The Velvet Underground & Nico
The Velvet Underground · 1967
Andy Warhol's simple screen-printed banana on a white background became one of the first interactive album covers — the original pressing featured a peelable sticker revealing a flesh-pink banana underneath.
Andy Warhol served as the album's producer (more accurately, he funded the sessions, lent his name, and largely left the band alone in the studio). His contribution to the cover was a simple screen-printed banana on a white background. On the original 1967 pressing, the banana was a peelable sticker — when you peeled it off, it revealed a flesh-pink banana underneath, making it one of the first interactive album covers. The peel-off feature was expensive to produce and was dropped from later pressings, making original peelable copies highly valuable to collectors (pristine copies have sold for thousands of dollars).
Warhol's name appears on the front cover more prominently than any band member's — it simply reads "Andy Warhol" beneath the banana. The band's name doesn't appear on the front at all in some pressings. This reflected the power dynamic at the time: Warhol was the celebrity, and the Velvet Underground was essentially his house band at The Factory. The band reportedly resented this arrangement but recognized Warhol's patronage was essential to getting the album made.
The banana itself has been interpreted in many ways — as a phallic symbol, a reference to drug culture (banana peels were rumored to be a hallucinogenic, a myth the band found amusing), or simply as a Warhol Pop Art object elevated from the mundane to the iconic. Warhol himself never explained the choice.
The original LP was one of the first commercially released albums to feature multimedia elements. It included a cover photo by Warhol collaborator Billy Name on the back, and some early copies included a poster.
Despite selling poorly on release, the album is now regarded as one of the most influential in rock history. Brian Eno famously quipped that while only 30,000 people bought the album initially, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band." The banana image has been parodied and referenced hundreds of times and remains one of the most iconic pieces of Pop Art applied to music. In 2012, the Andy Warhol Foundation sued a company for unauthorized use of the banana image, establishing it as protected intellectual property.