His pictures were worth a thousand earworms
Bob Dylan’s backlit corona of hair.
The band Chicago’s logo embossed in chocolate.
Bruce Springsteen sharing a private joke with saxophonist Clarence Clemons.
These and other emblematic album covers of the late 20th century — Springsteen’s was even adapted by Sesame Street — stemmed from the imagination of John Berg. The Grammy-winning art director for Columbia Records died Sunday of pneumonia in Southampton, N.Y. He was 83.
Berg, who had never worked on a record album when he joined Columbia in 1961, was responsible in his quarter-century there for more than 5,000 of them, by musicians as diverse as Blood, Sweat & Tears; the Byrds; Lead Belly; Simon and Garfunkel; Barbra Streisand; and George Szell. He commissioned covers from some of the foremost artists of the period.
Hallmarks of Berg’s work included cheeky wit, innovative typography and the frequent use of gatefold covers, in which the album opened like a book and yielded twice as big a canvas for artwork.
One of the best-known covers produced under his direction was Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (1967), which features the backlit photograph, by Rowland Scherman, of Dylan in performance. In what was often described as the first marketing effort of its kind, the album was packaged with an accompanying poster, commissioned by Berg and memorably executed by Milton Glaser, that depicted Dylan in profile, his hair a mass of brightly coloured psychedelic whorls.
Berg had employed unorthodox packaging for another Dylan album, the two-LP Blonde on Blonde, released the year before. Its cover, featuring an immense photo of Dylan’s face and no type, opened vertically to reveal a nearly full-length por- trait. “The record would fall out on the floor when you opened it up,” Berg told the East Hampton Star in 2012. “Everybody wanted one, because they’d never seen that before.”
And Canadian content? In the early 1980s, it didn’t get much bigger than Loverboy. He described Get Lucky’s creation to the Cooper Union School of Art: “I commissioned the photograph. I wanted to pump as much colour into the cover as I could. We found the best pair of red leather pants but they didn’t fit any models. The photographer, named David Kennedy, had a 16year-old daughter. They fit her perfectly. Then we got an Argentinian male model, six foot five, and hired him on the basis of his big hands.”
John Hendrickson Berg was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 12, 1932. He worked for ad agencies and magazines before joining Columbia as an art director.
At Columbia, Berg’s job drew not only on his flair for packaging but also on his esteemed eye for selection. Assigned to create a cover for Springsteen’s Born to Run, he found himself contemplating with distaste the sober, posed photograph that the singer had chosen.
“Bruce showed me the picture he wanted, which I always describe as ‘John Updike,’” Berg recalled in the East Hampton Star interview. “He looked like an author, one of those back-cover-of-his-book pictures.”
Sifting through images by Eric Meola, Berg came upon one of Springsteen in a moment of candid intimacy, his face dissolving in mirth as he leaned on Clemons’ shoulder. With that image, the album’s cover became one of the most totemic of all time. The design proved so widely recognizable that it was imitated, among other places, on the Sesame Street album Born to Add, with Bert playing the Boss and Cookie Monster as Clemons.
Berg’s calling often entailed the discreet art of diplomacy. For The Barbra Streisand Album, released in 1963, he needed to persuade Streisand to approve a photo of her face in shadow. He prevailed, and won a Grammy.
His work also entailed knowing when to use little or no photography at all — something he did in a series of albums by Chicago. Their design centred on the group’s cursive logo, which appeared variously carved in wood, worked in leather, hidden in the loops of a fingerprint, printed on asepia-toned map and, in Chicago X (1976), a Grammy-winning effort for Berg, moulded in chocolate. He had also created the initial design of the logo itself, intended to evoke the script of Coca-Cola.
Other album covers created under his direction include Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water; Santana’s Greatest Hits, featuring a Joel Baldwin photograph of a bare-chested black man holding a white dove; and Underground, by Thelonious Monk.
Berg said that often, when the covers were designed, he had not yet heard the music because the album wasn’t finished, and so he based his design on the title or a conversation with the artists.