Book release party for
Alex Steinweiss, The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover
is on this coming Thursday night,
December 3rd, 2009 from 7:00 to 9:00pm

at the TASCHEN Store in Beverly Hills:
354 N. Beverly Drive   Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Please RSVP to: store-beverly@taschen.com
Space is limited!
http://www.taschen.com/

Exclusive Interview with Steinweiss book Art Director Kevin Reagan...

Greg Escalante in conversation with Kevin Reagan who is celebrating the release of his new book, Alex Steinweiss, The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover. This interview relates back to an article on Alex Steinweiss that ran in the January 2008 issue (#84) of Juxtapoz. (More info after the interview below.)

Greg - Kevin, Juxtapoz wants to congratulate you on the release of your book.  Can you describe what the actual physical book looks like?

Kevin - It's a huge coffee-table style book - 422 pages. It looks like a 78 album with different sleeves and pages with five or six records in it - that kind of proportion, with a fabric spine that wraps around the left edge. So there is an immediate connection with anyone who has seen a 78 record album.

Greg - What percentage of Alex's work is shown in this book?

Kevin - I went to Florida and started looking through his archives. Going
through everything that he designed and choosing for the book was really
difficult because there were so many incredible pieces. There was so much
work, it was really tough trying to decide what would make it into the book
- I wanted to put it all in! We tried to show some of his fine art. It was a
point of contention for him. He didn't want to be known just for the album
covers. He had not done record covers for more that fifty or sixty years at
this point. He wanted to make sure people were aware of the other work that
he did - and I began to understand why. He was an accomplished ceramicist.
He also did this series of beautiful collage assemblages. He went on
extensive travels with his wife in the '70s - to lots of amazing countries -
Iran, Turkey, Greece. He collected pieces from each country and then
incorporated them into collages for that country. He was also (and continues
to be) an accomplished painter. We wanted to make sure we slipped some of
that work into the book as well. If I had to guess what percentage of his
life's work is in the book - I would say, it is just the tip of the iceberg.
As an artist, he was prolific in the true sense of the word.

Greg - Wow. So maybe 10% of his album covers?

Kevin - No, definitely more than that - I would say it's 20% or 30% of his album covers and 10% of his fine art.

Greg - So, even though this book is gigantic, you wouldn't consider it the "catalogue raisonné" of all of the album covers?

Kevin - It would be impossible to fit all of the album covers into this book. If we showed them two by two inches in size, maybe. But the way I had conceptualized this book from the beginning was that I wanted to show the covers full size. They had to be as close as possible to the size of a record album cover for the full impact. That's the great accomplishment of this book - that you see these covers in their full glory. The reproduction is amazing - it has been printed on a multi color press  - there are no halftone dots. The quality of the color and the reproductions is stunning.

Greg - I know that Taschen knows how to put together a really good book, because I own all these surfing books. They did a book on LeRoy Grannis, and their book was so much better than any surfing book that's ever been made, because they really know how to make books. So here I had a book that I thought was really well made and a really good book, by the best publisher and then I saw how Taschen did theirs and it was like ten times better....

Kevin - Well, you know, I was conscious of that when I approached them for the deal with this book. I'd seen plenty of their books and knew that they were all about quality. They are really the Rolls Royce of art books. I went in and met with the creative director and I was pretty organized. I had a tight comp I presented of how I envisioned the book and its actual size including the idea of the slipcase. I mean making a great presentation is what I do everyday in the record business and I'm good at it. I was going for broke I realized but that is how I felt it had to be done. And to be perfectly honest I wasn't going to be willing to negotiate very much with the vision I had. It had to be like the classic full size record album of the time with the slip case, in a nice box. There wasn't a lot of room for interpretation. I also came prepared with actual samples of Steinweiss' work - of course dozens of his actual album covers, a logo for a barbershop comb company (complete with the comb packaging itself), this incredible round promotional brochure for Family Circle magazine from the 1940's, other various magazine covers, movie titles, logos - and several other things. All just incredible samples of this man's work. After my pitch to the creative director he gathered the samples and mock up that I had shown him and took them upstairs to show Taschen himself. When he returned he said "Congratulations, you have a book deal." They gave me a book deal right there on the spot! - which is pretty unheard of. The creative director said he had never seen anything like that. It became a very good day.
Greg - (Laughs) Yeah! It's kind of a miracle!

