This is part 3 of my epic interview series with Graphic Artist and Designer Ernie Cefalu. He has just opened up his design company, Pacific Eye & Ear in Los Angeles. To read parts one and two of the interview click here and here.
Alan Mercer: So, you opened Pacific Eye & Ear. What was it like to start a new company?
Ernie Cefalu: We weren’t too busy the first couple of weeks so we were organizing and getting things together, then all of a sudden the work started coming in. The first job we had was the ‘School’s Out’ album by Alice Cooper. I didn’t get any credit for all the work I had done with Craig Braun, but Shep Gordon called my partner Tony and told him they couldn’t find the comp that Ernie created for the ‘School’s Out’ package. Some how that comp got misplaced or lost. Actually, I call it liberated.
AM: That’s a good way to describe it.
EC: So, Shep reached out and asked if we could help them. With Alice and Shep it was love at first sight. We were just right for each other. They knew it and we knew it. Shep wanted us to work with him and nobody at Wilkes Braun would know that it was me. We did it and it turned out great and he used us another 12 times.
AM: That means they loved what you were doing.
EC: We had so much to work with. I never worked on another project where we had so much to work with. Alice had so much like the make-up and the snake and the way he dressed. There was even controversy if he was a girl or a boy. There was no internet back then. That is what the DJ’s talked about. You could never get a multitude of opinions at the same place and time.
AM: You had lots of jobs pretty fast though, didn’t you?
EC: My partner, Tony was a really great salesman. He sold the Cheech and Chong package to Lou Adler and the School’s Out package to Alice Cooper and Shep. He wanted to keep everything pure and clean. He didn’t want anyone to be able to contest them. Craig Braun wouldn’t be able to say he had done the designs like he has done now with the Stones logo. Tony was about this is the work that Pacific Eye & Ear has done.
AM: Did you have to forget your past work?
EC: He said we could talk about the other work we had done but we couldn’t show anything not created by Pacific Eye & Ear. I said, are you kidding? I did the work. Why can’t I show it? That was one of our agreements.
AM: I guess he had his reasons for that decision.
EC: He was ten years older than I was and he was really smart. He graduated at the top of his class at 16. He was courted by the CIA for about a year to go to work for them. They flew him all over the country to Quantico to take tests, but he decided he wanted to be in advertising.
AM: That is so wild.
EC: So, we had the business open, the lights are on and the work just kept coming. It got to be overwhelming for me because I was designing, sketching and laying out and then Tony would present and come back to me and I would have to do the production. In those days everything was put together in a mechanical form on a piece of illustration board. You would lay everything out with the blue lines and red lines and crop marks and registration marks and the overlays where you glue it together. It was like creating a template and we populated the template. It got to be too much. We needed a production artist and there was this kid who lived down the street and he was a production artist.
AM: What good fortune you had.
EC: It’s kind of crazy when I look back at how all the people came to us. It was magical and destined to be. He joined us when we were working on the Jefferson Airplane ‘Long John Silver’ project.
AM: I remember that album cover!
EC: The package was constructed into a cigar box. There were directions on how to fold it up. The bottom was beautiful looking marijuana. Back in the day, people used to use a shoebox lid to clean their pot. This would allow the seeds to fall to the bottom. So many people have told me they had to buy another copy of the album because they wore out the cover cleaning their pot. It was constructed like origami.
AM: That is brilliant Ernie.
EC: I always wanted to make the music experience more than just that. I wanted it to be more than looking at an album cover and reading the credits.
AM: You certainly achieved that goal.
EC: The Doors album called ‘Full Circle’ had a zoetrope that you could pop out of two extra panels that were in the album. We worked on this with Ray Manzarak and it had 26 slits and animation on the inside of an embryo becoming a little boy crawling to a younger boy who’s walking and running to an older man and then an old man falling over and becoming the embryo again. It was the full cycle of life. The whole thing sat on top of the record while it’s playing, and you are seeing this animation.
AM: That is truly original and amazing.
EC: We were into making albums more than just albums. It really worked. We looked around after they came out and we saw other people doing what we were doing. We were working on two-dimensional album packaging with a three-dimensional brain. With Jefferson Airplane, all their fans knew they got high, so it was a perfect way of hitting their audience.
AM: Your marketing ideas were so out there.
EC: Pacific Eye & Ear would be considered an out of the box company today. The album covers were the biggest part of our success in the beginning. I never wanted to be known as the guy who did album covers, because I kept a foot in corporate America. Even though it was more constrictive and conservative, there was better money in it. The most expensive package we ever sold was for $5,000.00 and it was for Alice Cooper. 189 album covers were done under the Pacific Eye & Ear banner in fourteen and a half years. Look at the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album cover with an illustration by Drew Strezan, the most collected illustrator in the world, and I believe we got $4,000.00 for that. After our second year, we were really on the map.
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album cover illustrationAM: Can you tell me more about working with Drew Struzan?
CE: He has now done over 220 movie posters, but I gave him his first job. He was a painter who couldn’t find work. I had stopped seeing portfolios because it became too much. There was so much work. We were working 6 and 7 days a week. I could no longer take the time to look at portfolios. I already had everybody I needed.
AM: I guess that is a good thing.
EC: I wasn’t happy about that because I always enjoyed looking at other people’s work and maybe weighing in and helping them if I could and if they were really unique, I would give them work.
AM: Did you work with freelance artists?
EC: We used some freelance people but as we grew so did our muscle for art. We were growing at a pace that was really good, but that relied on me working all day and not looking at portfolios. Luckily, before I made the decision not to look at portfolios, I made an appointment to look at Drew Struzan’s work. I really thought I would just brush him off, but when I opened his portfolio and saw his work, it was like looking at Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo.
AM: Wow! How impressive.
EC: If you could look at their books, that is what it was like looking at Drew’s book. I could not understand how other people who had seen his book couldn’t see that, but they didn’t. He had just gotten married, and he had a young baby. He needed work. He actually told me that if I hired him, he would work for 5 days, and I would only have to pay him for 4 days. He was the kind of guy who could talk to you for 5 minutes while sketching and then show you the sketch and it would look like you were looking in a mirror. His work was breathtaking. We were destined to be together. I hired him that day. He did more work in an 8-hour day than most people could do in 3 or 4 days. I have 73 of his original pieces but we did over 150 more when you count the corporate work.
