Gig posters Volume 1, Rock show art of the 21st century Volume 1, Rock show art of the 21st century /

SOMEDAY a company like Pixar will create a virtual Beatles reunion concert, depicting them in real time as they are (or would be) now, singing their greatest hits as they might perform them today. I suppose there are copyright and other obstacles involved, but I guarantee it would be a blockbuster among my rapidly aging generation. Yet failing this digital reunion, memories of the Fab Four and the British Invasion can now be stirred by Alan Aldridge's book the MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES (Abrams, $35). Aldridge was the illustrator whose airbrushed images captured the ethereal essence and comic brilliance of the Beatles' lyrics in a two-volume work titled "The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics" (1969 and 1971), which he edited and which included the graphics of other significant illustrators along with his own. Although Aldridge's art is not psychedelic in the San Francisco style, it is certainly drug-inspired in a fab-gear-mod-London way - the pictorial analogue to "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." I still have my pristine copies and recall the first time I paged through them; they were an essential document of the era and an inspiration for many aspiring hippies, like me. Aldridge, a former art director and designer for Penguin Books, had originally created a series of illustrations to accompany an interview with Paul McCartney for the magazine The Observer. These and other images were then used for something called "The Beatles Sinister Songbook." That evolved into the first "Beatles Illustrated Lyrics" book, which featured some 70 illustrators riffing on songs in a variety of media and mannerisms. In "The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes," Aldridge recalls meeting McCartney for the first time. He writes in an animated, dialogue-heavy style, replete with clichés: "It was the Summer of Love - 1967. The sounds of 'Sgt. Pepper,' the sweet reek of 'grass' and joss sticks was everywhere. Groovy chicks in thin summery dresses and no bras invited 'free love.' It was good to be alive." While I second that emotion, the problem with this book is that, at times, inadvertent self-parody takes over. It's filled with great pop history and exquisite art, but the writing can be a little arch. Nonetheless, since Aldridge played a major role in British pop culture, his stories are fascinating. Take the time in 1970 when he met with Prime Minister Harold Wilson at 10 Downing Street to discuss a poster campaign he had designed. You'll have to read the book to learn what happened. "The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes," an illustrated autobiography by Alan Aldridge, includes his cover for a booh he edited in 1969. Aldridge's work was '60s-defining: In addition to being the court artist for the Beatles, he was known for his 1968 poster for Andy Warhol's film "Chelsea Girls," in which he transformed a woman's naked body into a veritable Chelsea Hotel, with sculptured characters hanging out of windows on her stomach and chest, and a doorway where her private parts should have been. He also produced psychosurreal images for the Rolling Stones, the Who and Elton John (the cover of the 1975 album "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy"). During the '60s, Aldridge's style was rather cartoony in a balloonlike way, owing to his emphasis on the airbrush. By 1973, for an illustrated children's book, "The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast" (written by the poet William Plomer), he had developed a meticulously detailed, fanciful approach that might be called neo-Victorian. Inspired by an 1807 poem by William Roscoe, Aldridge created scores of anthropomorphic insect characters. The book "became a huge hit, selling 100,000 copies by Christmas 1973." The most instructive part of "Kaleidoscope Eyes" is the reproduction of his sketches for these characters, which reveal his expert draftsmanship. He continued doing elaborately composed illustrations for books like "The Peacock Party" (1979), "The Lion's Cavalcade" (1980) and "The Gnole" (1991). Aldridge also tried to do an "Illustrated Lyrics" book for Elvis. Instead, having taken himself to Hollywood in 1981, he started to do concept designs for Colonel Tom Parker, Presley's manager: the "Throne of the Rock 'n' Roll King" - a "multimedia dais" intended for the lobby of the International Hotel in Las Vegas and an inflatable statue of Elvis. "Like all things that sound too good to be true," he writes, "my deal with the Colonel quickly fell apart. Designing stuff for Elvis didn't have the allure and glamour of movies." "Kaleidoscope Eyes" is jammed with art of all styles, but glued together by its whimsical content. Aldridge's imagination is without bounds, although some of his styles, notably his pen-and-ink work, lack the elegance of his children's books. He's also done his share of crazy gothic logos and sci-fi toy designs. I can't say I love his later work, but if all he had done was define the '60s, that would be groovy enough. Where does the word "gig" come from? For a few decades, at least, posters announcing rock concerts have been called gig posters, and there is even a Web site devoted to exhibiting and analyzing them called