Kevin - It's unheard of! When I talked to people afterward they were asking me if I was excited and I said yeah I was really excited for Alex. But honestly I wasn't surprised. It's kind of a no-brainer, the guy is an incredible designer. It's amazing, historic!  I thought, well, if they didn't get it then it's just sad.

Greg - Everybody else has the opposite story - where they are rejected by like thirty publishers.

Kevin - Yeah, and the creative director said, "Look behind you." There were six or eight projects waiting for the green light and it had been over a year. So I left there very confident, but  I went in very confident. I'm just glad that they got it.

Greg - So what's next?

Kevin - Well, when I met Alex Steinweiss and the more I got involved in his work and meeting him personally and becoming friends with him... He literally let me loose in his storage unit with his son. I was like a kid in a candy store times a million.

I was uncovering album cover after cover and his fine art was amazing - it was better than I had ever hoped for. I knew what an incredible designer he was -  I didn't know he would be that well archived. He really had saved a lot of work. Once I started uncovering more and more work it was clearer than ever that this was going to be an incredible book. I had to go through hundreds and hundreds of album covers.

Then I was uncovering cigar boxes of sketches. That's a story in itself - his wife managed his studio for a while and she would save these little two-inch gouache sketches that Alex did for every album cover. He would just throw them away and she would save them and put them in a cigar box.

Greg - Thank God for her!

Kevin - Right! The day I started uncovering these sketches - from all the different companies he worked for... When he took on Everest as a client, he redesigned the actual record labels for all the LPs. Everything from that to the movie titles to all the little sketches for the album covers... You're talking about a whole other dimension. As a designer, you love seeing how other designers approach a project. Here were the original sketches, two-inch tissues in gouache, that were still stunningly preserved, even though they were just thrown in a cigar box. It was so exciting to uncover that. We made it a point to show a lot of the original sketches with the final result in the book. And I think that's a really nice touch - to see with any artist - how they approach a project with sketches. How they come up with the design.

Greg - How old is Alex today?

Kevin - I met Alex at a conference in 2003 - when he was 86. So now he's 92. The big joke for years now while the book's been in development is Alex saying "Am I even going to be alive when this book comes out?" I would kind of laugh nervously and then after I hung up the phone I would joke with the managing editor... I would say, "I hope he does make it to see this book come out!" Thank God the book is out now - he received the first copy a month ago.

Photo: Miguel Elizalde

Greg - What did he say!?

Kevin - I think he was just dumfounded at first. It's really tough to put out a book - all the work and the politics... It's a labor of love, you know. And then when you hear a 92 year old peer of yours say, "I just don't know what I did to have you come into my life - why you did this for me - it's such an incredible thing." He'll tell me he loves me like a son and then I hang up and I think, "OK - it was worth it."

Greg - I wasn't aware of Steinewiss at all, I had never heard of him. Then I remembered I had seen all those albums that my Dad had during my childhood. I thought there were 50 or 100 different artists designing those covers. I didn't realize that it was one guy who designed so many. He had such a big influence on our culture. Part of our culture is really his design style. When I think of the '50s and that design style, it was really a lot of what he was doing in the '30s, but it didn't catch on until the '50s. It was so amazing to find out that he was this unsung hero of design that you were bringing to the attention of a whole new generation of art appreciators.

