Awesome Album Covers: John Cale’s “The Academy In Peril”

John Cale - The Academy in Peril (Reprise, 1972)

In an era of digital cameras that are mounted in everything from your phone to the cup that holds your latte, the design of John Cale‘s The Academy in Peril brings back memories of those quaint days when taking a picture involved a bit more than switching away from your Facebook screen.

For the uninitated, those white plastic frames that appear on the cover of Cale’s 1972 release are “slides” or, as they were known in photography circles, “transparencies.”

In this case, the cover designer took a photograph of 25 transparencies, sitting on a table, then cut the images away to reveal pictures of Cale that were printed in the album’s gatefold. A tricky technique that could only work on the 12″ palette of the long playing record.

The designer who rubber stamped his name on the cover? Andy Warhol, who traded the design for the right to use Cale’s music from Days of Steam in his movie, Heat.

Every picture tells a story … find more Awesome Album Cover stories here …