[Slowhand] Banned Record Covers: Blind Faith

[Kevin Wilson]

It's on the Internet somewhere, I never saved the link, anyway...

Bob Seidemann Interview

Musicom International | 1999

Originally from an advert to sell lithographs of the Seidemann artwork
during 1999.

Name: Blind Faith - Blind Faith

Artist: Bob Seidemann
Medium: Lithograph

Edition Size: 5000

Print Size: 16 3/4" x 16 3/4"

Framed Size: 27" x 29"

Item #: 261

Price Unframed: $70.00

Price Framed: $150.00

Plate signed by the visual artist.

Bob Seidemann: Detroit was burning. The police were rioting in Chicago.
Watts was being eaten by its inhabitants. One enormous cultural icon after
another was biting the dust, ground to a pulpy mass before the eyes of the
children of the radiant box. Lenny Bruce, Malcolm X, John Kennedy, Martin
Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and on and on.

There would be more, many more. Numberless units of our best and brightest.
A generation of bourgeois white kids would fry their brains on the griddle
of the cold war.

It was new car time. But they were junk so fast. Doctors smoked Camels.
Father knew best, mother knew her place in the electric kitchen and the bomb
would make electricity too cheap to meter. Jack Kerouac was off the road
now. Allen Ginsberg had made his run through the negro streets in search of
an angry fix. The man was in a gray flannel suit. If you didn't fit the man
would get you. Ask Lenny.

It was better living through chemistry. Pain was history. Why feel it. Your
doctor would prescribe a jar of Valium, mother's little helper. The whole
country was losing weight on Dexedrine by the handful. Jackson Pollock had
drowned himself in splattered paint and booze. The bastard couldn't paint
anyway. It was all plastic can't you see. Doesn't anyone see!

To a kid from New York, San Francisco was Oz. A fairy tale city of Victorian
wood. Ken Kesey was a government intelligence experiment gone wrong. He
would invent the acid test and fail it himself. With what was left of his
mind he took the Dead on a bus ride through a crack in reality and into
history. Many would join the dance at the Dog and the Fillmore. A dance of
longing, a dance of hope, a dance of love, a futile dance of naive
believers. God it was good. God it was brief.

It was nineteen sixty-eight. Last year was the summer of love. You could
stand on Haight Street and see the soldiers coming. They came in bright new
uniforms, their faces scrubbed and young. They came to see what Time
magazine was talking about. They would be shipping out in the morning and
the girls were beautiful. Oh the beautiful girls.

Nam was on. Nam was on with a vengeance. The soldiers would not come home
the same. None of us would be the same. We were all soldiers. They would
fight in Nam. We would fight at home. At home on that mushy battlefield of
our minds. The casualty rate was about the same.

The geeks came too. The lonely ones, the hungry ones, the ones without a
prayer. They were in search of their own salvation, in search of love. They
heard it was free. They walked and drove and clawed their way to the street
called Haight. When they arrived they stood with the soldiers and gaped at
themselves. It was not what they imagined. A mind was a terrible thing to
waste and their minds got wasted.

I was being on the "scene" because it was happening. It was ground zero of
the cultural revolution. How I managed it was by producing a handful of
photographs for a small poster company I was a partner in. The company was
founded by a raving poet with a hundred dollars and a picture of the face of
Christ, supposedly an impression on the veil of Mary Magdalene. His name is
Louis Rapoport, today he is news editor of the "Jerusalem Post". It was our
first poster and it was a hit. My work consisted at the beginning of
pictures of Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. They were impressionistic
and successful. Then I began making more far-out images depicting my scene
of the time, culminating with a rendition of Michelangelo's "Pieta".

Mercy master, spare me the Judeo-Christian symbolism. Americans carry those
symbols on their back like a hump and the hump burns like a fiery brand. It
was a portrait of the end of the scene. It was a picture of the end of love,
of death, and it worked. Buddha where are you? Carry me to the endless,
unremitting, unthinkable, unnameable. I would fly there myself but my wings
are weak.

Detroit was burning. The police were rioting in Chicago, cultural icons were
dropping like flies, the love generation had been kicked to death by CBS,
NBC, "Life", "Look" and "Newsweek" and I wanted out. I called Eric Clapton
in London to ask if he would put me up for a while. He did. I stayed at his
flat in Chelsea with a wild crowd of ravers. The party had been going on for
some time when I arrived. Other residents of the never-ending,
day-for-night, multi-colored fling were Martin Sharp, a graphic artist and
poet with an uncanny resemblance to Peter O'Toole, and the wildest of
ravers, Philippe Mora, a young filmmaker who looked like a cherry Peter
Lorre, and their handsome girlfriends. I bunked on a ledge under a skylight
in the living room. All of the London scene came through. It was wild and
wooly.

