Jackson Browne's Late For The Sky

The Design of a Classic Album Cover
This is the story behind the cover of Jackson Browne's 1974 masterpiece, Late For The Sky.
The text is from Rich Wiseman's unofficial Jackson Browne biography "The Story of A Hold Out".

	Jackson was not too busy with the production of Late for the Sky to conceptualize, as usual, the LP's cover. Fancying art that would evoke the Belgian painter Magritte's Empire of Light series, he dropped in one day on Bob Seidemann, the photographer hired for the project, and tacked a poster of one of the Magritte paintings on his studio wall. "He asked me to duplicate it with a Chevy [in front of a house]," says Seidemann. "It was Jackson Browne's Los Angelization of Magritte."
	The photographer found an appropriate abode around the corner from his studio, in Hancock Park, an upper-middle-class L.A. neighborhood of large, older houses. Then he went about the business of snapping just the right dusk shot. "It took weeks," he recalls. "I wanted just enough light so that we could catch the edge of the leaves of the trees. If it was [too] dark those leaves would have disappeared into the night. One of the reasons the photo works so well is that it's photo graphically accurate. It's not painted in."
	Seidemann, however, had no luck shooting a partly cloudy, bright sky in Los Angeles to splice onto his moody house/Chevy photograph, confessing a slight inconsistency in the Los Angelization: "I got the sky piece from a nature photographer, David Muench. I think it's Ohio." (NB. It's actually Table Mesa, New Mexico - featured in David Muench's magnificent collection of landscapes "Nature's America". Seidemann reversed the negative so we see a mirror-image on the album cover).
	Jackson's notion led to a stunning piece of photographic art. In Crawdaddy's "Art of the Album" series, Douglas M. Coffin and John P. Sullivan devoted their first column to a discussion of the Late for the Sky LP cover "because it so skillfully exemplifies contemporary design's fascination with surrealism." Further: "It is...a definitive, yet tantalizing statement about the surrealistic element in design and illustration."

Browne was delighted with the result. Bob Seldemann: "I spoke to Jackson in 1980 and he told me he thought it was his favorite cover. "Of course, the triumph of the cover lies not only in the fact that it is arresting. The Chevrolet, empty house, and sky are Late for the Sky lyrical props (further, in the songs the sky serves as the album's most striking symbol of death/salvation); and the juxtaposition of darkness and light reflects Browne's lyrical juxtapositions of resignation and idealistic determination, death and rebirth. The photo, meanwhile, is forebodingly framed in black, also the color of the back side of the album Jacket. Lest the Jacket appear too funereal, a mood-defusing photo of a relaxed Jackson, almost smiling and looking as though he has a surprise to we share, occupies a small square of the back cover. In all, the jacket does justice to the stunning work of pop/rock art that lies between the grooves of Late for the Sky.

For further information, visit these sites

The Jackson Browne Fans' Home Page

Magritte Biography and Paintings

David Muench's Web Site featuring Books, Biography and Photographs

This site was compiled by Fred Taylor with thanks to Paul Treffner, Ken Collier and David Socher for their contribution. Thanks are also due to Russ Paris, Lilsheba and Everyman, for furthering the appreciation of Jackson Browne's work.
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