This is the first in a series of interviews with world renowned Graphic Artist & Designer Ernie Cefalu. As a young music lover and artist myself, growing up I was in awe of these album covers. It's such a pleasure and privilege to be able to talk with Ernie for my blog.
Ernie Cefalu is a contemporary artist and Senior Creative Director, currently working out of Southern California. He is known for designing art for music albums.
Cefalu attended the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) and graduated in 1969 with honors. Soon after, he started his career on Madison Avenue at Carolini Advertising, where his first assignment was to create the campaign and graphics for the International Paper Company's 1970 national sales meeting. His solution took the form of an elaborate, award-winning off-Broadway musical production, Dolls Alive. In the early part of 1970 Cefalu became an Art Director at Norman Levit Advertising where he created the Jesus Christ Superstar album and Angels in an agency shootout with the Decca Records account as the prize.
At the end of 1970, Cefalu joined forces with Craig Braun, Inc. in New York, and worked on The Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album as well as Grand Funk Railroad's E Pluribus Funk. Eight months later, in mid-1971, he opened a satellite office in California for Braun, the head Creative Director. There, he was the creative force behind a string of famous album covers for Alice Cooper's School's Out, and Cheech & Chong's Big Bambu. He is also credited with being one of the people to design The Rolling Stones "Lips and Tongue" logo.
Cefalu opened his own agency, Pacific Eye & Ear, in January 1972. Over the next 15 years, he created another 194 album covers for rock artists such as The Doors, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, The Bee Gees, The Guess Who, Black Sabbath, Jefferson Airplane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Burton Cummings, Grand Funk Railroad, Iron Butterfly, and Black Oak Arkansas. Cefalu's collaborations with then emerging illustrators such as Drew Struzan, Bill Garland, Joe Petagno, Carl Ramsey, Ingrid Haenke and Joe Garnet led Pacific Eye & Ear's quest to become one of the top album design companies in the country. Cefalu has 212 total album covers to his credit.
In 1985, Cefalu formed David Hale Associates and broadened his client roster beyond the music industry to include the food companies Nestle and Kraft. Over the next decade and a half, his work helped more than 20 brands in five divisions post double-digit sales growth. In 1990 he was retained by Panavision Motion Picture Cameras, NGK Spark Plugs and Rockwell International. In 1996, Cefalu also added retail chain Kmart, motion picture studios Paramount, Universal, and Disney, National Hot Rod Association and Valvoline, and Wolfgang Puck's La Brea Bakery. Before the end of 2010 Cefalu had expanded his client roster to welcome Fortune 100 companies InBev, Honeywell/Novar and Avery Dennison.
Today, as Owner/Creative Director of HornbookInc, the Internet's first virtual agency, Cefalu is retained by four Fortune 100 companies as their internal Creative Director. He continues to take on select, music-related projects.
Alan Mercer: You’ve been designing album covers and ads for a long time. You must really love what you do.
Ernie Cefalu: I love what I do. There have now been five generations since I started doing this stuff. That’s a lot of people. There is a site that is called Top Ten and they have the top ten of everything. They have a Top Ten Creative Directors for album covers and Top Ten album designers and I’m in the number one position in both those lists. What I like about this is it documents everything and a way that it will live on forever. Let’s face it, we all want to make a mark on the world. I feel blessed to be able to live forever through my work. My goal in life is to keep on making history so I don’t become it because it’s very easy to become history. It’s pretty crazy when you are in the creative end of life.
AM: Did you always know you would be going into graphic arts?
EC: I always loved it. As a kid I would wait for the Sunday paper so I could read the funny pages. I’d sit there for hours drawing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. For the longest time I wanted to be a cartoonist, but as I got older and realized what Walt Disney paid his animators I knew I couldn’t do it. He was very cheap. In elementary school I was the artist and in high school I was the artist, and I was always the best. I met one of my first mentors when I was going to San Jose High School. Our mascot was the Bulldogs and there was a Bulldog Studios that the art teacher owned. He had a special group of people that would do all the art.
