Tributes - 1999

Bob Cato

Album cover artist and designer. Born New Orleans, 1923.
Died New York City, March 20, 1999, aged 75.

Bob Cato was a master of music-based images, helping to transform album covers into a serious artform. His paintings, collages and photos illustrated a variety of musical styles, from classical to swing, but his most important work was in the rock music arena. In a genre where image is almost as important as the music itself, he was one of the most important of the image-makers.

During the sixties, as rock was becoming more adventurous, Cato responded by designing or supervising some of the most intriguing album covers of all time. Gone were the smiling photo portraits and posed group shots which had been the norm - replaced by cover artwork that suited the music itself: fresh, inventive and often very unusual. Rock music would never look the same.

Though a visual artist, who was older than most of his audience, Cato's life would have impressed much of the Vietnam generation. A Quaker, he was imprisoned during World War II as a conscientious objector. After the war (and his release), he moved to Chicago, briefly studying under Hungarian designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, one of the foremost figures of the Bauhaus school.

Following Moholy-Nagy's death in 1946, Cato studed in Philadelphia with designer Alexey Brodovitch, art director of the popular magazine Harper's Bazaar. Brodovitch's innovative designs, using open spaces and Modernist artwork, would affect magazine and fashion design, as well as Cato's own work, for years to come.

After Brodovitch was injured in a car accident, Cato became his driver and cook, and subsequently his assistant at Harper's. Cato later moved on, working as art director for a few arts and showbiz magazines, while exhibiting his artwork at galleries.

He joined the recording industry in 1960, as art director and vice-president of creative services at CBS-Columbia Records. This dual position, which he would hold for 10 years, saw him supervise CBS's eclectic catalogue, from the mellow jazz of Thelonius Monk to the popular lounge music of Johnny Mathis. As well as himself, Cato employed some of the era's hippest artists and photographers to design these covers, including pop art masters Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.

Even classical music was not immune to his fresh marketing approach. Cato's own elegant cover to a 1965 Leonard Bernstein album, in which the maestro conducted the New York Philharmonic, used a photo of a pretty girl, superimposed over a shot of ocean waves. It was strange, but it worked, inspiring classical music marketers to use more such amorous covers.

CBS's rock music, meanwhile, was gaining pre-eminence under the flamboyant producer Clive Davis. Well before MTV and high-tech stage performances were part of a performer's arsenal, Cato's designers gave images to many "new rock" stars, including Laura Nyro, The Band, and Simon and Garfunkel. Cato himself would win two Grammy Awards, for the sunrise image of Barbra Streisand's "People" (1964) and the renowned semi-silhouette cover of "Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits" (1967). His most influential covers, however, were bizarre paintings, reflecting the psychadelic content of the albums. The sleeve of Moby Grape's "Wow" (1969), showing the band approaching a giant bunch of grapes by the seashore, is probably remembered more than the music.

One of Cato's most inspired decisions was to employ comic book artist Robert Crumb to design a cover for the grunge band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which boasted the high-powered Janis Joplin as their vocalist.

When Joplin met Cato about packaging the record, they easily agreed on Crumb, renowned for his almost demented artwork on the underground "Zap Comix". Joplin also insisted, however on the title "Sex, Drugs and Cheap Thrills".

"The title didn't seem quite right to me," Cato would recall. He suggested that it simply be called "Cheap Thrills". Joplin agreed, admitting: "I've always settled for cheap thrills anyway."

Cato left CBS in 1970, later returning briefly to the music business at United Artists. He continued to experiment with his covers, offering everything from abstract art (for Gene Harris's "Astral Signals") to collage (Clifford Brown's "Brownie Eyes"). He devoted his later years to fine art and photography, co-producing the book "Joyce Images" (1994), a collection of images devoted to James Joyce.

Cato is survived by his Australian wife, writer and art historian Kate Jennings, and two sons from a previous marriage, Eric and Marc.