Stories

This is one of the first covers I ever made. In those days they demanded that you have certain things on the front of the record cover, like where it says stereo, the company logo and the type on the top. I tried to lay everything in so that it would be least conspicuous so that you could see Henry Diltz’s photograph in the best possible light.

You can probably tell that the band is not in the proper order here. A few days after taking this picture they named themselves Crosby, Stills & Nash. At the time of this picture they hadn’t settled on a name, so when we looked at the picture they were backwards. We all agreed that we would go back later to re-take the picture. When we returned the next day to re-shoot it, the house was gone! It wasn’t there. It had been bulldozed and was just a pile of timber in the back. Crosby says this is why people who don’t know him come up and greet him as “Nash”. This was my first foray into using the power of the band to get the record company to spend the money needed to make it right. At the time album covers cost like eight cents per to make. CSN cost a quarter per x millions of units and the company freaked out. Three of the owners of the label came out from New York and cornered me in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel to tell me in no uncertain terms that they weren’t going to spend the money. It was artist’s appeasement! The famous line was: “You could put a good record in a paper bag and no one would care.” In the end they did what I asked and in fact lots of subsequent releases by this label were printed on the same expensive laid finish stock.