Frank Olinsky and The Blues.

When I was four years old my parents drove up to our new house in one of the bedroom “developments” that were creating the suburbs of the 1950s and standing on a dirt hill in the backyard was the 5 years old Frank Olinsky, and a lifelong friendship began. He was already showing an awesome artistic talent and then, as teenagers, Frank was the neighborhood music freak who introduced me to records ranging from the Monkees to the Mothers of Invention and everything in between. So Frank was an obvious choice when we needed an album cover for Blues from the Apple.

It wasn’t a particularly easy assignment. Tom Pomposello’s vision of the LP was to expose what was essentially an underground music in New York, the blues. So while Charles Walker was nominally the leader of the sessions, it was actually a kind of anthology album (Charles sang on only five of the nine tracks). Frank solved the dilemma with his usual blend of grace, class, and humor, and properly represented “The Apple” of the 1970s with an eaten out apple core.

Frank went on to start a studio I hired to create the famous MTV logo and he rightfully became one of the great album cover designers. Check out his work, it’s great (and his blog too, where he tells some of his best stories behind his designs).