Food becomes music: the aesthetics of the covers

““Wine/Vinyl” is a journey through a visual feast, the meaning, symbolism and cultural impact of foods and drinks immortalized on the covers of more and less famous albums: from Andy Warhol’s provocative peelable banana for the Velvet Underground to the greedy surrealism of the Rolling Stones’ “Let it Bleed”, from Guns N’ Roses’ spaghetti to the pot of snakes in PFM’s “Cook” up to Tankard’s passion for beer, Vino/Vinile”, Luca Fassina’s book, observes the influence of food and drink on the musical imagination and illustrates how they have contributed to shaping the perception of the albums and the artists themselves.

I asked Luca Fassina, author of this and other books (“Spaghetti. Rockstars at the table: from AC/DC to Zucchero” was reviewed here) to choose some songs taken from “Vini/Vinili”. Here is your selection.

The most famous banana in the history of record covers is certainly that of Andy Warhol. In 1966 he saw the experimental rock band the Velvet Underground play, finding in their musical research an affinity with what he wanted to express with his art. He made the Factory available to them as a rehearsal room, introducing them to the German singer Nico. He planned to debut with Verve Records The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) a banana covered with a removable adhesive peel which, following the advice of the writing “Peel slowly and see“, revealed a pink interior. It was a perfect balance between the minimalism of the single object with few colors and the maximalism of its meaning. Brian Eno said in 1982: «Lou Reed confessed to me that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in the first five years. I think it was so important to so many people that whoever bought one of those copies must have started a band!»

There jam or jam, it is a preserve obtained by cooking fruit with sugar. Unlike jam, which is specific to citrus fruits, jam can be made with any type of fruit. In music it is short for jam sessionsan informal, often improvised performance in which musicians play without a predefined score. That’s what the Japanese fusion-jazz band Casiopea decided to call their album Mint Jams (1982), playing on terms that suggest a “jam session in optimal conditions”, with an illustration by Alfa Records designer Masao Hiruma.

There’s a funny story about the album Better than Raw by Helloween, released in 1998. The cover represents a witch intent on stirring a pumpkin soup: like many of the band’s zany ideas, this one was born in their favorite bar, the Backstage in Hamburg, when talking about Smurfs, Gargamel and food, they came to agree that everyone hated the taste of pumpkins. From there, the call to the new illustrator Rainer Laws: «To be honest, I didn’t like their previous covers which I considered “old” and static. Furthermore, designing covers wasn’t my job, I worked in advertising, so I thought about refusing, but they insisted, so I made a sketch: I knew I didn’t want to use oil paints, but something decidedly more horror, so I opted for a comic style, more in my style. I created that sexy witch and turned the pumpkins into some sort of goblins that are cooked because… they are better than raw».

They Can’t All Be Zingers (2006) is a best of songs taken from the singles of alt metaller American Primus, packaged like a bag of cheese slices for toast, designed by Zoltron, a Californian street artist as shy as Banksy and present in a large number of museums, who has worked for numerous artists (from Soundgarden to Pussy Riot to Devo), and created together with Reuben Rude: «One of the things I’m most proud of is the idea of ​​the packaging of this album, because to hear it you practically have to destroy the cover. Inside it’s all yellow, just cheese. I thought it was a great idea, never seen before. And twenty years later, the still sealed copies must be worth a lot! »

If the Primus are crazy about cheese, there are those who are even more obsessed with beer. Germany, 1982, Tankard (in Italian: beer mug) was born in Frankfurt, a band belonging to the Big 4 of German thrash metal together with Kreator, Destruction and Sodom. They define their style as “alcoholic metal” and immediately build a strong bond with fans over post-concert beers. Curiously, alcohol appears on their covers only from the third album The Morning After (1988) which shows the hangover in great detail by the illustrator Sebastian Krüger: we see the room of a metalhead who has evidently been partying with food scraps, records, perhaps a woman (there is an abandoned high-heeled shoe) and certainly lots and lots of beer.

If musically In Through the Out Door (1979) is not among the first records that come to mind when thinking of Led Zeppelin, the cover designed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis (which was nominated for a Grammy for Best Album Package in 1980, losing to Breakfast in America by Supertramp) is a small masterpiece: it represents a man in a bar burning a letter, but what makes it unique is the fact that it was published with twelve different images (one for the front and the other for the back of each of the six albums published) which show the same scene, but from the point of view of each customer observing the man.

Gigi Cavalli Cocchi is a self-taught designer with a natural talent, he even signed up for the IED in Milan before being struck by Genesis in 1973 on their tour of Foxtrotwhen his priorities changed and he started playing the drums. «It was 1989, Luciano Ligabue knew that I was also involved in graphics and we started talking: he liked the idea of ​​transmitting something more than his message and asked me to find images to accompany the texts to which he had added related phrases and thoughts. It was with that portfolio – and with the professional recordings made at Psycho Studios with Claudio Dentes – that the then tour manager Claudio Maioli reached, thanks to Pierangelo Bertoli, Angelo Carrara, who led them to the contract with Warner; they were the ones who chose my illustrations as a subplot for the lyrics for the debut cover Ligabue. It was a novelty, because back then only photos of the artists were used.”

Even Mina succumbed to the charm of the quote: Baby Gate (1974) is a record named after the stage name that the singer took at the beginning of her career. To conduct a ‘live’ market survey, Giulio Belgio – musician, arranger and at the time musical consultant – simultaneously released a second album called Minawaiting to understand which of the two incarnations would have had greater success with the public. The covers have similar images: in the first, the singer has an unmistakable bottle – on which “gazzosa” was written, perhaps to avoid legal problems – and a martini glass, in the second a more prosaic salami sandwich. The two artworks were curated by Mauro Balletti, Mina’s trusted photographer who revived neorealism using artistic and digital techniques.

Speaking of marketing, The Who had a brilliant idea for theirs The Who Sell Out (1967): it is a concept album in which they joke about having “sold out” to the consumer culture of the time; conceived as a pirate radio show, with the pieces interspersed with fake advertisements, it shows on the cover a gigantic Odorono deodorant and a huge can of Heinz beans (to which a piece is also dedicated). Fifty years later, they have collaborated with the famous multinational to raise funds for charity. Since they had just made an advertisement for Coca Cola, Pete Townshend thought it best to make a proposal to the company to insert real advertising between one song and another. Intrigued by the idea, Coca Cola managers asked how many copies they expected to sell. Inflating the quantities to a measure he deemed respectful, he fired off a “hundred thousand.” They hung up the phone on his face.