"Beggars Banquet," "Harvest" Designer Tom Wilkes Dead at 69

Grammy Award-winning art director Tom Wilkes, who helped design the iconic covers for the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet and Neil Young's Harvest, died of a heart attack in his Pioneertown, California home on June 28th, the Los Angeles Times reports. In the last decade, Wilkes also suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. Wilkes was 69.

Wilkes was also the creative force behind album covers like George Harrison's All Things Must Pass and Concert for Bangladesh, the Flying Burrito Brothers' Gilded Palace of Sin, Eric Clapton's 1970 self-titled debut and Janis Joplin's Pearl, which featured Barry Feinstein's photographs of the singer days before she overdosed, the LAT writes. Additionally, Wilkes notably served as art director for the 1967 Monterey International Pop Music Festival, creating many of the famed festivals' iconic posters and graphics. Wilkes won a Grammy in 1973 for Best Recording Package for his stunning pinball image for the London Symphony Orchestra's version of the Who's Tommy.

Wilkes "was able to capture a certain essence of what was on the record and the person who made it," Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke told the LAT. "The magic and the sort of importance of album design was to be able to catch the eye, to try and get a sense of what the music and the personalities were inside and also make you want to buy it," Fricke said. "You look at something like Neil Young's Harvest, the texture of the cover and that very simple, almost antique lettering, and you get a feel of what Neil was trying to do in that record, the honesty and the grit and the deep Americana of what that record represents now."

Rolling Stone continues to celebrate the underappreciated art of album cover design — check out more stories on LP covers here:

• Readers' Rock List: 25 Favorite Album Covers
• Album Covers: A Lost Art?
• Readers' Rock List: Best Album Covers of 2008
• Readers' Rock List: Best Album Covers of 2007

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Song Stories

“Too Close”

Next | 1998

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'" 

More Song Stories entries »

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