Kevin - That's exactly how I felt when I met him. I was invited to this conference and they told me they were giving a lifetime achievement award to this man named Alex Steinweiss. I thought, "Who's that?" They said, "He's the man who invented the album cover." How stupid did I feel, because I had never heard of him! I thought, "Oh, really? Because that's what I do. So who is he?" They said "You'd recognize his work if you saw it." So I did a little research and I discovered that I owned several of his album covers. Any person interested in music and/or design, you end up collecting album covers... I realized that I totally knew who he was and I was excited to find out that he was still alive! The next step was that I emailed him and we became fast friends over our first correspondence. I thought that this was a fascinating story so I got myself down to Florida to meet him in person. Way before the show and the book. I had to meet him, so brought a camera man down to Florida and shot some documentary footage. My next phase in this journey is to make a documentary film with the footage I shot on that first trip. Luckily he is still with us! All I wanted to do once I saw his work from the beginning, which has become a complete labor of love and a personal mission, is to bring this guy, who's basically fallen asleep in the public eye for 50 years, to the attention of people who have never heard of him. He's gotten his accolades over the years - I always like to make that clear - he's received awards. He's a gold metal winner from AIGA, the lifetime achievement award, etc. But this was so long ago. There have been great articles written about him, but the one thing I wanted to do was to stir interest in his work way back up, and you know, I teach too (Kevin teaches Graphic Design at FIDM in Downtown Los Angeles: http://www.fidm.edu/). So there's this whole new crop of 18 and 19-year-old designers out there. I brought the book in for them to see and their jaws dropped. They were, like, "Are you kidding me?" On every level you see this book and it's beautiful - you open it and see this work... I said, "Look at this work, and these colors and look at these compositions. Look at the typography. And by the way, he's also an incredible illustrator. He did all of the illustrations by hand!" It's hard to impress a 19-year-old these days. I said, "This is the man who started it all." It's just come back to me ten fold on every level. Personally, spreading the word of Alex - it's almost like a religion now! I just wanted the book to be good enough, beautiful enough, to end up in Berlin, London, LA, and NY... In museums and for a whole group of kids that can go see it in their library if they can't afford to buy it themselves. And most importantly, to bring the name Alex Steinweiss into the conscious of American graphic design. He's a complete living legend, hero, icon - and we don't have many of them in the world of graphic design.

Greg - Is the book written in English?

Kevin - Taschen has a format that they follow, the book is in three languages - English, German and French. All the Taschen books are in three languages. I differed that layout to the Taschen in-house art department. It becomes very involved, especially for an outside art director like myself, even with a lot of design experience.  It's pretty formulaic at that point. You kind of let the music do the talking, so to speak.

You can imagine - every caption, all the text, everything has to be laid out and thought about. The managing editor becomes a real hero - they have to organize all this stuff, the captions and the dates and the references and the fact checking, etc.  It's a very involved process. We packed up, I'm guessing, 800 images - to be shipped to Germany to be reproduced for the book. Of course Alex was very anxious about that, because some of the pieces were the originals and irreplaceable. But the reproductions are pretty mind-blowing. I was blown away and I've been looking at these images for years now and the originals are gorgeous, the colors and everything. To even attempt that - that was always something I was worried about - but the reproductions are beyond my expectations. It's pretty beautiful.

Greg - Were you the only writer on the book?

Kevin - I wrote the introduction, since it was my project, my idea. But Steven Heller wrote an essay for the book,  he is a design critic and has worked with Taschen before. He put it in the historical context of what Alex's work meant in relation to the bigger picture. And I thought that was something that I could never do - it's way over my head. They asked Steven to do it and it's very interesting.

Greg - So he did the scholarly art writing to put Alex into the context of History and Art History.

Kevin - Yeah, he's the smart guy - I'm the art guy.

Greg - What was the most memorable moment that you remember while working on this book?

Kevin - I think it was about a month ago when they called me to come in and see the very first copy of the book. They had two copies - one was going to Alex and one was going to Benedict Taschen. It was very emotional. When you see something that you've been working on for this long, and you've met the man and all the things come together. The physicality of a major book like this. So when I saw the cardboard box that they ship them in and I opened it up... The unveiling was pretty amazing. I guess it's like seeing your baby for the first time!

Greg - It sounds like that is exactly what you are describing - it's like giving birth!

Kevin - It was a little longer than a pregnancy. Instead of nine months - it was more like two years! But it was like going to the hospital to see your baby for the first time! Oh my god - there he is!

