A recent note from a Tradewinds fan about the design of a particular album cover took me back to the time I had begun recording with the band in Toronto in the late 1960s. From the inception, surrounded by all the American marketing concepts, I had given a lot of thought to making our album covers visually attractive; I’m referring, of course, to the vinyl LP days when the album jackets were some 14ʺ wide; good canvas.
Our very first LP jacket in 1968, done in a hurry when ‘Honeymooning Couple’ became popular, was simply a quick studio shot of the band, but after that they became more imaginative. For the second album, we had sponsorship from BWIA, and I came up with this idea of an action shot on a gorgeous Trinidad beach with us throwing BWIA beach balls in the air. The weather was good and the session went well, but I learned that day that to get good action shots, particularly involving several people, you need to take scores of photographs. We took about three dozen.
It was a mess. The prints showed photos of everything from people in awkward positions, eyes closed, shadows on a face, someone grimacing or backing the camera, or the BWIA balls out of focus – you name it – and we ended up with only one shot from the 36 that was barely passable.
For the third album, in 1970, ‘Hit The Road,’ and with the band on a roll, Martins had a more adventurous idea. I asked a talented Guyanese artist Ray Rix, living in Toronto, to do black-and-white line portraits of the guys (Ray’s drawings were superb) and we produced a stark black-and-white look of the band that I really loved. It was dramatic as hell. It still looks that way to me. But the head of the record distribution company in Toronto was aghast. “Your band plays totally Caribbean music; that design has no life; it will kill the LP.” He tried to get me to change it, but I persisted. As it turned out, he was right. The album died, and I learned to avoid that approach in the future.
A few years later, with Tradewinds now a household name in the Caribbean, we went up into the outskirts of Castries and organized a shot of us, in the garish uniforms of the day, sitting on a bench overlooking the stunning St Lucian harbour front. I also had the photographer capture us liming in a tiny roadside bar in the picturesque village of Gros Islet, with my good friend the late Bobby Clarke, and that went on the back cover. It was pure Caribbean small island ethos. It still feels that way when I look at the album now, some 30 years later. The jacket was showing you the same Caribbean I was writing about.
Sometimes a great idea for an album cover doesn’t work out, as in my attempt to feature Kaieteur Falls on one of the covers. We took off from Ogle one sunny morning with me very excited at the prospect of getting this dynamic cover photo, but when we got to Kaieteur we were met with steady rain, overcast sky, and, worst of all, almost continuous mist on the face of the falls. We flew back from that venture with not one picture we could use. It was a fun trip for all of us, but a photographic disaster.
Looking back, I have two favourites, and both of them took a lot of doing. In one, using the castaway idea, we used driftwood to spell out the word “Tradewinds”, in letters about four feet long, on the very beautiful Crane Beach in Barbados. The photographer was perched on the edge of the adjacent Crane Hotel property, some 70 feet above, and shooting down on us waving and leaping below like castaways. As is the case with almost any beach in Barbados, there were several tourists about that day; the sight of these gaudily dressed men, leaping about for no discernible reason and waving at nothing in the sky, must have driven several of them straight to the bar.
The other one I’m really proud of is the cover of ‘Caribbean Souvenir.’ The idea there was to design the jacket to look like a package in the post, wrapped in brown paper, tied with white string, and with all the requisite stamps and labels of a BWIA cargo shipment, but with part of the brown paper torn away (ostensibly by Customs) to show that the package actually contained an LP recording. Ray Rix also did the layout, and that cover actually won an award in some graphic design exhibition that year in Toronto.
In general, over the years, drawing on my lesson from the black-and-white cover, I leaned heavily on zesty Caribbean themes for the Tradewinds LP jackets. We used the female form, tastefully I would contend, in several of these showing some in extreme close-up, and, in one case, ‘Cream of the Crop,’ presenting a partial view of a bountiful Kittian lady wearing not much more than a heavy covering of cream on her torso. My mother, who almost never commented on aspects of my musical career, said to me on that occasion: “Boy, you have to do these things like this?” For one album, I used close-up shots of the bottom half of a bikini: one take from the front, for the front of the album jacket, and one taken from the back, for the, well, you get the idea. No names, no faces, just bikini bottom.
As I said – tasteful. In the mid-1980s, for an album of 8 popular soca tunes, the LP cover featured four young ladies who were Tradewinds fans in Toronto – a Kittian, a Vincie, a Guyanese, and a Canadian, all reasonably well endowed from the waist up, and the album was entitled ‘Eight of the Best.’ If you’re a double entendre person, figure it out.
My ideas for the next album? Well, the pirates have put a substantial dent into those plans, but we’ll see. I have to admit, though, I’m still grinding over that black-and-white drawing of the band. I’m telling you; it was pure drama.