A year passed and I had my own room in a basement flat in the same part of
town with another bunch of ravers. The phone rang. It was Robert Stigwood's
office, Clapton's manager. Cream was over and Eric was putting a new band
together. The fellow on the phone asked if I would make a cover for the new
unnamed group. This was big time. It seems though the western world had for
lack of a more substantial icon, settled on the rock and roll star as the
golden calf of the moment. The record cover had become the place to be seen
as an artist.

I had sold my cameras in San Francisco after the "Pieta" poster because it
scared me so much, vowing never to pick up a camera again. The picture game
me the heebie-jeebies and the willies all at the same time. If you pinned it
to the wall, the wall would smoke. It was a picture of death alright. If I
was going to take up a camera again to make a cover for Eric's new band it
would have to be the antidote to the "Pieta" image, a picture of life.

It was 1969 and man was landing on the moon. Our species was making its
first steps into limitless space and I had a shot at immortality. That's
what every artist hopes to achieve, a stab at greatness to make something
that will last for a little while. To scratch an image on a wall and hope
the wall outlives him. The lights were on the curtain was going up and I was
coming down. Down from San Francisco. Down from the height of that lofty
battlefield. Down from "Dr. Strangelove" and "2001". The pop world was
awaiting the new pop idols and I had been asked to create their emblem.

Technology and innocence crashed through the tatters of my mind. Only a
thread of an idea. Something I couldn't see. Something out there just beyond
my vision, an impulse rippling through the interstellar plasma. I stumbled
through the streets of London for weeks, bumping into things, gibbering like
a madman. I could not get my hands on the image until out of the mist a
concept began to emerge. To symbolize the achievement of human creativity
and its expression through technology a space ship was the material object.
To carry this new spore into the universe innocence would be the ideal
bearer, a young girl, a girl as young as Shakespeare's Juliet. The space
ship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of
the tree of life.

The space ship could be made by Mick Milligan, a jeweler at the Royal
College of Art. The girl was another matter. If she were too old it would be
cheesecake, too young and it would be nothing. It was the beginning of the
transition from girl to woman, that is what I was after. That temporal
point, that singular flare of radiant innocence. Where is that girl?

I was riding the London Tube on the way to Stigwood's office to expose
Clapton's management to this revelation when the subway doors opened and she
stepped into the car. She was wearing a school uniform, plaid skirt, blue
blazer, white socks and ball point pen drawings on her hands. It was as
though the air began to crackle with an electrostatic charge. She was
buoyant and fresh as the morning air.

I must have looked like something out of Dickens. Somewhere between Fagan,
Quasimodo, Albert Einstein and John the Baptist. The car was full of
passengers. I approached her and said that I would like her to pose for a
record cover for Eric Clapton's new band. Everyone in the car tensed up.

She said, "Do I have to take off my clothes?" My answer was yes. I gave her
my card and begged her to call. I would have to ask her parent's consent if
she agreed. When I got to Stigwood's office I called the flat and said that
if this girl called not to let her off the phone without getting her phone
number. When I returned she had called and left her number.

Stanley Mouse, my close friend and one of the five originators of
psychedelic art in San Francisco was holed up at the flat. He helped me make
a layout and we headed out to meet with the girl's parents.

It was a Mayfair address. This was a swank part of town, class in the
English sense of the word. The parents were charming and worldly with a
bohemian air. He was large robust, she was demure. They knew the poet Allen
Ginsberg, owned a tenth-century manor house outside of London and were
distantly related to two royal families, one English, the other German. The
odds against this circumstance were astronomical and unsurprising.

Mouse and I made our presentation, I told my story, the parents agreed. The
girl on the tube train would not be the one, she was shy, she had just
passed the point of complete innocence and could not pose. Her younger
sister had been saying the whole time, "Oh Mommy, Mommy, I want to do it, I
want to do it." She was glorious sunshine. Botticelli's angel, the picture
of innocence, a face that in a brief time could launch a thousand space
ships.

We asked her what her fee should be for modelling, she said a young horse.
Stigwood bought one for her. I called the image "Blind Faith" and Clapton
made that the name of his band. When the cover was shown in the trades it
hit the market like a runaway train, causing a storm of controversy. At one
point the record company considered not releasing the cover at all. It was
Eric Clapton who fought for it. It was Eric who elected to not print the
name of the band on the cover. This had never been done before. The name was
printed on the wrapper, when the wrapper came off, so did the type.

This was an image created out of ferment and storm, out of revolution and
chaos. It was an image in the mind of one who strove for that moment of
glory, that blinding flash of singular inspiration. To etch an image on a
stone in our cultural wall with the hope that the wall will last. To say
with his heart and his eyes, at a time when it mattered, this is what I
feel. It was created out of and a wish for a new beginning. It was created
out of hope and a wish for a new beginning. Innocence propelled by Blind
Faith.