Greg - Was there the worst, most doubtful, darkest moment? It sounds like everything came together well, but were there any low moments?

Kevin - Yes there were several. I would say that the whole process in general was draining. To relinquish control. When you have a great idea - to let go and have the in-house designer lay it out and not be able to cross every "t" and dot every "i"... You have to just step back - you brought this project to these people, and that's a great moment - but you have to just let go... It's hard to do when you do your own design.

This book came out of an idea I had when I first met Alex and he showed me the book that was published by Princeton Press (titled "For The Record"). And I thought that Alex deserved a tribute that was much more impressive than a small paperback book. He's one of the greatest graphic designers this country ever produced. So every time I saw that book, it kind of drove me to make this new book happen.

Greg - It's amazing that this is your first book and it's this huge $500 coffee table book, 422 pages - for Taschen...

Kevin - I did a couple books years ago for Chronicle, but I know what you mean. But when you know me - this is typical Kevin. I'm not even thinking of options - this is how it has to be. The guy's amazing, if they don't get it they are nuts. When I came home that day and people asked me "How'd it go?" I was like, "Well it was real exciting - I got the book deal on the spot." They were like, "Wow!" But what is a publisher going to say? No? It's not cool enough? That would have been fine too - I just would have had to try somewhere else or put it out myself.

Greg - Yeah, you could put it out yourself, but you never would have gotten the International distribution. That's your best choice.

Kevin - If you are lucky enough to be attached in a positive way to a big name - Madonna, Sonic Youth, Geffen - those names were important to me. And Taschen... If you are fortunate enough to work on a project that went well and be associated with a name like that - it's a good thing. You just ride the wave. Greg - you know that, you are a surfer - it's a good analogy for surfing! You wait for it your whole life and then you get on it. Was it worth it? You know, it was hard to be out there for that long, but you caught that great wave and you don't regret it.

Greg - We want to let people know about the book signing event that's coming up...

Kevin - We're promoting the book and they asked me to do a book signing for the limited edition deluxe copy of the book - the "Cadillac Edition." There are 1,500 copies at $500 each and they are all signed by Alex and numbered.

Greg - Will Alex be at the event?

Kevin - No, unfortunately his wife has some health issues and he doesn't want to come without her. There is also a real deluxe limited version with a limited edition lithograph of one of the covers signed by Alex. There are 100 of these "artist proof" editions and they are priced at $1,000 each.

So, I will be there to "personalize" the books. I don't exactly know what that means, because I don't know why someone would really want me to sign it. Even though it's my project...

Greg - Because you are the author! It's weird because it's signed by the artist... but you're the author. I'm sure if Steven Heller was around some people would would want him to sign it also!

Kevin - I guess. Sometimes when I give people CDs that I have designed they ask me to sign it. I always find it really strange - why would I sign a Madonna CD? They say, "Well, because you designed it." But I'll do what ever they want - I'll sit on it if they want me to...

Greg - So, when is the event?

Kevin - It's at the Taschen store in Beverly Hills on Thursday night, December 3rd, 2009. It's at the beautiful flagship store - if you haven't seen it, it's worth it to go in there and see some of the most beautiful over-the-top books.

Greg - Now that you did this book, we'll look forward to seeing further documentation in the form of a documentary film...

Kevin - I would love it - I've got to get on that. I'm very conscious of the fact that he's 92. I've got some footage and some still photography and if I can find the right people that can help me, I'm going to finish  up that documentary.

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From the Taschen web site - (http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/design/all/01099/facts.alex_steinweiss_inventor_of_the_modern_album_cover_art_edition.htm):

Music for the Eyes

The man who launched the Golden Age of album cover design

No. 1-100: Limited to 100 numbered copies, each signed by the artist, this Art Edition comes with an original signed serigraph print. Also available in a Limited Edition (No. 101-1,600).

