In our world of music there are a small set of well-known names. Part of the lesser-known names are those who create the artwork for albums we cherish. Which names come immediately to mind? Probably Hipgnosis, most likely because the British design company hitched itself to Pink Floyd’s star. Maybe you even know the names of the head designers at Hipgnosis, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, too. But it’s safe to wager that the name Ernie Cefalu is even lesser known than most. We hope that will soon change.
The mainstream music press doesn’t often write about rock and roll art’s significance. Album covers used to be almost as important as the music inside. There were music lovers who bought albums based on the cover alone. The vinyl resurgence of the past 10 years is making all of this become a reality again. Tracking the history of album art, and the art of rock and roll in general, the big bang of creativity came in the late ’60s and expanded its glory during the 1970s. Take Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic, Cheech and Chong’s Big Bambú or Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. What do those seminal albums have in common? The album artwork and packaging sprung from the mind of one of the world’s most prolific rock and roll designers, Ernie Cefalu. Of course, Cefalu wasn’t alone in this; he grew his natural talent into a powerhouse company by the name of Pacific Eye and Ear (affectionately referred to by its acronym PEE). At its peak in the late 1970s, PEE had become one of the go-to design companies of the music industry.
Unlike other design firms, PEE formed a unique relationship with the music acts that they worked with; they rarely treated them like mere clients. Cefalu himself has maintained many of these relationships to this day. This is especially true for Cooper.
Back in the ’70s, Cefalu was part of the Alice Cooper Band’s close circle of friends. Cooper himself would dress Cefalu up as a ghoul for certain shows and parade him around onstage. And all these years later Cooper has nothing but praise for Cefalu: “Without the art of Ernie Cefalu,” says the shock rock icon, “Alice Cooper would have been just another faceless rock band. Our image played a huge part in the success of Alice Cooper, and Ernie created that in large part!” And Shep Gordon, the longtime manager/promoter of Cooper, has a response with more elation: “I love Ernie. I would do anything for him!”
CEFALU’S GENESIS
Attending art college in Oakland, California, Cefalu decided early on that if he was going to make anything of himself, he needed to move to New York City, the center of creative advertising.
“I was already freelancing in and around the Bay Area,” Cefalu says. “I also had family there, but in spite all of this, I knew I had to be on Madison Avenue. I wanted to work as an artist in advertising, I had no idea I was going to end up working in the music industry. In the summer of 1969, after graduating, I put together a portfolio, set up some meetings and flew out there.”
While working his way up at a major ad agency in New York City, Cefalu was recruited by an aggressive headhunter to join a smaller agency more affiliated with the music business. Cefalu had success with album packages, like the 1969 musical Dolls Alive! and Decca’s album campaign for Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, so there was no doubt he could deliver album art of exceptional quality. It wasn’t an easy decision to walk away from a higher-paying job on Madison Avenue to join an agency where he would only design art for rock and roll acts. But this agency, Craig Braun’s new firm, bustled with a young staff full of inventive ideas — and the agency had just been tasked with creating a logo for The Rolling Stones.
After Cefalu took the job with the Braun agency, he followed up with the creation of some of the most memorable album covers in rock history, as well as collaborations with some of the industry’s greatest illustrators, designers, writers and photographers. Cefalu didn’t stay in New York City for long, however. After about three months, Braun announced he was creating a West Coast arm of the company and wanted Cefalu to go out there and run it.
According to Cefalu, Braun did not deliver on any of the business he promised and started taking claim for work that Cefalu had created (i.e., The Rolling Stones tongue logo, School’s Out, Big Bambú and Grand Funk Railroad’s E Pluribus Funk coin cover). It was at that point that Cefalu and Tony Grabois, Braun’s vice president, left to start their own firm, Pacific Eye and Ear. Of course, the departure can be given a more colorful explanation, one that only Cefalu could deliver. “Craig was just full of sh*t. He started claiming that it was he, and not me, who had created all of these masterpieces. I hated him for that for so long. It was my hatred of Craig Braun that drove me to excel at what PEE was doing. Eventually, the truth has a way of finding itself. Shep Gordon really went to bat for me. (Note: See letter to NARAS on opposte page.) So did Alice Cooper.”
But, in the end, the switch excited Cefalu. “When we started up Pacific Eye and Ear it was the wild west, and we loved every minute of it.” Cefalu and Pacific Eye and Ear would go on to earn three Grammy nominations for the album designs of Big Bambú, Billion Dollar Babies and Five Dollar Shoes. When asking him to sum up his career with Pacific Eye and Ear, Cefalu says, “Pacific Eye and Ear was the little company that did! It is how I, along with a handful of others, through our art, like the music itself, left images for the world that will live on forever.”
This following article covers the stories behind some of the albums and art that Cefalu and Pacific Eye and Ear worked on. Some of this is from an ongoing book project, trimmed down for space in Goldmine.
THE ROLLING STONES – WHICH LOGO CAME FIRST?
There is nothing in the collective works of Ernie. Cefalu has gotten quite a bit of that reaction over the years, and the reason for it is that the Stones actually created different images. One was to have been used on the album, and the other was to have been used to merchandise jewelry and T-shirts. The way it ended up, however, is that the Pasche version took off because it was in much wider use. It appeared on the inner sleeve of and became known as the de facto image. Although, Cefalu himself believes Pasche created the better-looking logo. “I like Pasche’s logo better than my own; it’s more animated and has more depth to it. I get a laugh out of all this controversy, which by the way is great for business.”
