Synesthete: Tom Wilkes, 1939 – 2009

Grammy Award-winning art director, writer, and photographer Tom Wilkes, who designed album covers for George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Neil Young, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, and many others, died on June 28 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) at age 69. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times is available here. While still in his 20s, Wilkes became art director for the 1967 Monterey International Pop Music Festival, for which he created the festival’s iconic psychedelic poster (at left) that was printed on foil stock, for which he won an award from Reynolds aluminum for the most creative use of aluminum foil. Formally trained in graphic design, Wilkes was one of several Los Angeles area artists, including John Van Hamersveld, Warren Dayton and Art Bevacqua, who would eventually create concert posters. But Wilkes clearly was highly influenced by the posters emerging from the San Francisco Psychedelic Art movement beginning around 1966.

Wilkes’s now quite valuable poster for the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival obviously is influenced by early psychedelic art: its ornate lettering and highly symmetrical composition, for instance, is a characteristic feature of such art, as well as its collage-like, black-and-white insertion of a photograph of a young woman, gazing at some unseen person or thing off to her right, clothed in garb that would have been considered, in the nineteenth century, both exotic and erotic, her feminine figure surrounded by curlicue-etched cones that imitate, in abstract form, her pronounced breasts. Perhaps that assemblage of spirals is meant to be an ocean wave-inspired motif, given the festival location’s proximity to the Pacific, but they are abstract enough to suggest both rolling waves and female breasts simultaneously (music as a synthesis of nature and culture, both nurturing and nourishing?). In any case, the most pronounced and inspired feature, for me, is that fanciful, pop-arty, Duchamp-inspired necktie, invoking both Duchamp’s goateed Mona Lisa but which also gives the young woman a slightly androgynous appearance. The L. A. Times report quotes Wilkes’ long-time friend, Lou Adler, who observed:

“Most of the artwork in that particular culture was coming out of San Francisco, and what Tom did was he took a San Francisco look, or niche, and made it international,” Adler said. “You can see a lot of the posters from that period and say, ‘Oh, that’s the ‘60s.’ With Tom, it isn’t dated. There's a very special look to it.”

Perhaps what was most influential about Wilkes’ poster for the Monterey Pop Festival, though, was that it was printed on foil stock. That silvery sheen (ink, however, not actual foil) almost immediately graced several covers of rock albums released within the next year, giving each of them a vaguely psychedelic, or at least acidic, aura (none of which, so far as I know, were designed by Tom Wilkes): Steppenwolf’s eponymous first album (1968), Cream’s Wheels of Fire (1968), and the eponymous first album by Quicksilver Messenger Service (1968). The use of faux aluminum stock, in fact, has graced many albums over the years since.

His design of the printed and visual materials associated with the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 led to Wilkes’ career in the music industry, first as art director at A&M Records. He subsequently designed (or provided art direction or graphic design) for dozens of album covers (a list is available here and images of a few are here), some of them among my all-time favorites, including Beggars Banquet (The Rolling Stones), Harvest (Neil Young), Mad Dogs & Englishmen (Joe Cocker), On Tour (Delaney & Bonnie), and Concert for Bangladesh and All things Must Pass (George Harrison). He also took the famous cover photo of Joplin Joplin for her posthumous album Pearl (1971). The particular effectiveness of Tom Wilkes as an album cover designer was that he was a synesthete, explaining why his images always largely formed an enticing visual equivalent to the music to be found inside.