Terrible Visual Puns On Album Covers
Or: “We’re On The Sleeve Of Destruction”
This article gathers together examples of that staple of LP cover design: the terrible visual pun. Many thanks to all those who have raked examples up in discussion over the years!
The preference here is for the niche and quirky, rather than platinum seller albums: the goal is terrible visual puns, so expect to see atrocious, not Hipgnosis. Strap yourself in.
Crushingly Literal Covers
Let’s start with images based on the entirety of a phrase, those examples where we get crushingly literal depictions of figurative terms.
For example, here’s Dance The Rock & Roll, a 1957 Atlantic compilation album:
You can see the same idea recycled on this 1973 album by Foghat (actually a same-titled album, but often referred to as Rock N Roll):
The 1974 album ButterFly by Barbra Streisand takes apart the expected meaning of the title, as underlined by the use of camel case:
And from camel case we can slickly move to the cover of Rain Dances by Camel, which instead of showing a dance to invoke weather gives us some very literally dancing rain. The child seems unimpressed.
Equally glum is poor old Buck Dharma on the cover of Flat Out. He’s out and about in his chrome-laden car, but he’s got flat tyres. He’s not going flat out, he got a flat out.
From flat out to far out; through this slightlydelic cover featuring a hinged skull, we can peer into The Open Mind Of John D. Loudermilk:
Dragged from obscurity simply for the sake of its dogged literalness, we have Hammond’Cheese by Ron Feuer. What the apostrophe is contributing is a mystery:
Another organist, Jack McDuff, wants you to Check This Out:
And, finally, the laconically stupendous cover of Smoking On The Bog by Spud. To interpret this, you need to be aware that “bog” is UK slang for “toilet”. Instead of the hinted-at illicit cigarette, they go fully literal:
Use of Homophones
Another set of visual puns rely on the use of specific homophones; two different words which have the same pronunication.
The artwork for Big Beat On The Organ by Jon Thomas is one of the pinnacles of this form:
But there are many other examples of art direction succumbing to the lure of such silliness. Here’s more inappropriately invoked foodstuff, on the cover of the compilation album Soul Direction:
In an equally fishy vein is REO Speedwagon — You Can Tune A Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish, where tuna fish and tuning fork are conjoined:
At least the tooth-grindingly awful food punning on the cover of The Wurst of PDQ Bach fits in well with the comedy content:
At last, we have an example that doesn’t rely on food/fish; Idol Gossip by Gerry Mulligan’s New Sextet:
Finally, using the creakingest of puns, here’s Florence Warner with Another Hot Night (groan):
Use of Homonyms
Equally fruitful are homonyms, which are two words that have different meanings, but are spelled the same.
Here, for example, we see the beatnikoid slang sense of “dig” confused with the more literal sense on the cover of Jonah Jones — I Dig Chicks:
On the cover of Dave and Ansel Collins — Double Barrel, we get one kind of barrel substituted in place of another:
Here’s a more obscure one: Grimms — Sleepers. The cover shows us a bunch of sleeping people (sleepers) who are at the same time visually acting like railway sleepers. Sadly this only makes sense in some countries, as in the US and Canada sleepers are referred to as “ties” — but that’s another visual pun begging to be made right there.
Different uses of the word “swing” are a favourite: a few examples, just the tip of the iceberg, are provided here by Joni James, Ted Heath, Ray Ellis, and Bud Ashton:
And in a similar vein, here’s Rockin’ With Wanda by Wanda Jackson:
Another source of homonym punning is the use of words as different parts of speech. A good example is Moe Bandy — Here I Am Drunk Again implying the verb sense of “drunk” in place of the expected adjective.
Pushing the envelope on the use of “catchy”, by working off of the related verb instead of the adjective sense, the cover of Catchy Rhythms From Nigeria is strangely compelling:
Finally, there are numerous “back” albums, using the cheap gag of taking the noun sense of instead of the prepostion, here represented by the unlikely quintet of Hank Crawford, Victor Borge, Nina Simone, Mike Harding, and Big Jim Sullivan:
Rendering The Artist’s Name
Another fertile source of terrible punning is using the name of an artist and showing it literally.
