3 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 3 album covers documented under the "psychedelic art" design theme, all from the 1960s. These covers sit within the rock, experimental, pop tradition and feature work by Grateful Dead, The Moody Blues, The Zombies. 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.
Rick Griffin's Aoxomoxoa is only half the story. The front grew from a psychedelic concert poster into a dense cycle of birth, sex, death and rebirth; Thomas Weir's back-cover photograph places the Grateful Dead, family and friends beneath an oak at Olompali, turning the package into both cosmic mythology and a portrait of the band's real-world community.
Philip Travers was asked to visualize meditation for The Moody Blues' In Search of the Lost Chord. After struggling with the brief, he saw repeated reflections of himself rising in the recording-studio glass; that accidental vision unlocked the surreal ascending figure at the center of the finished sleeve.
Terry Quirk's hand-drawn sleeve for The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle grew out of a late-night conversation with the band—and its most famous detail, the misspelling of “Odyssey,” was not psychedelic wordplay at all. It was a mistake that became inseparable from one of the defining records of British psychedelic pop.