The Band

Look at the picture and the nickname explains itself. The border is a deep russet, chocolate brown, and the photograph inside is printed in warm sepia rather than crisp black and white. It has the look of an old tintype, the kind of hand-held portrait a frontier family might have sat for, and it has been likened to a Matthew Brady Civil War-era photograph, matching the album's old-time, roughly 1865-era Americana themes.

The composition is unfussy and confrontational. The five men are arranged in a loose row, filling the horizontal frame, their bodies overlapping slightly so they read as a single unit rather than five individuals. Their coats and jackets read as dark, heavy, workmanlike. The faces are lit unevenly, some catching more of the flat outdoor light than others, which is where the guarded, almost suspicious mood comes from: the eyes keep refusing to give anything away.

There is no set, no props, no logo cluttering the scene. Behind them, the out-of-focus tangle of branches and the washed-out earth could belong to any rural winter of the last century. That negative space does real work, dissolving any fixed time or place and letting the antique tone take over. Where contemporaries were drenching covers in fluorescent chaos, acid colors and kaleidoscope patterns, this frame offers the muted palette of an old daguerreotype. The backward pull was the whole point: the aged look trades the psychedelic swirl of the late 1960s for antiquated imagery drawn from American folklore.

The only concession to modernity sits at the very top, floating above the photograph in the brown margin: the words THE BAND, set in plain, spaced capital letters. It is the sort of typography that gets out of the way. No flourish, no color, no attempt to compete with the faces below. The name is almost an afterthought, which suits a group that chose anonymity from the very start. Calling yourselves simply The Band is a refusal to perform a persona, and the cover honors that refusal by giving you nothing but the men themselves.

That anonymity was strategic, and the photograph was central to it. Early on, the public's only image of the group was this picture. There were no cartoon logos, no glamour shots, no dramatic staging to latch onto, just these five faces looking older and stranger than their years. The scarcity of imagery fed the mystique. If all you had was this one antique-looking portrait, the group became a puzzle, a rumor, a set of songs attached to men who seemed to have stepped out of the wrong century.

The cover also quietly erases where the music was actually made. Nothing in the frame suggests California, sunshine, or a movie star's backyard. The eye lands first on the faces, then drifts to the brown surround that frames them like an old photograph in an old album, then back to the eyes. The whole picture works because it does not invent a fantasy world; it simply photographs the present so that it looks like the past.

The man who made it was Elliott Landy. He came to the group through Albert Grossman, the manager who steered Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan, and who summoned Landy to photograph an outfit that, at the time, did not even have a name yet. Landy became the only photographer with genuine access to them during the making of their first two records, embedding himself with the group from Big Pink through to the Hollywood Hills. He shot the cover portrait for their 1968 debut, Music From Big Pink, and then this follow-up.

The cover photograph was taken by Landy in 1969 in the rain on a back road, John Joy Road in Zena, Woodstock, New York. He shot more than ten thousand frames of the group across 1968 and 1969, an immense archive of a band in the act of becoming itself.

The album's designer was Bob Cato, whom Robbie Robertson refers to as "Bob Cato, the album designer." Cato, who had also worked with Miles Davis and Janis Joplin, was the source of the "Brown Album" nickname, and the aged, sepia look was chosen deliberately to evoke a 19th-century photograph in keeping with the record's old-time Americana themes.

The music behind the cover was made in an unlikely place. The album was recorded in the pool house of a Hollywood Hills home rented from Sammy Davis Jr., a space chosen and converted into a studio because it had a large room with high ceilings. There is a nice irony in it: a record that sounds and looks like rural Americana, hand-hewn and timeworn, built inside a celebrity's poolside room in the hills above Los Angeles. The Band was released on September 22, 1969 by Capitol Records, its music described as roots rock, folk rock, country rock, and Americana.

This sepia gravity became the visual half of the DNA of what we now call Americana, the proto-genre the group helped invent. They have been called the fathers of Americana, and this frame is a large part of why the label stuck to their sound as well as their look. Landy did not invent a fantasy world for The Band; he found a way to photograph them that made the present look like the past, and in doing so handed a young genre its face, giving five men who wanted to be unknowable exactly the kind of portrait that would keep people staring.

Landy's wider work put him at the center of the moment. He also shot the album-cover portraits for Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline and Van Morrison's Moondance, and was the official photographer of the 1969 Woodstock festival.

The cover image was one selection out of thousands. Of the more than ten thousand exposures Landy made, fewer than about twenty-five to thirty had ever been published before his 2015 book, The Band Photographs: 1968–1969, which gathered the archive into a fine-art volume. His photographs of the group have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide for over fifty years.