The Stories Behind Six Iconic Album Cover Shots Taken in America—and Where to Recreate Them

In the early days of vinyl records, album covers were nothing more than a safety feature, blank paper jackets meant to protect the fragile content inside. That is, until, designer Alex Steinweiss at Columbia Records decided to photograph the Imperial Theater in New York City to fill the blank canvas encompassing the 1940 album Smash Hits by Rodgers & Hart—and permanently altered the face of music consumption.

Since then, countless cover shots—the visual identities of formative albums—have been photographed across the United States. The country’s dynamic cityscapes and diverse terrain adorn records and the galleries of music populating streaming platforms. Whether decorated with a photo of a bustling subway stop or a striking Andy Warhol painting, album cover designs can constitute masterpieces in their own right, amplifying the artistry of the music they envelop.

Six photographers help us unwrap the stories of iconic American album covers and pinpoint the exact locations where they were captured.

KISS, Dressed to Kill

KISS’s now-famous cover shot for their third studio album, Dressed to Kill, released in 1975, was a fluke. Photographer Bob Gruen didn’t intend to capture any album promotional materials. A new album had yet to be recorded. KISS was instead working on a photo novella for Creem magazine, playing the protagonists of a comic strip made entirely of photographs.

According to Gruen, the storyline followed KISS, still in full makeup, disguised as normal city dwellers. Clad in suits and ties, the band discovers that a “boring” John Cleveland (a cheeky play on John Denver) concert was occurring in New York City. They would need to ditch their costumes and “save the world with rock and roll.”

Band members Gene Simmons and Ace Frehley showed up to the shoot without formal attire—so they borrowed Gruen’s.

“Gene looks like a monster because my suit is three sizes too small for him,” says Gruen. “It comes up halfway to his arms and legs, and he looks like the Hulk.”

With Frehley squeezed into a pair of Gruen’s loafers and Simmons shoved into Gruen’s ex-wife’s clogs, the band ventured through the New York subway system. As the band emerged out of one station before heading to another, Gruen suggested they stop on the street to snap a few transition photos for the spread. The spontaneous shot of the band crowded around an ordinary street corner ended up far outside the pages of the magazine feature.

“The picture was not meant to be a statement. It was just part of a story, one picture to add to the panel in case we wanted to use it. Turns out the picture was pretty good!” says Gruen.

Though the photos were taken in the fall of 1974, Creem magazine released the full photo novella in early 1975, right as the band was in the midst of recording their next album. KISS loved the photos so much that they decided to shape their entire album concept around the false identity storyline, down to the name of the record itself: Dressed to Kill.

Positioned at the southwest corner of the intersection of West 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, the lamp post still marks the spot where the incognito KISS members gathered.

“There are almost no pictures of KISS wearing anything other than their KISS outfits,” says Gruen. “If you ask any huge fan of KISS, the one picture they remember is the Dressed to Kill shot, because it’s so unusual.”

Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

The soaring, intricately shaped towers seen on the front cover of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot are at the heart of the city of Chicago, just as Chicago is at the heart of Wilco.

“[Yankee Hotel Foxtrot] was a very hometown record for Jeff Tweedy, and a lot of the things that he was writing were about the experience of living and working in Chicago,” says photographer Sam Jones. “We talked about how to make the city a character on the record. So, I just started spending a little time going around the city and taking pictures.”

Fascinated with the Chicago skyline, Jones boarded a Chicago River architecture tour. From the top deck of the tour boat, he shot the 65-story apartment towers, the pair of buildings looming over 300 North State Street in Chicago’s River North neighborhood.

“The nickname I heard for them was the ‘Corncob Towers,’ and I thought that was a great confluence between how Wilco had come from a more rural place, but here they were making this very modern, urban kind of record. It seemed like a great dichotomy,” says Jones.

Wilco leader Tweedy loved the photograph and chose it as the 2002 album cover, the unique yet familiar towers reflective of the band’s stark sonic departure from alt-country to eclectic, psychedelic indie-rock, while still holding their origins dear. Now, the officially named Marina Towers have taken on another moniker: the “Wilco Towers.”

“At the time, I had no grand illusions that I could go out and pick the album cover. It was just me being fascinated with Chicago,” says Jones. “I think some of the greatest things in life come that way, where you follow a little seed of curiosity.”

Beastie Boys, Paul’s Boutique

The Beastie Boys’ sophomore album Paul’s Boutique, released in 1989, was initially considered a commercial failure, a lackluster follow-up to their breakout debut album. But, as the album has aged, it’s become an acclaimed hip-hop achievement, celebrated for its adventurous sampling and unpredictable production among critics and fans alike.

Though the album was made in California, its cover art was taken in New York, where the band, and their album cover photographer Jeremy Shatan, had grown up. Shatan had been friends with members of the Beastie Boys since high school; he was in another band with Michael Diamond, Kate Schellenbach and John Berry before they split off to form the Beastie Boys.

The band enlisted Shatan, a recent photography graduate, to capture a panoramic photo of Lee’s Sportwear, the clothing store that they would temporarily turn into Paul’s Boutique. A makeshift, fictional store, Paul’s Boutique was complete with a bespoke sign that hung from the store’s rooftop, stacks of clothing and vinyl records, and piles of curated pop culture detritus, anything that was “either important to them or kind of a joke,” according to Shatan.

“None of this was legal. There were no streets blocked off, but it was just kind of a nowhere area. It’s just a real slice of life. It was uncut New York,” says Shatan.