AM: What were some examples of what you created?
EC: We would make the posters for the drama class plays or anyone running for class president needed posters we would create. The art teacher really took me under his wing. Even years after I graduated and was in college, he would have me come and talk to his high school classes. It was neat. He kept a binder on me and a few of the other people who went on to make art a career. I started out on the bottom rung and ended up on the top rung.
AM: It seems like you had an idea of what you wanted.
EC: Actually, I went into the army because I didn’t have a sense of what I was going to be. I did a short term being a carpenter and I joined the carpenters union. My father was a master carpenter so that was probably the happiest day in his life.
AM: How long did you last?
EC: After three months I said I couldn’t do it. I need to do something else that I’m good at and I knew I was good at art, so I put together a portfolio and went to Oakland to the California College of Arts & Crafts. So, again I started on the bottom rung but it was even worse because everyone there was an artist. Everybody there wanted to do the same thing I wanted to do and that was become an artist of some sort.
AM: How did you cope with that in your mind?
EC: It was hard because I was filled with ambition and ego that I was the best. It was kind of scary but I never had fear because I loved what I was doing. And I was following that dream. When you are younger people do try to disway you from being an artist. They ask who is going to pay you to sit there and draw? Get a real job. Learn a profession.
AM: Every artist goes through that.
EC: To make matters worse, advertising and design was at the bottom because we were the whores of the art world. If you were a fine artist, I couldn’t pay you money to change something on your painting. That’s the difference between a fine artist and a graphic artist. We will compromise our art for money.
AM: When did you realize you were going to be a graphic artist instead of a fine artist?
EC: It was in my junior year that I realized the only way I was going to make money was to get into advertising. I always liked design so my senior year, I took a lot of advertising classes, and I became the best. So, now what am I going to do with that? I decided I was going to go to New York. I was already freelancing in San Francisco and decided to stay an extra year because I had a few clients. If you are going to New York, you have to show them actual professional work, not school assignments. I was working with an agency called Walter Landers that was a packaging and trademark firm that would create corporate identity and it was on a ferry boat on the San Francisco pier. I worked on Dixie paper plates and cups. That gave me some printed pieces.
AM: You really were at the right place at the right time.
EC: For me, timing has been everything. You can be the best artist in the world, but if the timing isn’t right, you will sit there and that will be it. I know a lot of artists who are much better than I am, but the timing wasn’t there for them. You have to be in the moment and for me that meant going to New York. I had told my girlfriend that in probably 3 weeks I’ll be able to send for you. I’m going to bring the city to its knees. They are going to be awed by me and the value I can bring to them. The ad agencies are going to fight to have me come work for them. I had already set up some appointments with several agencies.
AM: You knew what you wanted.
EC: I thought we would be the King and Queen of New York, but after two weeks of all this rejection from all the appointments I had made, I called my girlfriend and told her I had totally misjudged what I was getting into. I think I need to come back to California. I have agencies that I already work with. When she heard what I wanted to do, she said, ‘OK, you can come back but I won’t be here.” I was like, where are you going? She said, “I can’t live the rest of my life with somebody who will run form the first bit of adversity they encounter. I can’t do that. You are running away, and you will keep on running away. Once you start that you will continue, it’s like lying. It’s very easy to do because it gets you out of the moment.”
AM: She was very wise.
EC: She was. I hung up the phone and I realized what she was saying and that was I needed to follow my dream. I was 22 and it was hard for me to understand that. Would she really leave me? I didn’t want that, so I went on one last call, and I got the job. Then three weeks later she was in New York with me. My dream was to work on Madison Avenue. That was the ultimate goal for any advertising person.
AM: You must have already had your own unique style.
EC: Peter Max was a huge influence on me, so my work did look more like California than New York. His art was the look for my generation. He was working with the Beatles. It was a reflection of the lifestyle that we were living at the time. The agency I worked for assigned me a big job of coming up with a campaign for their biggest client, an international paper company. They needed a theme and a design for everything. I didn’t really have the skills yet.
