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Posted - 02/01/2025 : 18:03:59
The original illustration by Bob Pepper (on the left) was featured in the advertising billboard on the Strip announcing the ‘The Third Coming Of Love’. It was signed off before the album cover artwork; note how the original illustration differs from the album cover artwork on the right – Arthur Lee’s eye is looking a little to his right and the iris is without a black outline. Also, his mouth is closed because he was not smiling in the photograph the illustration was based on!
Bob Pepper who is also renowned for the covers of numerous Philip K. Dick novels, as well as designs for Milton Bradley's Dragonmaster and Dark Tower games, said:
“I got called by Bill Harvey [art director of Nonesuch, a subsidiary of Elektra], and he wanted me to do this rock album for Love. This was about the time when there were a lot of rock bands out there that were really good. But I didn't like Love at all. But I took it, and because I was heavily into Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and also into psychedelic art, I combined elements of all of that.
I put their heads together (using pictures of each of the five members that had been taken by an unknown photographer in the spring of 1967 - source: My Little Red Book: Love Day-By-Day, 1945-1971 by Bruno Ceriotti) and made their hair like a design element, and the skin color was, like, solarized, so that the shadows were green and the white part was red or something. And I put it on a white background and it was centred. And that record later became like an iconic record, because people used it -- you know, because it had a white background -- to do their cocaine things, or so that’s what I heard!
However, Bill Harvey changed my design. I mean, I guess he changed it. Because I had the lips on the main character closed, and then, when it got printed, he'd drawn a smile in there! And it didn't fit the sides of the lips. And that's the way it came out, and I didn't like that at all. He did it without asking me or saying anything about it. That's happened to me a couple of times; where an art director has changed my illustration.” (source: The Cover Our Tracks Interview by Lara Kristin Herndon, September 27, 2016).
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The actual writing of a song usually comes in the form of a realisation.
I can't contrive a song. – GENE CLARK
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