Shatan, with the help of assistant Matt Cohen, took the shot on a massive, rented panoramic camera, stationed at the intersection of Ludlow Street and Rivington Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. While the discount clothing store is now long gone, the album cover photograph remains a time capsule of late ’80s New York and the unapologetic hip-hop that emerged from its streets.

“It was an homage to New York, and how, in our childhoods, we would listen to all these different sounds,” says Shatan. “It makes me super proud that a bunch of kids, who only semi-knew what we were doing, got it done and really just made an absolute classic.”

In 2023, the Ludlow and Rivington intersection was renamed “Beastie Boys Square” in honor of late band member Adam “MCA” Yauch.

Weezer, Weezer (White Album)

It took a professional lifeguard, a stubborn couple and a $20 bill to capture the shot that would end up splashed on the cover of Weezer’s 2016 Weezer (White Album). With a general “beach noir” concept in mind, photographer Sean Murphy, who has been working with Weezer since 2000, traveled to Los Angeles’ Venice Beach to scout for spots suitable for Weezer’s tenth studio album artwork.

“We had home base on the beach, a stylist and a makeup artist and clothes prepared for us to use on the fly, and we walked around the area shooting and changing clothing as we went. And it was very guerrilla style,” says Murphy.

Murphy’s friend and photography assistant Wadley moonlighted as a Venice Beach lifeguard, giving the band an exclusive in to the beach itself. Murphy positioned the shot in front of the Westminster lifeguard tower, right next to Wadley’s tower.

The couple seen on the right side of the photo were not paid extras—the lounging beachgoers were told a photoshoot was taking place and decided to stay exactly where they were. The man with the metal detector shown on the left side of the photo was also a stranger. Before the man wandered outside of the photoshoot’s range, Murphy had a friend grab him and hand him $20 to walk back and forth near the band. On the final cover, both the couple and the man with the metal detector perfectly, yet organically, frame the band members.

“To me, it’s a perfect shot,” says Murphy. “The composition is really good. I love the extras that just happened to be there. It just worked out really nice.”

The Westminster lifeguard tower on Venice Beach remains virtually the same as it appeared in the album cover, save the etched signatures of dedicated Weezer fans who have since marked their names on the stand.

“A lot of my favorite shots of Weezer in 23 years are from this day, from that beach,” says Murphy.

Jurassic 5, Quality Control

Photographer Brian Cross, who also goes by B+, first met Jurassic 5 band members Charles Stewart (Chali 2na), Dante Givens (Akil) and Lucas Macfadden (Cut Chemist) at a health foods store. The Good Life Cafe was a hub for the Los Angeles hip-hop scene; the nutritional café turned into an open-mic venue every Thursday night.

Cross had taken photos of the members since their initial encounter and continued the partnership once the band had officially signed their record deal with Interscope. The 2000 album Quality Control marked the band’s first release with Interscope, and member Mark Potsic (DJ Nu-Mark) had a clear vision in mind for its cover.

“Nu-Mark came to me with a record by rock group Jethro Tull, and on the back, there’s a tree trunk with a tonearm and the needle, and he [wanted to] remake it, put it somewhere in L.A. and have headphones plugged into it,” says Cross. “Basically, [it was] the history of the city through this tree in a very vinyl, visceral way.”

Executing Potsic’s concept was no easy task. The team sourced the tree from the Parks Department in San Francisco, which allowed people to purchase a tree before it was felled from Golden Gate Park. They then transferred it in a U-Haul, root system and all, and got to work. A woodworker spent weeks hollowing out the tree so that it could be transportable, and then the tonearm was added.

“We really set out to actually do it. Jurassic has a very hands-on, old-school way of thinking about things. And what they were doing was very advanced in many respects, but it was also an homage to a lot of early crew. So, it was important that we actually made the tree,” says Cross.

The entire process took around six months. When the tree was completed, Cross opted to place it in a street median, near Potsic’s Los Angeles studio, half a block west of La Brea Avenue on San Vicente Boulevard.

“It really felt like music from the wood, from the earth, the grit,” says Cross.

The tree has since been moved and now rests in the backyard of the mom of Jurassic 5’s manager.

“It’s one of those [covers] where it’s deceptive in the sense that people think ‘Wow, that’s really cool,’ but they don’t realize the blood, sweat and tears that went into the process,” says Cross.

American Football, American Football

American Football’s debut studio album, American Football, released in 1999, catapulted the band into the indie rock mainstream, their Midwest emo sound tapping into a nostalgic collegiate aesthetic. It’s only appropriate, then, that the American Football cover shot features photographer Chris Strong’s college house at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he attended school with the band.

The photograph was one of many that Strong took for his senior photography thesis, a series of images that he shot throughout the college town.

“As a broke college kid, you need to get dual use out of things,” says Strong. “The images of senior photo show also are what ended up being the body of work for the American Football record.”

Strong chose the image of the house, taken from his front yard, due to the powerful emotions he felt the simple, light hues and upward angle evoked.

“I felt like, of all the photos, that was the one that had the most power,” says Strong. “Combined with the music, the image becomes more about longing. It gains a lot from being associated with the music.”

Located at 704 West High Street in Urbana, Illinois, the home has become inextricably linked to the band. For the cover of American Football’s 2016 sophomore album American Football (LP2), Strong featured the house yet again; this time, its interior. In 2014, the house appeared in a new music video for their 1999 single “Never Meant.” And, just a year ago, Strong, American Football’s record label Polyvinyl Records and another friend purchased the home.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with it exactly, but it’ll have an extended life now,” says Strong.

Catherine Duncan | READ MORE

Catherine Duncan is an intern with Smithsonian magazine.