FEATURE:
More Than a ‘Muse’
The Unheralded and Underexplored Women on Classic Album Covers
__________
I have been thinking about…
some of the classic albums that feature women on the cover. Not famous and well-known faces. Many bands and artists did it as a way of either keeping themselves off of the cover or creating some sort of allure or sexiness. Whether designed to provoke some sort of reaction or a stylistic choice, we do not really know about these women. Of course, in some cases, the women used on the covers are not consulted with and then take the artist/band to task. One such example is the cover star of Vampire Weekend’s Contra. The press always refer to women on covers as ‘muses’. It seems like such an insulting and dehumanising word. These women help the artist to sell records and make the cover what it is. As Vanity Fair wrote about the woman on the cover of Contra: “Ever since she was 23, people have been using Ann Kirsten Kennis’s image to sell their products. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, she appeared in magazine advertisements, catalogue pages, and television commercials for a long list of recognizable brands, among them L’Oréal, Revlon, Fabergé, Parliament, Cuervo, Jordache, and Vaseline. She did looker ads and lingerie ads and bathing-suit ads too”. In 2011, The Guardian reported how Vampire Weekend settled with Kristen Kennis: “Vampire Weekend have settled their legal dispute with Ann Kirsten Kennis, the model who discovered her photo on the cover of the band's album Contra. Kennis won an undisclosed settlement from the band and their label, XL Records, while her photographer remains locked in ongoing litigation. Contra was already on sale when Kennis's teenage daughter spotted her mum's face on the cover. "I was like, 'Yeah, that's strange. That's me, many years ago,'" Kennis told Vanity Fair in 2010. The Polaroid was almost 30 years old, and Kennis didn't remember posing for it. Although a photographer called Tod Brody claimed she signed a release form in 2009, Kennis, now in her early 50s, denied this. She took them all to court, seeking $2m (£1.3m) in damages. Vampire Weekend and XL always claimed they followed proper steps to license the photograph, blaming Brody for any wrongdoing. Yet even if the photographer misled them, the court could still have found that they did not exercise sufficient due diligence, paying Brody $5,000 but not researching the photo's provenance. By settling with Kennis, the case against Vampire Weekend has been dismissed, Photo District News reports”.
It is a shame that the first example resulted in an unfortunate lawsuit. However, there is no denying that this photo helps make Contra’s cover one of the greatest of that generation. It is striking. It also afford us an opportunity to pay credit to the woman whose image was used. Not a muse. She is, instead, this incredible talent and amazing human whose story and work has been acknowledged and explored more – even if it was as a result of a lawsuit and backlash. Not only making such all legalities are followed, I do think artists should acknowledge this iconic and incredible women on covers. In terms of featuring women on album covers, Roxy Music are notable. Not in an exploitative way. Eight studio albums feature women. A decision the band made, it was almost like selling a work of art or a beauty magazine. Engaging listeners with this beautiful or sexy image. An idea of perhaps what the album would sound like. This article explores the women featured on Roxy Music album covers. I am going to include four examples. If their earlier albums featured unknown women on their covers (including fans), they had grown by the time 1975’s Siren arrived. Whether a famous supermodel or not, these women are part of music history. Part of some of the most iconic album covers ever:
“Roxy Music (1972)
Cornwall-born Kari-Ann Muller was a former Bond girl (she appeared in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) paid a scant £20 to appear on the cover of Roxy Music – a steal for the then-unknown band, whose debut album would go on to define 70s art-rock. Evoking classic glamour shots of the 40s and 50s, the Roxy Music artwork set the template for all future Roxy Music album covers, though Muller would retire from modeling in order to become a yoga teacher. She retains ties to the rock world, however, as she married Chris Jagger, whose brother has fronted a popular beat combo since the 60s.
Siren (1975)
A sign of how Roxy Music’s status had grown in just three years, they were able to encourage globally recognized supermodel Jerry Hall to pose as a mermaid for the cover of their fifth studio album. Ever the charmer, Bryan Ferry is said to have held an umbrella over Hall during the shoot, to ensure that her blue body paint did not wash off. Smitten, Hall was engaged to Ferry by early 1976, though she would leave him the following year for Mick Jagger, subsequently inspiring the Stones’ song, “Miss You,” and becoming the third Roxy Music album covers model to connect the band to Jagger and co.
Manifesto (1979)
Perhaps finding it hard to top Jerry Hall, when Roxy Music returned after a four-year hiatus they threw a fake party with a collection of mannequins – some apparently designed with the original Roxy Music cover star, Kari-Ann Muller, in mind. Look carefully in the background and you can see two human models: a pair of twins who were long-term fans of the band.
Flesh + Blood (1980)
Roxy Music went for gold with Flesh + Blood, which hit the top spot in the UK charts in June 1980. The models, staged to look like high-school athletes competing in a sports day javelin contest, were picked and photographed by Peter Saville, best known for his design for work for Factory Records”.
