The Story
I had a bit of success in 2015 with Brian Woodbury’s Pay Attention CD cover. That allowed me enough confidence with my graphic skillz to broach the subject of doing the art for Andy Faunch’s first album in 17 years, venice & beethoven. I played a lot of guitar on the album, and co-produced it with him, but I really wanted to do the cover art for it, too. Andy let me have at it.
Andy and I have been playing music together most of our lives, from the fall of 1978 forward. We were in bands that had a go at it, the most successful of which was funk pop rock band And And And in the mid-80s (not the more recent And And And from Portland, OR... not us). Given that we had to eat during those non-halcyon days, we got ourselves the archetypal day job: jobs taken just to make ends meet, and perhaps to grab a bite or two to eat along the way. Oh, and maybe pay rent...
When we first arrived in LA from San Diego in December of 1983, Andy responded to a help wanted sign at the corner of Venice Boulevard and Beethoven Street at the western edge of the Mar Vista neighborhood of Venice, CA. Let me have him tell it in his own words from the website that I built for Andy back in 2016...
that venice & beethoven title...
Nothing to do with Ludwig Van or that wet city in Italy, actually. My printing business, which I owned and operated for over 30 years, stood at the corner of Venice Boulevard and Beethoven Street in Mar Vista, an unincorporated city within Los Angeles. I never went to any other crossroads in Los Angeles for work after moving to the city in December, 1983. I grabbed a HELP WANTED sign off the window of a shop, took it inside, and got the job. Following that fateful decision, it all happened right there for me at that one corner for over 30 years. And still, I could never figure out how to cross the street without getting caught by the yellow…
All the audio tracks on venice & beethoven were recorded by me at Squeeger Studios, my personal studio in Redondo Beach, CA, while much of the digital and production work was done in my office at the corner of Venice and Beethoven during ‘downtime’ (hey, that’s my story and I’m stickin' to it…), a location I fittingly called Venice & Beethoven Sound.
I can’t tell you how many jobs I held down, and in how many various locations all around Los Angeles county at the same time that Andy ran that shop for dozens of years.
With Andy's buy off, I set out to create a dystopian version of Beethoven sinking into the canals of Venice for the cover artfor his album. The completed cover art for this project in particular has always felt like my most-influenced-by-Hipgnosis work (other than perhaps the spoof cover I did for Bret Helm's SMUG album, The Sharp Side of the Spoon, but that one was literally parody of the more-than-famous Pink Floyd album cover for their Dark Side of the Moon album, not an original work in the least). It just has that spooky, what's-going-on-here! sort of feel to me, not unlike the Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here cover from 1975 featuring that man on fire (which he really was!... crazy).
I had a subscription to one of the bigger photos-for-a-fee sites on the interwebs in 2016 when I was working on this cover art, so I rifled through many pics that I pulled down as part of my unlimited plan there, and put together this Led Zep Presence-like cover art from several bits and pieces from different photos (it was a LOT of work in Photoshop!.. I literally spent MONTHS making this cover... way more time spent than on any other project I have ever done, but I wanted to get it RIGHT, right?...).
Andy printed up CDs for this album, so this art of Beethoven sinking into the Venetian Lagoon and being observed by nonplussed tourists in a gondola was just the front cover of the package. I used a bit of map of the Mar Vista area for the back cover, which features the corner of Venice and Beethoven.
As a screen printer, Andy worked in the CMYK world of offset printing (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks), so I created the art for each panel of the album to feature one of the four colors in the CMYK model. The front, of course, was the CYAN panel.
Mock up of final four panel+CD art for venice & beethoven
During my work on the album art I also created Andy's ajf logo in CMYK colors.
Andy's cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) logo that I worked up during the creation of the v&b cover art (we used it on several of his subsequent releases).
FINAL:
Done. /\/\
