6 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 6 album covers documented under the "1970s" design theme, all from the 1970s. These covers sit within the punk, rock, folk tradition and feature work by Gang of Four, AC/DC, Genesis, The Rolling Stones and others. Each entry below includes the cover artwork, the designers and photographers behind it, and a short story about the visual choices that defined the release.
Gang of Four's Entertainment! cover turns a familiar cowboy-and-Indigenous-American image into a blunt lesson about power. Jon King's deliberately rough design repeats the handshake three times, then uses captions to expose the exploitation hidden inside the friendly pose.
AC/DC's first live album got a cover as violent and theatrical as the band itself: Angus Young appears to have been run through by his own guitar while Bon Scott grins behind him. Art director Bob Defrin conceived the stunt, photographer Jim Houghton shot it, and gallons of fake blood turned a backstage gag into one of the band's most memorable sleeves.
Genesis filled A Trick of the Tail with a strange little cast: a thief, a nurse, the doomed Squonk and the horned creature from the title song. Colin Elgie drew them like figures from an old storybook, giving the band's first album without Peter Gabriel a visual world that still felt unmistakably Genesis.
The front of Exile on Main St. is not a photograph of the Rolling Stones at all. It is Robert Frank's older image of a wall crowded with sideshow photographs, pulled from the world of The Americans and turned by John Van Hamersveld into the visual center of a deliberately rough, taped-and-pasted package that made the Stones look like fugitives from polished rock-star imagery.
The quiet woodland portrait on Joni Mitchell's For the Roses was a compromise. Mitchell first wanted her own drawing of a horse with roses emerging from its rear on the cover, a joke aimed squarely at the music business. When the label wanted her face instead, she countered with a nude Joel Bernstein photograph. That was moved inside, leaving the serene outdoor portrait on the front — while the rejected drawing ultimately returned on a 2026 Record Store Day edition.
Early in 1971, before American Pie was recorded, Mediarts sent Don McLean to Los Angeles for cover photographs with George S. Whiteman. The session produced the album's unmistakable image: McLean behind a raised hand whose thumb is painted with the American flag. Whiteman is credited for both photography and design.