As If Ako...

A few weeks from today will mark the fourth anniversary of the death of my friend Chikako Atsuta. Had she maybe taken a moment longer to leave for work on that brilliant August morning in 2004, Ako would have simply been 39 years and 202 days old. Instead, she perished beneath the wheels of a lumber truck on a city street while riding her bike to work, and those precious few years and days were all she got. Some of her ashes and bits of bone are buried under a bench overlooking the sea in her beloved Gloucester, Massachusetts. The rest of her earthly remains are interred at her family’s shrine in Osaka.

Ako, an artist, author and poet (and amazingly, incongruously, Tiger Woods’ webmaster), had just e-mailed me something she had written in the early morning hours of her last day. It was a short poem describing her feelings about the sterility of the sports marketing office in which she worked. Nearly all of it was forgotten in the grief of the ensuing hours, days and weeks, and especially in my own misplaced guilt over not responding to her message immediately upon reading it that morning (and by doing so perhaps delaying her just enough to take her safely out of synch with an anonymous, inexperienced truck driver). The opening line, however, carried more irony and coincidence than I or any of her friends could stand.

“The air is dead, and so am I”

Ako was the most passionate worshipper of art and the natural and spiritual world I have ever met, which made the manner of her demise even harder to accept. That evening I was reminded of the grace and magic of the world in which Ako was so enmeshed. As I was leaving to meet my best friend and his wife and daughter for dinner at the 99 Restaurant in Waltham, I found myself bombarded by the most spectacular hailstorm I have ever witnessed, and afterwards, by an equally unsurpassed sunset below the dark receding storm clouds. The temptation to begin the next sentence with the words “it was as if…” is as strong now as it was that night when I toasted her memory with people she didn’t know at a restaurant she would have hated.

Al Stewart

I just finished my third album cover for singer/songwriter Al Stewart, a design project that was very close to my heart. I usually tell some version of this story when I am introducing myself to new classes at CDIA, so I thought it might be a good idea to post it here. This piece was originally written for my friend Neville Judd’s website. Neville wrote Al’s official biography Al Stewart: The True Life Adventures Of A Folk Rock Troubadour , published by Helter Skelter in 2002.

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Sometime during the summer of 1974, a friend loaned me a copy of Al Stewart’s Past, Present and Future . I looked at the picture on the cover of that LP and, no lie, I told myself that I was going to learn to make photographs just like that, maybe even for musicians like Al Stewart someday. I had discovered photography earlier that year and had already decided that I would be some kind of professional photographer after graduating from high school, but it wasn’t until I saw that very well known black and white image that it all came together for me. I saw Al in concert for the first time at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia in early 1975, which was coincidentally the inauguration of his nearly 20-year partnership with guitarist Peter White. Just as coincidentally, a drummer named Steve Chapman opened for Al that night as part of Leo Sayer’s band.

After graduation I went on to drive a subway train in Philadelphia at night so I could teach myself photography during the day. Then came a stint as a camera store manager, 5 years as a portrait and society wedding photographer in Newport, RI, and, disillusioned by that experience, many, many more as a commercial and advertising photographer and designer in Boston. Throughout it all I continued to follow Al’s career over the years and never forgot the epiphany that he had unknowingly provided for me.

In 1991, I worked up the nerve to call Steve Chapman, now Al’s manager in Los Angeles (and Peter’s, who had started his own very successful solo career as a jazz guitarist). I asked if there was anything I could contribute photographically to Al’s next album. Steve said something like “what a strange coincidence, we were trying to figure out what we were going to do for that just the other day”. After describing an idea I had for a cover image, Steve gave me free rein to work with Al and Peter at their performance at the old Chestnut Cabaret in Philadelphia. The resulting images became the front and back covers of Rhymes In Rooms , and one of my teenage ambitions was happily checked off the list.

My career kept me pretty busy for much of the next decade, so it wasn’t until 2001 that things got interesting again. Peter and I had developed a friendship and he visited me one afternoon at my house outside of Boston that summer. Around the same time I sent some of my old concert photos of Al taken throughout the previous 25 years to Kim Dyer to use on alstewart.com. That led to an invitation to shoot Al’s Grace Cathedral show in San Francisco in November of that year where I met, unforgettably, Neville Judd. Neville and I hit it off instantly and he later hired me to design the package for the Live at Grace Cathedral DVD.

