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,
