One album cover every other day for 25 years. John H. Berg did that.
Mr. Berg, who had never worked on a record album when he joined Columbia in 1961, was responsible in his quarter-century there for more than 5,000 of them, by musicians as diverse as Blood, Sweat & Tears; the Byrds; Lead Belly; Thelonious Monk; Simon and Garfunkel; Bessie Smith; Barbra Streisand; and George Szell.
Hallmarks of Mr. Berg’s work included stylistic ecumenicalism, cheeky wit, innovative typography and the frequent use of gatefold covers, in which the album opened like a book and yielded twice as big a canvas for artwork.
One of the best-known covers produced under his direction was “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” (1967), which features the backlit photograph, by Rowland Scherman, of Mr. Dylan in performance. In what was often described as the first marketing effort of its kind, the album was packaged with an accompanying poster, commissioned by Mr. Berg and memorably executed by Mr. Glaser, that depicted Mr. Dylan in profile, his hair a mass of brightly colored psychedelic whorls.
The design of the album won Mr. Berg one of his four Grammy Awards. (source)
“The Milton Glaser poster was assigned by me to go into Dylan's first Greatest Hits package (1967). The cover used Rowland Scherman's photo of Dylan's back-lit hair. That was the first time, to my knowledge, that a poster was shipped within a record package. The Greatest Hits album was cooked up because at that time Dylan was recovering from a motorcycle accident and couldn't produce a new album. An early sketch from Milton included a harmonica, by the way. That sketch is long gone. Of course the poster is on the cover of Milton's book.” - John Berg
Q: I’ve seen a rough version of the Dylan image that has a different silhouette and a harmonica, did the project go through many different phases?
“No, the silhouette is the same but in the original I had a harmonica. It was the art director who said you know maybe you can take out the harmonica and he was right. And actually this was the only solution I arrived at, which happens very frequently.” - Milton Glaser (source)
At Columbia, Mr. Berg’s job drew not only on his flair for packaging but also on his esteemed eye for selection. Assigned to create a cover for “Born to Run,” he found himself contemplating with distaste the sober posed photograph that Mr. Springsteen had chosen.
“Bruce showed me the picture he wanted, which I always describe as ‘John Updike,’ ” Mr. Berg recalled in The East Hampton Star interview. “He looked like an author, one of those back-cover-of-his-book pictures. I asked him to leave the stuff with me and I would go through the contacts.”
Sifting the images, by Eric Meola, Mr. Berg came upon one of Mr. Springsteen in a moment of candid intimacy, his face dissolving in mirth as he leaned on Mr. Clemons’s shoulder.
With that image, the album’s cover became one of the most totemic of all time. The design proved so widely recognizable that it was imitated, among other places, on the Sesame Street album “Born to Add,” with Muppets replacing men.
Mr. Berg’s calling often entailed the discreet art of diplomacy. For “The Barbra Streisand Album,” released in 1963, he needed to persuade Ms. Streisand to approve a photo of her face in shadow. He prevailed, and won a Grammy. (source)
Oh, this one won a Grammy too.
It equally entailed knowing when to use little or no photography at all — something he did in a series of albums by Chicago. Their design centered on the group’s cursive logo, which appeared variously carved in wood, worked in leather, hidden in the loops of a fingerprint, printed on a sepia-toned map and, in “Chicago X” (1976), a Grammy-winning effort for Mr. Berg, molded in chocolate. He had also created the initial design of the logo itself, intended to evoke the script of Coca-Cola. (source).
This one won Grammy, but others are equally amazing as well.
Great Pinterest board where you have all of them in one place .
John Berg died on October 11, 2015 in Southampton, N.Y. He was 83.