In some cases there is a bit of, well, controversy to the cover star. When it came to blink-182’s cover for Enema of the State (1999) and the nurse, they photographed Janine Lindemulder. An adult film actress, often credited mononymously as Janine. She is a member of the AVN Hall of Fame and the XRCO Hall of Fame. In that case, it was very much the band trying to be proactive and perhaps aim squarely at their target audience (teenage boys and those in their early-twenties). Even so, that is not me throwing shade. It is a phenomenal album cover and, rather than it being this mysterious image where the woman is uncredited, shining a light on Lindemulder means she joins the cannon of women who help define incredible album covers. Giving them a story and props. This interesting article introduced us to amazing women on phenomenal covers. Two all-time classic albums are defined by the women on them. Whether accompanying the greatest lyricist ever or a front and centre on a landmark 1990s album, it is their presence, image and gravitas that not only makes the cover timeless. We also get to discover more about them:
“Then there’s Suze Rotolo, immortalized on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), walking arm-in-arm with the Bard of 4th Street down a snowy Greenwich Village avenue. Unlike our other cover stars, Rotolo wasn’t a model but Dylan’s girlfriend and, more importantly, his cultural compass.
This daughter of Communist Party members introduced the Minnesota boy to modern art, poetry, and civil rights politics. She inspired the acerbic classic balled “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and showed Dylan there was more to life than scratchy old Woody Guthrie records. The cover shot, by Don Hunstein, captured young love in its natural habitat – though if you look closely, you can tell they’re freezing their artistic asses off.
The relationship between Dylan and Rotolo was more than just another swinging sixties fling. She opened his eyes to a world beyond folk music, taking him to see Picasso’s “Guernica” and French New Wave films. After hearing her talk about the murder of Emmett Till, Dylan wrote one of his first protest songs. Their love story ended after three years, but Rotolo’s influence on Dylan’s artistry was permanent. She kept quiet about their relationship for decades, finally breaking her silence for Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary, No Direction Home, followed by her own memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Suze passed away in 2011 from lung cancer.
Fast forward to 1994, and we meet Leilani Bishop on Hole’s Live Through This. Photographer Ellen von Unwerth recalls Courtney Love calling her with a vision: recreate the prom queen scene from the horror movie Carrie. The 17-year-old Bishop nailed the beauty-queen-gone-wrong look, complete with smeared mascara and that slightly unhinged smile. Apparently, the iconic pig blood was out of stock at the prop store.
The timing proved eerily prophetic – the album was released just seven days after Kurt Cobain’s death, with Bishop’s emotional expression capturing the turmoil surrounding the band and its frontwoman.
Von Unwerth and Love clicked immediately, bonding over drinks the night before the shoot while Love wore her signature schoolgirl dress. Though the photographer hadn’t heard the album yet (it was still being recorded), she trusted that “Kurt’s girls would produce something equally cool [as anything by Nirvana].” The shoot proved to be perfectly timed lightning in a bottle – and Billboard later ranked it #12 on their “50 Greatest Album Covers of All Time.” Bishop is now a podcaster and conservationist”.
I have been thinking that there should be a collection or exhibition of album covers with these amazing and diverse women. There are so many I will forget. Modern examples that have nothing written about them. However, this article lists a few I have already covered. However, they also let us know about the woman featured on the phenomenal cover for Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain:
“Along with George Clinton’s other band The Parliaments – who would later go on to become the fully-fledged Parliament – Funkadelic helped to pioneer the iconic funk sound of the American 70s. Their third album, Maggot Brain, was the last in a run of albums, before the group expanded into a funk collective, that were also heavily influenced by psychedelia. Its cover was the perfect blend of the two genres, showing a woman’s head screaming (in either pleasure or pain) sticking out of bare earth covered in roots. All very trippy. The woman in question, though, was the African-American model Barbara Cheeseborough, known for her Afrocentric image – and a symbol of the black culture that is inextricable from funk and soul music”.
Actor Tamarah Park was the model for REO Speedwagon's best-selling 1980 album, Hi Infidelity. Nataliya Medvedeva: A model, singer, and writer featured on the cover of The Cars' 1978 album, The Cars. Also, and an album cover I remember well, was Maroon 5’s Hands All Over. That featured Rosie Hardy: as a 19-year-old photographer, she took the photo of herself.
I guess there was a traditional for Glam Rock and Hard Rock bands to feature women on the covers. In many cases, we will never know who they are. I guess the motivation was, again, to create sex appeal or sell records that way. It does make me wish we knew more about these women. How many of them were ever named or given their dues? In some cases, a provocative or sexy image can be very artistic and classy. The woman on Pixies' Surfer Rosa album cover is not a single person, but the name Rosa comes from a lyric and the cover's concept was a flamenco dancer posing as a surfer girl. The image was created by photographer Simon Larbalestier and his friend, Rosa, who was the girlfriend of a friend of the band. At a time when so many album covers are bland and forgettable, it did turn my mind to the anonymous or under-discussed women who we know by looks but not by name. Learning more about them, I feel, gives extra depth to albums. Many people will have examples of their own. It would be good to know. From Roxy Music to Bob Dylan through to The Cars, Vampire Weekend and Hole, some of the all-time best albums have these incredible women on the covers. More than mere muses or cover stars, they are part of music history and tapestry. I still think there should be a documentary, exhibition or something that explores these women. It would be wonderful to…
KNOW more about them.