Jackson Browne
Jackson Browne - Jackson Browne (not a.k.a. "Saturate Before Using")
Jackson Browne says,
“I always thought of album covers like a shield, the way Indians would dream up, literally dream, or imagine, or think of their “thing” that represented them and put that on their war shield. We used to spend a lot of time in the desert and I had this water bag on my wall. Gary and I were discussing ideas over the phone and I said we could make it a water bag. Our generation knows what a water bag is. It’s a canvas bag, made of flax so that it expands, when you submerge it in water, probably in the tire trough at a gas station, then when you pass through the super heated Mojave desert the water evaporates through the radiator grill to help the car stay cool. On my bag it said Saturate Before Using on the back, it was a little instruction. When Gary mocked the cover up I said, ‘Gary, we can’t put that on there because people are going to think that it is the title of my album.’ Gary said, ‘No way, they never would think that. They would know that’s not part of it.’ After so many years of people calling it Saturate Before Using the record company finally believed that was the title and they put it on the spine of the CD.”
Gary remembers;
“When I made this cover for Jackson I tried to make it look like a real water bag. Using a black and white photograph of Jackson that Henry Diltz took, I created a high contrast image to give it a silk-screened look. The inside sleeve was a beautiful color shot of water printed on shiny paper. Later we had a billboard on the Sunset strip that was the front grill of my old ford station wagon with the water bag album cover hanging on it. It was cool.”