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Alice Cooper

Pretties for You

Straight

STS-1016

Alice Cooper

John Williams

Ed Beardsley

not applicable

1969

It's funny that we think of the late 1960s as being a time of social and sexual liberation and then you get confronted with something like this ...  

The late Frank Zappa and artist Ed Beardsley were fairly close friends.  Zappa had purchased several Beardsley works for his private collection including one entitled 'Pretties for You'.  By coincidence, in 1968 Zappa had signed the band Alice Cooper to a recording contract with his Reprise Records affiliated Straight label.  Zappa subsequently decided to use on of the Beardsley paintings for the cover (and title) of the band's debut album.  Looking at the album cover today, the image seems pretty innocuous, but when the record was released in 1969 the image of a woman exposing her panties generated an uproar among retailers.  With distributors and stores threatening to drop the album the always cost conscious Zappa decided that rather than coming up with an alternate cover Straight would simply slap a small brown sticker over the controversial part of the cover.  Today it seems hard to believe that a pair of white panties would generate more than a bored yawn ...

I actually found a brief October, 2003 interview with Beardsley on an Alice Cooper oriented website.  In the interest of public information, I'll post it until I get threatened with a lawsuit  = )

"Yes, I am the same person who did the painting used on the Alice Cooper album, Pretties for You. Actually, that was the title of the painting, which Frank Zappa then used for the album. Frank, a friend of mine, was visiting my studio one day, bought two paintings he wanted to used for album covers, one for Alice Cooper, another for the Mothers of Invention. The two paintings purchased: 'Pretties for You' and 'The Four Apostles'. Both ended up in Frank's home, 'Pretties for you' in the main living room, and 'Apostles' in the downstairs music studio. Who knows what happened to them after Frank's death. I'm still in touch with his brother, Bobby, but not his wife or kids.

The idea behind the painting are the dreams and regrets of old men on the occasion of their death. It was inspired by the funeral of an Italian movie director who died in '68 or '69. There was a photo layout in Life magazine, I think it was, detailing the funeral. They had photos of the old director, and I liked his look, especially his hat. I tried to imagine his thoughts at his own funeral. Death is the fate of us all, of course, and I suppose the moment defines us as human beings... given the reality, however absurd it may seem to us, that we are born only to die."