Westminster Records produced a series of weird and wonderful cover art for classical records; this visual punning reference to Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto is brilliant:
Robert Ellis Orrall — Fixation goes for the obvious Freudian pun:
And then takes it to a further level with the back cover:
The organ player Lenny Dee was a master of this game, turning out a whole series of albums that used terrible name-based puns; Dee-licious gives you an idea of how this plays out:
Likewise opting for “part of my name is part of the album title” visual punning is Tom Jones, with A-TOM-IC JONES (mushroom clouds on album covers is another topic for another day).
Are you aware of the singing career of Edward Woodward? Bad luck if so. Here he is in period apparel on the cover of the album Edwardian Woodward.
An even more tenuous name connection is Terry-Thomas’ album Strictly T-T, the motivation for which only becomes clear when you realise that T-T is an abbreviation for “teetotal” as well as “Terry Thomas”. There’s the cad, in his well-provisioned wine cellar, supping ruefully on milk. Cheers!
The opportunity for some trick photography was too tempting for the creators of Tommy Roe — 12 In A Roe:
You might think that’s a pretty bad name based pun, but… Chuck Berry Is On Top:
It’s all fun and games on Twist With Chubby Checker:
Does Bobby Taylor — Taylor Made Soul reduce you to stitches?
In a similarly fitting pun, we have Serge Chaloff — Blue Serge:
And here we see Russ Conway in the middle of Russ Hour:
There was no way Dennis Coffey was ever going to escape this treatment…
… but you have to feel slightly sorry for Peter Beveridge having the cover of his first album embellished with an arbitrary floating drink:
Sometimes it’s another artist’s name that gets the literalness treatment, as the hard-to-credit cover for Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf by Jimmy Smith shows:
And finally, achieving some kind of pinnacle of artist name literalness, here is the cover of Rune Gustafsson Plays Stevie Wonder:
Art Attacks
Another direction to go with visually punning covers is to mangle a famous artwork.
For example, we find the jazz fusion powerhouses Billy Cobham / Steve Khan / Alphonso Johnson / Tom Scott opting for an electrified twist on Whistler’s Mother for their album Alivemutherforya:
Similarly vandalistic is Simon Park — Venus Fly Trap, which uses the fly trap as a visual stand in for Botticelli’s original scallop:
And Allan Clarke — Headroom gives us some sub-Magritte surrealistic imagery based on another figurative/literal confusion:
A direct reference to another album’s cover art is provided on Heirloon by The Liverpool Scene, which riffs off of the famous Warhol banana:
The Pure Visual Pun
There is also a category of album covers that use pure visual puns, where objects stand-in for visually (or conceptually) similar things.
The KPM album Sleight Of Mind (composed by David Vorhaus) shows what is meant; it uses an image that is one of the zillion variants on “Blossom And Decay”, an artwork dating from 1860:
Another visual pun without reference to the album title or artist name, Non Fiction by Steve Kuhn employs a surrealistic juxtaposition of comb and crop:
The cover of Miroslav Vitous album Mountain In The Clouds uses a rollercoaster as a visual stand in for a mountain range:
Similarly, the spirality of shells is used to conjure up the idea of church roofs on the cover of Chants Des Églises Orientales by Ensemble Vocal Trajan Popseco:
More cartoonily, Hot Tracks by Buckwheat has reels of tape standing in for pancakes (this could maybe have gone in the “Crushingly Literal” section; I leave the taxonomical debate as an exercise for the reader).
Another audio analogy is laid on by Cameo on the cover of Knights Of The Sound Table:
The cover of Joni Mitchell — The Hissing Of Summer Lawns goes the heavily conceptual route, subverting the expected reference to lawn sprinklers with cover art showing instead an enormous snake in the grass (you can read the back story and analysis of the cover on her own web site).
The final word we give to Tymes Up by The Tymes, which mixes gravestones and a customised parking meter. And with that, we must lay this article to rest.