"I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music." - Alex Steinweiss

Alex Steinweiss invented the album cover as we know it, and created a new graphic art form. In 1940, as Columbia Records' young new art director, he pitched an idea: Why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months record sales increased by over 800 per cent. His covers for Columbia-combining bold typography with modern, elegant illustrations-took the industry by storm and revolutionized the way records were sold.

Over three decades, Steinweiss made thousands of original artworks for classical, jazz, and popular record covers for Columbia, Decca, London, and Everest; as well as logos, labels, adverting material, even his own typeface, the Steinweiss Scrawl. He launched the golden age of album cover design and influenced generations of designers to follow. Less well known-but included here-are his posters for the U.S. Navy; packaging and label design for liquor companies; film title sequences; as well as his fine art. Includes essays by three-time Grammy Award-winning art director/designer Kevin Reagan and graphic design historian Steven Heller; Steinweiss' personal recollections from an epic career; and extensive ephemera from the Steinweiss archive, most of it never before published.

About the artist:
The father of record design is Alex Steinweiss, who in 1940, at the age of 23, single-handedly invented the album cover. He made thousands of classical, jazz, and pop covers for Columbia, London, Decca, and Everest and his modern designs graced the packaging, logos, and covers of dozens of distilleries, film studios, and magazines; earning him an AIGA Medal and the Art Directors Hall of Fame lifetime achievement award. Also a fine artist, Steinweiss and his wife live in Sarasota, FL.

About the authors:
Kevin Reagan is a triple Grammy Award-winning art director, also honored by the AIGA, Print, and Communication Arts. As former art director of Geffen, MCA, and Maverick, he designed packages for Madonna, Beck, Sonic Youth and many others. He lives in Los Angeles.

Steven Heller, co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Designer as Author Program, writes the "Visuals" column for the New York Times Book Review, and is the author of 120 books on design, illustration, and satiric art.

From the Juxtapoz web site -  (http://www.juxtapoz.com/Current/alex-steinweiss-creator-of-the-album-cover)

Arguably every artist in the world would love to be responsible for creating custom artwork to adorn the cover of a big release for a favorite band. Yet not much press has been able to shine a light on the beginnings of the much-overlooked innovator of the art form: Alex Steinweiss (covered in the January '08, issue 84, of Juxtapoz).

Steinweiss created the first album cover artwork Smash Song Hits by Rodgers & Hart, Imperial Orchestra under Richard Rodgers way back in 1939 for Columbia when music still came in plain brown wrapping. Boring! Now, at 90 years of age, Steinweiss is getting his well-deserved due respects. With an impressive tome due from Taschen, and a solo show of his works coinciding with an art-star-studded tribute exhibition at Robert Berman Gallery in Los Angeles, the album cover's prolific padre is enjoying his moment.

To date, Alex Steinweiss has not had a major exhibition of his work. Kevin Reagan and Greg Escalante have spearheaded the motion to find the perfect venue, settling on the Robert Berman Gallery. The exhibition will feature an astounding collection of album covers, posters and ceramic works from all stages of Steinweiss' prolific career.

Coinciding with the exhibition will be a tribute show, curated by Greg Escalante and Kevin Reagan, featuring art on 12 x 12" format by such names as Shag, Miles Thompson, Andrew Brandau, Lola, Raymond Pettibon, Josh Petker, Nathan Spoor, Tamara Guion, Jim Woodring, Cameron Gray, Glen Wexler, Thomas Woodruff, Craig Stecyk, Sergio Aragones, Sandow Birk, Ron English, and many more.
This exhibition gets its a kick start at an opening this Saturday, January 19th, 2008, a mere 69 years after Steinweiss' initial invention.

For more information on Alex Steinweiss: http://www.alexsteinweiss.com/

For information on purchasing original art by Alex Steinweiss: http://www.robertbermangallery.com/robertbermangallery/exhibitions/Green/steinweiss.htm
ROBERT BERMAN GALLERY
At Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue, Suite C2/D5
Santa Monica, California 90404
D5 Tel: 310.315.1937 / C2 Tel: 310.315.9506 / Fax: 310.315.9508
Email: berman@artnet.net
Web: www.robertbermangallery.com