GigPosters.com. There is no single style for gig posters - they are punk, grunge, new wave, neo-modern, comic, retro, parodic and satirical. Some are beautiful, others ugly; some derivative, others novel. Most are eye-catching, and some are memorable. Those that are wheat-pasted on hoardings or taped to lampposts are usually removed within days, so GigPosters has been a terrific archive of the good, the bad and the ugly. But digital versions just don't compare with the printed posters, which is why GIG POSTERS: Rock Show Art of the 21st Century (Quirk, paper, $40), compiled by Clay Hayes, founder of GigPosters, is such a useful resource. The book contains posters by leaders of the art form (including Emek, Eleanor Grosch, Lil Tuffy and Luke Drozd), who offer brief commentaries about their work. It's hard to pick out favorites, since each poster has its own appeal. Johnny Crap's poster for the Pixies uses a '60sera typeface designed by Milton Glaser, yet the design, with a large illustration of a ladybug, is surprisingly timeless. Invisible Creature's poster for Brand New is a startling minimalist image of a comically rendered, spiked monolith crashing to the ground; what it means, I have no idea, but it caught my eye. And I can't stop looking at Dan Stiles's image for a Mars Volta concert - the impression of a black skull out of whose eyes and mouth come colorful psychedelic swirls - which reminded me a little of Alan Aldridge's early work. This is just the first volume. Since Hayes boasts more than 100,000 posters in his collection, this prospective series can go on indefinitely. For now, however, it's good to see that despite the elimination of LP and even some CD packaging, rock music still excites more than the ears. Soon, physical album covers will be as extinct as eight-track tapes. Passionate collectors are hoarding classic record sleeves, some of the most memorable of which were created by a British design firm called Hipgnosis. Founded by Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson in 1968, the firm was known for eerie and erotic staged photography that wed magic realism to Surrealism. Hipgnosis employed comedy, mystery and sexuality (sometimes all at once) in its elaborately composed tableaus. Among the bands branded by its images were Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Genesis and Wishbone Ash. Covers for these groups and many more are reproduced in Powell and Thorgerson's FOR THE LOVE OF VINYL: The Album Art of Hipgnosis (PictureBox, $45), which comes with additional commentary on specific albums by various artists and designers, including Peter Blake and Paula Scher. From far left: Designs by Large-mammal Print, Luke Drozd and Tim Gough, in "Gig Posters." Above, a 1957 design by Reid Miles, from "Jazz Covers." HIPGNOSIS helped define 70s rock with covers for Pink Floyd's "Atom Heart Mother," showing a cow in a field; Paul McCartney's "Band on the Run," with his group caught in a spotlight trying to escape, prison-break style; and Led Zeppelin's "Presence," which depicts a perfect, "probably Middle American" family sitting around a yacht-club dinner table hypnotically smiling at a mysterious black object. Like "Kaleidoscope Eyes," "For the Love of Vinyl" offers detailed case studies of album designs made when rock music was the zenith of popular culture and the bands were larger than life. So this artwork is emblematic of its time. But as the design critic Adrian Shaughnessy writes in an essay here, "Looking back at the best Hipgnosis covers . . . their most salient feature, besides the imaginative potency of their 'ideas,' was that their most successful covers have not dated like so many sleeves done at the same time." And some of them are still quite menacing - like a Scorpions album cover with a man in a limo, in a three-piece suit, pulling a humongous wad of bubble gum off the bare breast of an otherwise elegantly clad woman. About this cover, Thorgerson notes: "I always felt marginally uncomfortable with the piece because of its possible sexism, but the Scorpions loved it. . . . Though they didn't love the next one nor any others in later years. Ah well, you win some and lose many." Hipgnosis disbanded shortly before album covers were miniaturized to CD size. I trust, given their penchant for enormous graphics, that Powell and Thorgerson made the right decision. Rummaging through the old record bins at secondhand stores can be like stumbling on unknown masterpieces in a museum, only dustier. For me, one of those surprises was the cover of the 1956 LP "Mel Tormé With the Marty Paich Dek-Tette," designed by Burt Goldblatt. It shows the outline of Tormé's head (though it also looks like a young Sinatra), made from a collage of automobile silhouettes. This album cover and 650 others from the 1940s through the early 1990s are collected in Joaquim Paulo's JAZZ COVERS (Taschen, paper, $39.99), edited by Julius Wiedemann. It's a bricklike compilation of groundbreaking design and photography, and it's almost as much fun as rummaging through those old bins, only cleaner. Jazz labels sought out the most progressive graphic design during the '50s and early '60s. In addition to commissioning some striking studio and conceptual photography, art directors encouraged illustrators and painters to interpret the improvisational music abstractly. Joan Miró's Surrealist "Composition" adorned