74 year-old Belgian painter-collagist of album covers, books and more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/21/AR2008112103565.html
By Joe Holley and Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 22, 2008; Page B04
an excerpt
Guy Peellaert, 74, a Belgian painter-collagist whose fervid imagination produced surreal album covers for John Lennon, David Bowie and Mick Jagger, as well as images for a seminal book about rock mythology, "Rock Dreams," died of kidney cancer Nov. 17 at a hospital in Paris.
The book was a collaboration with the prominent British rock journalist Nik Cohn, who wrote how they intended to convey a "cinematic approach" to pop history and "approached the project, not as commentators or fine artists, but primarily as fans. Even more than the actual music, we were both obsessed with pop mythology."
"Rock Dreams" was published in the early 1970s and reportedly sold more than a million copies. It featured a bloated Jerry Lee Lewis clutching a bottle to his chest and stumbling along a neon-lit street; the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, drug-dazed and muse-abandoned, sitting alone in a garbage-strewn practice room; Ray Charles, his arm cradling a woman, cruising behind the wheel of a convertible.
A reviewer for the London Independent described Mr. Peellaert's images as rock iconography -- "almost as thrilling as the music itself, but obviously not the same thing. It was the pornography of rock. It was also its stained-glass window."
In another book with Cohn, "20th-Century Dreams" (1999), Mr. Peellaert envisioned Mussolini walking in on Hitler stretched out on the floor playing with model trains; President Nixon and Mao Zedong weeping at "Lassie" reruns; and President Reagan and the pope comparing footwear while Nancy Reagan struggles to fit Cinderella's spiked heel onto Mother Teresa's giant foot.
In other images, a bloated Elvis Presley, stuffed into a sheriff's uniform, bursts through the dorm door of a pot-smoking Bill Clinton; and a champagne-bearing Prince (the performer) meets a naked Princess Diana in a seedy passion-pit room.
― curmudgeon, Saturday, 22 November 2008 16:36 (seventeen years ago)
But it was for "Rock Dreams" that Mr. Peellaert was widely remembered. He told Beaux Arts Magazine in 2003, "Rock will always represent the extravagant, the flashy, the fantasy. These pictures are a memento to that dream."
― curmudgeon, Saturday, 22 November 2008 16:43 (seventeen years ago)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/3497867/Guy-Peellaert.html
Peellaert was originally inspired to create Rock Dreams as an animated television series after reading Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, Nik Cohn's history of the early days of rock and roll. When he first contacted Cohn by telephone, Peellaert's fractured English led Cohn to believe that he was talking to an important producer who wished to turn his book into a film. Cohn agreed to meet in Paris and duly booked himself into an expensive hotel, expecting Peellaert to foot the bill.
"He met me at the airport," Cohn remembered. "This balding man in a baggy sweater with holes in it, driving a Renault 6. It was quite obvious this was not a major movie producer." Cohn cancelled the hotel and ended up sleeping on Peellaert's sofa.
Rock Dreams was conceived as a series of stills from a motion picture that had never – and could never – be made. After Cohn had sketched out the scenarios in a matter of weeks, Peellaert laboured for three years to bring them to fruition, working from photographs and an extensive library of newspaper and magazine cuttings, to shape the characters and settings in a gallery of luridly coloured collages infused with a dreamlike, elegiac quality.
Buddy Holly climbs the steps of an aircraft giving a finger-snapping final farewell; PJ Proby, in a blue velvet romper suit, floats in the heavens amidst a throng of adoring, naked, pneumatic nymphs; Bob Dylan, a study in luxurious isolation, huddles in the back of a limousine, swathed in furs, toying with a kitten on his lap; while the Rolling Stones are shown in a series of progressively decadent tableaux – pigging themselves at a Beggars' Banquet, as leather-clad tranvestites in a hotel bedroom, and in Gestapo uniforms surrounded by pre-pubescent girls.
― curmudgeon, Saturday, 22 November 2008 16:54 (seventeen years ago)
Yeah, you can post YouTubes, just do like you did there with the direct copy/paste of the URL, and it'll automatically embed.
― Ned Raggett, Monday, 24 November 2008 00:34 (seventeen years ago)