the real thing. I have it in front of me now, and the promos have been bopping around the web for a few years now (presumably as record critics clear out their collections). That art is actually inside the released Imagination liner notes, only reproduced quite small.

And incredible in a good or bad way? Personally, I've always felt it was heads and shoulders above the released CD cover. But it doesn't quite reflect the music, I suppose.

And let's not forget the singles.

(http://i7.ebayimg.com/04/i/07/ag/98/42_1.JPG)
(http://213.160.67.42/AAF/AAF689A.jpg)
(http://www.vinyltap.co.uk/gallery/br/briangv6633816665765990.jpg)
(http://i1.ebayimg.com/01/i/000/fd/8a/9369_1.JPG)

Love the Imagination promo art. So much better than what ended up as the album's cover!

While the Friends cover might not be a piece of high art in itself, it's just as nice and charming as the brilliant music the sleeve contained.

I really like that Love & Mercy artwork. Also, that Do It Again cover is pretty nice. Brian just always looks so damn cool in sunglasses.

The person who photoshopped Brian's picture here went a little overboard... It doesn't actually look like Brian anymore and it looks like he's 30 years old...

And it looks like his head is exploding.

The Love & Mercy cover looks like Daniel Johnston's art work.


All this time I thought I was the only one who felt that way about that cactus. I just though I was being perverted! :lol

Because of its strong sense of symmetry, the TLOS cover reminds me of Dean Torrence's graphic design work, especially on the cover of Love You.

As far as past BW solo covers are concerned, PS Live and Live at the Roxy seem like especially weak and blah designs to me, while BW 88 is my favorite.

Nah, there's no Captain America or big eyeball!

Wow, now that's something for the more arty tastes, although I can see why it didn't make it onto the final product.
The sun reminds a bit of the Imagine mosaic in Central Park.

speaking of postcards, check this!!
http://cgi.ebay.nl/VINTAGE-BEACH-BOYS-LOVE-SURROUNDS-ME-POSTCARD_W0QQitemZ170242247303QQihZ007QQcategoryZ32999QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

It's a better cover than the real one. I thought the title was always very ironic considering how unimaginative I found most of the songs!

I like the cover.  The text is simple, yes, but it kind of has that carnival look to it, kid like text since Brian's kind of immature anyways.  I like that the cover doesn't try to necessarily mimic the music or try to be overly important, it looks lighthearted which is how I take the album anyways.  The spoken word parts are very whimsical and stuff like "Good kind of love" and "Oxygen" are really optimistic and happy songs.  Even "going home" and "Southern California" are optimistic.  Brian gets a little preachy sometimes and I'm happy that this album isn't overloaded with that. 

GO BRIAN!!

Am I the only person here looking at the drawing of the person, and seeing a "bullet hole"(for lack of a better term) in the head?  :o

[/quote] Am I the only person here looking at the drawing of the person, and seeing a "bullet hole"(for lack of a better term) in the head?  :o
[/quote]

Blemish or sloppiness, like around the mouth, but could be a 45 cal entry wound.

He looks like a mob hitman.