Gary Panter blog

THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS

A lot of people are writing me asking about the album covers I did for the Red Hot Chili Peppers so here's the story.

The story starts with my friend Eric Greenspan. Eric is a lawyer in Beverly Hills. He bought THE ELVIS ZOMBIE painting from a show of my work at STEVE'S HOUSE OF FINE ART in Hollywood in the late seventies and thereafter we got to know each other and became friends.

Eric represented a lot of reggae bands and was always checking out everything and he started telling me about this new band and that they were the greatest thing and that they performed naked except for socks on their collective dicks and that they were funky and great. Soon everyone was talking about them. Eric became their lawyer and soon I got to see them play and they were totally great!

I lived on Beachwood Drive at the bottom of the Hollywood Hills and so did Anthony and Flea, I guess, because I would see them walking around barechested right into traffic with a lot of attitude and rudeness and spirit. I used to eat cheeseburgers at Raydion across from the Scientology building there on Franklin, with Teller, of Penn and Teller, and they walked by sometimes. They were always nice to me for no particular reason. Maybe they liked my comics?

I met Flea briefly at the opening of Penelope Spheris's film Suburbia in which Flea's performance jumped out. He was friendly always. He is a kind of Jimbo character.

Somehow, through Eric's influence perhaps, I was hired to do the first album cover. By accident it was a situation in which I knew many of the people involved; the art director Henry Marquez was a friend I knew through the illustrator Justin Carroll.

As an illustrator, particularly of record packaging, one is competing visually on a very aggressive field, so I am always trying to do something eyegrabbing. In the case of the Chili Peppers they are a knock-your-socks-off kind of experience with elements of the desert, California, Mexico, psychedelia, punk and funk to name a few, so no one held me back.

I went to see them in concert and at rehearsal and drew them and developed caricatures of each member of the band in a style derived from the Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth Monster hotrod plastic assembly kit and shirt designs from the early '60s. And from the monstrous caricatures of Basil Wolverton.

Normally, one would show a sketch and I did a sketch to base the final painting on, but I don't remember showing it.

The style of paint was like the paintings I was working on at the time which derived from the colorful off-register Mexican Wrestling posters I saw in Brownsville,Texas and Matamoros, Mexico in the '50s.

I did the line work over and over in transparent complementary colors in acrylic. Complementary colors, as we know from psychedelic posters, vibrate like crazy when they are next to each other and especially when the values of the color are close or match. So the colors jump around alot and they also look like they are made for use with 3D glasses. Almost anything looks neat through 3D glasses and so does this cover, but there is no depth inducing spacing attempted here. I worked on two versions of the illustration in color simultaneously in case I messed one up. One became more finished than the other and that's the one I turned in.

The typography was done on acetate overlays in black tape to indicate the elements, placement and color. Then turned it over to Henry.

Everyone seemed to like it OK.