A few months later Neville fell ill while driving Al to a series of shows in the Northeast. Steve Chapman called that night asking if I could fill in as driver for the last week of the tour. Assuming it was actually just Neville having a bit of fun with me, I laughed at the thought of such a thing. Apparentlys the joke was on me because two days later, I stood in front of a hotel in Northampton, MA with his faxed itinerary in my hand and a big nervous smile on my face. A black limousine pulled up in front of me and out jumped Al, switching chauffeurs for the long haul to Philly and eventually New York. We had a blast over the next 5 days, and after finally delivering Al safely to his hotel in NYC, I called Steve’s office and told them that it was safe to take Lloyd’s of London off their speed dial.

After many more roadtrips with Al and a fully recovered Neville over the next few years, I was starting to feel pretty well acquainted with both of them. But I was absolutely unprepared for what happened next. I came home from work one evening in early 2005 to find a message from Al wondering if I “would like to knock off an album cover” for him. Neville had evidently filled Al’s head with exaggerated accounts of my design skills, so for the next month Al and I would talk on the phone most days and review design comps online. A Beach Full Of Shells was the result. ABFOS was later nominated for a media industry packaging design award, and was bumped out of the final round by, among others, the designer of Aimee Mann’s The Forgotten Arm . Had I made it to the final round, I would have been invited to the awards ceremony in LA. The industry legend who was rumored to have been on hand to acknowledge the winners that evening was none other than Storm Thorgeson, the creative genius behind Hipgnosis, the London design firm responsible for the cover of Past, Present and Future in 1974. That was a handshake I would have enjoyed, and, in the words of Maxwell Smart, I missed it by “that much”.

I figured that that was that, but Neville always has something up his sleeve. He called me earlier this year to ask if I had any interest in doing it all again. I said I did, and the next call was from Al. “It has to have a trireme on the cover this time”, he said excitedly, and after asking him 3 times to spell the word, I listened to a précis about Hanno the Navigator while googling like a son of a gun. Like many of us, standard equipment while listening to Al’s music for me was always an encyclopedia and a dictionary, but these days I need to be close to my MacBook’s high-speed internet connection when I see his name come up on my Caller ID.

I found some excellent high-resolution photographs of a reproduction of a trireme built by the Hellenic Navy on their website. With their permission I used one as the basis for an illustration for the cover; I ghosted some Phoenician text of a contemporary account of Hanno’s voyages over the image and mocked the whole thing up with the working title Hanno the Navigator set in a font named Herculaneum and sent it over to Al. He liked it immediately, and without going any further he said that it was exactly what he was looking for (in one take, even!). The rest of the work came together over the next month or two, with the last remaining decision being the name of the CD itself.

Al told me he was thinking that the name of the disc would be Sparks Of Ancient Light (with the perfect acronym SoAL) as I was preparing the final artwork for Appleseed and EMI. I loved it, and hoped he would stick with it. Everyone involved began referring to the project as SoAL, but then he changed his mind. “How do you like The Secret Life of Clocks ”, he asked me one afternoon. I did, I told him, but I was already trying to figure out how I would bring a clock into the trireme illustration. “But maybe it’s not in keeping with the look of the artwork”, I said, realizing afterwards that that sounded a little self-serving.

“Then how about Yesterday and Tomorrow ?” he asked.

It seemed I was in on the naming decision at this point and tried my hardest to be diplomatic but helpful.

“That’s good too, but…”

“ Lost Victories ?” He had a list, and was reading through them all.

“Interesting”, I said. “That might work.”

“ Rose Colored Morning ?”

“mmmmmmm…” I wasn’t sure what to say about that one.

“ Wet ?”

“At the risk of stepping out of line” I said, “ Sparks Of Ancient Light has Al Stewart written all over it. It’s the perfect combination of words and image, and it supports the material beautifully”

“I know” he said. “We’ll probably stay with it, but I’m just afraid it doesn’t roll off the tongue very easily.”

Obviously, he stuck with it, and I think it’s a great title. I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to contribute something to one of Al’s best pieces of work ever. And if I were standing on that awards stage in LA right now with Storm Thorgeson looking distractedly at his watch behind me while I ticked off a long list of those to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, at the head of that list would be Kim and Neville, Steve Chapman, my girlfriend and Production Assistant extraordinaire Jenny Chang (I dabble, but she really knows how to do this stuff), and finally, Al himself. This experience (and so many others like it) has been, for me literally, a dream come true.