Alan Mercer: Ernie, you really know a lot about how the record labels influenced their artists to use the in-house graphic department for their album covers.
Ernie Cefalu: The record companies in the late 70’s had given a lot of the album cover control to the groups to get them to sign. The labels let them decide who would produce their albums. They would not have to use staff producers. They wouldn’t have to record in the labels recording studios. The bands were given the freedom to go out beyond that. The same thing happened with album packaging. The labels would tell the artists they didn’t have to use their art department. They would be allowed to go to another company, but the act could get the album cover for free with the label, which was total bullshit.
AM: Free!?! Even I know that wouldn’t have been true.
EC: Lee Dorman, the bass player for Iron Butterfly and Captain Beyond exposed all that. They led him down the path and he saw what was really going on. The bands were really paying for this spread out over four or five different areas like instrument rentals, recording studios, public relations and touring.
AM: Of course.
EC: Pacific Eye & Ear only had one place to put the money. Here is what we do and this is what it costs. The labels would tell the artists they could get the artwork for free but in reality they ended up paying two and three times more. Lee exposed it all in the early 70’s. What I mean by exposing is he told other musicians. A lot of those musicians were tight with each other. It was a different market back then. It seems like it was smaller and less diverse. Iron Butterfly was a major band and Lee let it be known. The record companies were trying to control as much as they could, because they gave it all away. By 1984 the record companies took all the control back and what we were doing was done.
AM: So, by 1984 you were doing corporate work?
EC: Yes, we were doing corporate work right from the start. I was freelancing when I was working at Craig Braun. I have 8 or 9 times more corporate work than all my album covers. We would do 4 to 6 album covers a month, but we would also do 3 or 4 corporate pieces. I had Sizzler, Rockwell and Honeywell, some major corporations that we were doing work for. When the album cover work diminished, our corporate work took over as a major part of what we did.
AM: Did you stop doing album covers when CD’s started showing up as the major format?
EC: No, we still did album covers, just not as many. I’ve done album covers every year since I started. Right now, I’m working on an album cover for Burton Cummings and I’m also working on his second poetry book.
AM: Do you know about how many album covers you do a year now?
EC: I do about one album cover a year now and the rest is all corporate and that work is mostly marijuana and CDB.
AM: Oh wow!
EC: I started doing more work in that industry about 11 years ago. I picked up a CBD client 4 years ago. He had gone to a company called 99 Design where he had gotten a logo done and it was terrible. His product was good, but his branding sucked. It’s called Cali Born Dreams and I have pictures of the new products I designed on my Facebook page. It’s doing really well. 7/11 is talking about picking it up. All the convenience stores are starting to put CBD products on their shelves. There is a new strain of CBD called Delta 9, which has major marijuana in it.
AM: I can’t believe those convenience stores are selling it.
EC: The thing that sold Circle K and 7/11 is the beautiful packaging we did. I’m having a lot of fun doing that. I was also doing a bunch of stuff for Ocean Spray, so I still keep my fingers in the corporate world. I do as much work as I want. I’ve gotten older and I want to have a life too. I’m going to be 78 in April, and I’ve spent three quarters of my life working every day. It’s almost like having a mistress. Thankfully my wife, Bonnie is very understanding.
AM: Album covers aren’t what they used to be are they?
EC: No, now it has to be a box set to do anything. I did an old school box set for Alice Cooper and I did one for the Little River Band and it was fun. The Alice Cooper one took 3 months to complete. If a group puts out a vinyl now, it’s a small quantity so everything has changed.
AM: Can you tell me how the Bee Gees project happened?
EC: Sure, I hadn’t heard from Robert Stigwood in a few years, since I did the Jesus Christ Superstar project, and he reached out, out of the blue and told me he was working with a group and they needed a logo and I was the guy who could do it for them. I did the ‘Main Course’ album when he was managing them.
AM: The Bee Gees logo never went away, did it?
EC: No, it didn’t, and neither did Alice Cooper or the Rolling Stones. A lot of designers will follow trends, but I tired to do stuff that would be more memorable. I would love to do more music work, but actually corporate America is more lucrative. It is a little harder working with Nestle and Kraft where they have teams of marketing people and focus groups. With Rock n Roll you only dealt with a manager and the crazier you were, the more they liked it. There is a price to pay when doing corporate work, but the financial part is much better. In the 80’s when I said we were through, there were people coming out of art school willing to do an album cover for $250.00. Even the record companies were using them, so they got rid of their art departments.
AM: You did several covers for the same groups too.
EC: Yes, we did 13 covers for Alice Cooper and 8 covers for Black Oak Arkansas, but mainly we would do one cover for any group. The Rolling Stones never used the same person twice. I think that’s how they stayed fresh and current.