the cover of a 1956 album by the Japanese-American pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi, and William Claxton's Dadaesque trompe l'oeil collage for a Chet Baker record from that same year "capitalizes on Baker's matinee pinup status." David Stone Martin's 1954 portrait of Count Basie, which looks similar to Ben Shahn's ragged line style, is nonetheless a remarkable evocation of Basie's music. A Hipgnosis album-cover composition for AC/DC, from "For the Love of Vinyl." The sheer quantity of albums in this book ensures that not every cover will reach the same aesthetic heights. But the cool modernist minimalism displayed on many of Reid Miles's Blue Note covers is a high point, as is the Expressionist cowboy who turns up on a Modern Jazz Quartet album designed by Stanislaw Zagorski. One of the biggest treats was finding another Mel Tormé cover, this one a forgotten piece by Piedra Blanca (the pseudonym used by Alex Steinweiss, the first designer to create original artwork for 78-r.p.m. albums). But my favorite, for the wonderfully atmospheric photograph and visual pun, is the image on "The Hawk in Paris," a record by Coleman Hawkins and Manny Albam, which portrays a typical French-woman of the evening sitting at a cabaret table nonchalantly holding a hawk by its talons. Now that's cool. THE covers for a subgenre of jazz albums known as bachelor-pad music usually had a photo of a sexy woman with a come-hither look. What differentiated this exploitative form from another kind of art, the romance novel cover, was nuance. The album covers were moody, while the book covers were swoony. What's more, romance-novel illustration almost always featured a white, blemish-free, idealized woman, whereas jazz albums were often more eclectic. In THE ART OF ROMANCE: Mills & Boon and Harlequin Cover Designs (Prestel, paper, $25), Joanna Bowring and Margaret O'Brien trace a century of lovelorn fiction through its covers. Predictably, the formula of a beautiful woman looking longingly at a handsome man has not changed all that much (except now there's more photography). Mills & Boon, Britain's leading publisher of romantic fiction, is 101 years old; Harlequin, which owns the company, is 60. Throughout these years loyal romance readers have been treated to some enduring fantasies - for example, the sheik as hero. Today, the authors say, "the modern Mills & Boon sheik is a rich, international businessman, but still rooted in the traditions of his desert background." Although sheiks have changed, the covers continue to tell the story of undying male and female stereotypes. "The hero is dark, striking and rugged, possibly of a higher social status than the heroine and appears indifferent or ruthless, often at the mercy of a passion he is unable to acknowledge." Oh, my! The heroines "vary from the sedate girl next door to the working woman and the glamorous beauty." When these stereotypes meet, the result is an image of eternal love. Or so it is written. FINALLY, here's a book about romance of a different kind: the love of - nay, the desire for - chicken. Actually, it's the author's passion for the storefronts and signs of chicken restaurants and takeout joints in London. The hundreds of photographs in CHICKEN: Low Art, High Calorie (Mark Batty, paper, $24.95), by Siaron Hughes, a graphic designer, are lovingly assembled, but they may turn you off to this versatile bird forever. What makes the book so marvelously unappetizing is the way Hughes organizes it: from pictures of gaudy shop fronts, with their loud, brightly colored signs, to shots of the wall menus, which are not that different from autorepair price lists, to photographs of the photographs of food, which are so badly composed and lighted as to make every saucedrenched or deep-fried item look as if it came from a medical textbook. But Hughes loves this stuff. "What started as a curious quest instigated by my profession has grown into something more, something personal," she writes. "I have met the people who customize and adapt these unique and eye-catching visuals to suit their neighborhoods. They are not so concerned with theories and practice so much as providing a service." Peppered throughout the book are interviews with sign makers and chicken experts. The fun comes with the logos (most with happy chicken faces) in the "Graphic Language" section, which includes a visual analysis of the typography and ornament used to draw attention, and of the routinely garish color schemes for graphics and shop interiors. "At first sight, much of this signage appears the same," Hughes writes, "but there are differences, subtle as they may be." The author notes that chicken signs in New York are a little more restrained than those in London, and her mission was to find out why. For me, the surprise hidden in this book is found in an interview with Richie, a sign maker, about why the food looks the way it does in pictures: "It's all photography tricks. For example, when we do the chicken burger, you don't ever fry the chicken burger like how you would sell it. You like half-cook it, then we get a box of buns and you choose the right one, the best one. . . . The bun is set back and tilted away so you have a sense of it being much bigger!" The secret is out. A book cover from "The Art of Romance," top, and fast-food logos from "Chicken: Low Art, High Calorie."