There are iconic album covers whose image strikes immediately and whose power endures ... then there's this.
It's the spectacular and much parodied artwork to the monster leftfield smash,"Nevermind".
A piece of art that came about by accident, as the original concept was a cover-shot of an underwater birth!
Later, after the final concept had been stumbled upon, a shot of a baby girl swimming underwater was almost selected for the artwork.
When Seattle indie artists Nirvana were recording their major label debut, they wanted the record to capture their very mixed feelings about buying into the corporate music machine and being seen as 'selling out'.
With the band moving from a heavy, hardcore-influenced sound to a more melodic, dynamic, less abrasive style, they wanted a distinctive album cover to go with it, and also one that could comment on their feelings about moving more mainstream.
After watching a TV show on water births, Cobain
drew a sketch of a baby swimming towards a dollar bill and thought something like this would make a wonderful cover.
After agreement on the broad concept of an image of a baby in the water, aquatic photographer and certified rescue diver, Kirk Weddle was contacted
by the art directors at Geffen Records. But only when they couldn't find a workable
stock shot of the original concept - an underwater birth!
At the time, Weddle shared a studio in old town Pasadena with other artists to help pay the rent. Among them was cinema special-effects creator Rick Elden.
Elden agreed to help out Weddle and. taking his newborn son Spencer (then four months old) along, he accompanied the photographer to a nearby swimming pool. There the shot of a baby apparently chasing a dollar on a hook was quickly created.
Rick Elden spoke to EchoPark about how the iconic shot was taken, saying ...
"Babies have a gag reflex. If you blow in their face, they hold their breath. I
blew in Spencer's face and put him in the water. Kirk was shooting 18 frames a second, so Spencer was in the water for about two seconds."
Spencer was put in the water twice and Weddle captured the two shoots on one roll of film. They then decamped for lunch at a nearby taco house unaware of the significance the images just created would have.
The dollar and hook were superimposed later and a seminal album cover was born.
Spencer Elden, now 22, is still introduced as the 'Nirvana baby' over two decades after the release of the album and has had to learn to cope with the extra attention his brush with fame generates.
He spoke to CNN on the album's 20th anniversary (see vid below) saying:
'When I am introduced, they introduce me as the Nirvana baby .... My dad was an artist rigging special effects for Hollywood. They went to the local pool, threw me in the water and that was it .... It was a friend-helping-a-friend kind of thing.'
However, there were no release papers signed by Rick Elden so neither he nor Spencer has ever received royalties from the image.
Unsurprisingly, Spencer has grown up to become a big fan of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana's music, telling CNN:
"Definitely, I like Nirvana a lot and there are no songs that I don't like - they all have a special place for people."
He has never met anybody from the band though.
Kirk Weddle's additional artwork used for the album includes underwater shots
of an infant girl and the band itself, photographed several months
later.
Nervous about only providing Geffen with only the handful of shots they were
able to snap, Weddle later went to a swimming class for babies and hired some
'models' there. He told
SPIN:
“We originally shot Spencer -- one dunk, give him a little shove, bang
bang bang -- and that was it, a half a roll of film. But that's a
difficult thing to deliver to a client, like, "Here's your one frame,
gimme my check," and it was such a dick shot. So I went to this school
where they teach babies to swim and offered $50 to bring their kids to
try out and $200 if we picked them as a model
This one girl was like a machine - couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, but
she would just motor around underwater. The labels saw the photos and
were like, ‘We want the dick, we want the dick.’ It was bizarre.”
And just like that, with a “we want the dick,” history was made.
In regards to the band shot, Weddle said ...
"It was in the morning, the band had been playing really late the
night before, and they just weren't into it. The weather was bad, and
Kurt (Cobain) was MIA for about two hours. Then he was laying unconscious
on the pavement at the side of the pool for a couple of more hours."
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