AM: That all sounds nerve wracking.
EC: There were going to be 500 people coming to this meeting. So, what was I going to do? I came up with a concept that I called Balls Alive. It was singers and dancers and skits. We hired Skip Redwine to write 10 songs about paper stock. So, we went and recorded the ten songs and skits. That became a souvenir for the attendees at the convention. The campaign was a huge success. We won a bunch of awards and the whole thing was on display in the Union Carbide building in New York City. In that same building was headhunter who placed artists with agencies. I got approached by this agent who said he had an agency who could use me. I loved where I was, but I was willing to go to an interview.
AM: Was it a bigger agency?
EC: This was a huge agency. It was my dream come true. They had great clients like Ralston Purina, Waring Blenders and Mixers and Decca Records. While waiting for the interview to take place, I realized I didn’t want to work there so when the president of the agency, Norman Levitt asked me what I wanted I lied and told him I was making $40,000 a year and I would need an extra $10,000 to make it worth leaving. He said that was more than they wanted to pay so thanks, but no thanks. I left there elated that I wouldn’t be working there and took a cab back home to Brooklyn. Then I realized I was going to have to tell my girlfriend I lied so that I wouldn’t get the job. When I got home, she greeted me with a message that Norman Levitt had called, so I called him back and he told me he talked with his partners and even though it was more than they wanted to pay, they wanted me to work with them. It was great because I didn’t have to lie.
AM: Did the agency want to place you with Decca Records?
EC: Norman wanted me in his office that Saturday to tell me about these two art directors he had in the office. Decca Records was one of his staple accounts. He had a good connection with them and was doing a lot of work. The two art directors had befriended the creative director at Decca, a guy named Bill Levy. They started their own agency and were taking Decca with them. Norman went to the Vice President of Decca and convinced them; they should have a shootout between the two agencies.
AM: That seems like a lot of pressure.
EC: I wasn’t afraid of a little competition. In fact, I welcome it. We went to the meeting with Bill Levy, but you could tell he was only talking to us because someone higher up told him he needed to do it. He wasn’t happy to be scrutinized by his boss. He told us about two English guys who created a very controversial album called ‘Jesus Christ Superstar.’ The assignment would be to come up with packaging and graphics. Then he asked when we wanted to present our work for consideration. Norman asked when were the other guys presenting? He told us in one week. This was on a Monday. I blurted out that we would present this Friday. I looked at Norman, who was biting a hole in his lip and clenching his fists. On the cab ride home, Norman tore into me. I was told the account was very important to him and what was I doing. You are only giving yourself four days to do this. In a presentation when I am competing, I like to be the first one because you set the bar and then it’s up to the other ones to surpass that. Norman kind of understood that and he didn’t speak to me for the next four days.
AM: You must have been busy coming up with a variety of ideas.
EC: I had five different ideas and the angels were one of them. I came up with an angel, but it didn’t seem quite right, so I made it symmetrical and put it in a box with Times Roman text, very easy to look at and sophisticated. I liked a couple of the other designs even better than the angels, but Bill Levy loved the angels. You could see his whole attitude change from being forced to see us to this could be something really good. I was feeling pretty confident at this point, but Norman was still pensive. The other guys did present the following Monday and Bill called us immediately after and told us he didn’t like what they showed him. He told us to come in and we could get started.
AM: Do you know what the other guys presented?
EC: The other agency took a different kind of approach. They felt like saying Jesus Christ Superstar was sacrilegious and there would be a lot of negative feedback. They had a drawing that looked like Moses and they called it Superstar. They dropped Jesus Christ and that was their whole pitch. Bill Levy was wise enough to know there was no way he could go to Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber and convince them to drop Jesus Christ.
AM: What an auspicious beginning designing album covers.
EC: That was the first album cover I did, and it was such a big one.
AM: I remember it was on the cover of TIME magazine.
EC: Yes, it was. When they launched the album, there was a live performance at St. Peters Cathedral with all the artists that were a part of the recording. I sat next to Time Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was an amazing time for me.