AM: Didn’t you create the George Carlin ‘On The Road’ album cover?
EC: Yes, George was great. I really liked working with him and Kenny Rankin. They were both on the Little David record label. That was owned by Monty Kay who was married to Diahann Carroll and a partner with Flip Wilson. Monty produced the Flip Wilson show. We became the agency for them. We did Kenny Rankin and George Carlins album covers. I actually worked with Flip Wilson on a book that never got published because Little David ended up pretty bad. George and Kenny left the label. They ended up going out of business. It was fun working with George. He was crazy. He would call us up at three in the morning and bring over some coke and we would do it and George would do his routines. It was crazy. Sometimes Kenny Rankin would come with him and play guitar.
AM: How amazing to get to hear Kenny Rankin up close and personal.
EC: Kenny and I were like brothers. I loved Kenny. He was awesome and died way too soon. I met Don Costa, who produced all of Frank Sinatra’s big hits, through Kenny. He was a real fan of Kennys, in fact he produced Kenny’s After The Roses album and he was getting ready to produce a new album for Kenny, but then Kenny was diagnosed with lung cancer and he passed away within a couple of weeks after diagnosis. He had written another album. I’m still friends with his son, Christopher, who’s actually now a producer. Kenny was crazy and when you put him and George together, it was insane.
AM: Have you thought about putting out a book?
EC: We have thought about it. I’ve got around 100 pages. It’s a dungball this scared beetle keeps pushing around. We’ve been fooling around for the last 5 years. We’ve got a format and it’s beautiful. There are already 2 or 3 dozen album cover art books and we are in a few of them.
AM: Then why do another album cover book?
EC: Well because it’s not just another album cover book. The book that we’re doing shows album covers and corporate work and how they intermixed at the same time. The same people who were doing album cover work were also doing work for Nestle, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Honeywell, Rockwell, Sizzler Steakhouse, we did a lot of crazy stuff. Flying Tiger Air Freight were around before Fed Ex and then they were bought out by Fed Ex in 1989. We did all the branding and messaging. We had logos and shirts. It’s that kind of stuff that will be in the book and show how we did more than just album covers. Pacific Eye & Ear was a lot more than album covers. If I have 350 album cover pieces of artwork, I probably have 2 or 3 times that in corporate work.
AM: That is so amazing.
EC: Finished art, sketches, comps, it’s this whole career of these artists who came together like Drew Struzan and Bill Garland and Joe Garnet. All these people came together at one time to do this stuff. The artists liked doing corporate too because it kept them on their toes. If you’re only doing one thing, you become pretty complacent and standardized. I can show you a thousand pieces of art and none of it looks the same. We were always different. Since we worked with young up and coming artists, they were willing to try different stuff. Bill Garland came out of the air force. He was mainly a photographer, but he was an incredible cartoonist. It was like working with a Disney cartoonist. He was really good and really fast, and he could also do calligraphy. When you look at the Lou Reed ‘Berlin’ album, all that calligraphy and hand lettering on the libretto is all Bill Garland.
AM: You really did have a wide range of clients.
EC: We were the agency for the Hari Krishna’s for a while because one of the guys that my partner, Tony knew back in New York came out to California to be a record producer and ended up joining the Hari Krishnas. We met up with him at LAX. They were out front banging music and giving people incense.
AM: I remember them in the airports.
EC: He convinced them if they wanted to connect to a younger audience, and get people into their religion, they should do an album. Music was selling a lot in those days. He had them build an incredible recording studio and we did the album and a bunch of their advertising. They made and sold incense that were called Spiritual Sky. They had all these devotes who stayed all day long and made and packaged incense for them.
AM: How in the world did you market that?
EC: We did a character called Snaz, who was a nose with ears and legs. He came from a planet where everybody burned incense while they listened to music. He came to earth to turn people on to how much better music became when you were burning incense. It’s crazy stuff.
AM: I can tell your creative team all got along with each other.
EC: Drew did all the cartooning. Carl Ramsey was our airbrush guy who did amazing airbrush work. Over the course of about 4 years, we all kind of learned from each other. Album cover work had such freedom. Everybody wanted to do album covers because it was fun. It wasn’t corporate America where you sit with marketing people and all these people who have opinions, and your ideas get beat down into something you never recognize. But the good thing with corporate is the pay. You will make 3 or 4 times more doing corporate work. I worked with Nestle for 30 years. We were their smallest agency. They worked with all the biggest agencies, but we got on their list. We did all the graphics for the Chicago Marathon. I worked in 5 of their 6 divisions. Their headquarters were in Glendale. It was a great learning experience for me. It’s been an interesting career and the book will show that.
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