Akron Compilation
Stiff Records
title: Akron Compilation
artiste/band: Stiff Records
record label: Stiff Records
format: 12" LP with SCRATCH
release date: 1978
misc: if you scratch the cover
brief / approach
...I was asked to come up with something unusual & hopefully eye-catching to highlight & explain what made the US city of Akron, Ohio (in)famous - the fact that it was the home of the Goodyear tire & rubber company - nicknamed the 'rubber capital of the world' (let alone America...)
...the first award I got for cover design & promo campaign was for this album and it probably helped that this was the first album cover* to feature 'Scratch & Sniff' - which was coated on my tyre illustration/lettering and smelt pungently of burning rubber - wonderfully you can still smell that on the covers after four and a half decades..?!
(* although unbeknowst to us at the time in the US promo copies of The Raspberries 1972 debut album had featured a scratch & sniff raspberry-smelling sticker...)
backstory
...this was a classic 'stiff tongue in stiff cheek' release - we were claiming ( & obviously pretending...) to have discovered the new wave version of the 'Liverpool sound' in America - offering a compilation of an exciting new music style of the new bands from the city - in reality it was mainly the work of the highly talented young multi-instrumentalist, producer/director Liam Sternberg and a few like-minded & ambitous new wave musicians who interchanged & made up the band members & backing singers for most of the 'bands' on the compilation..?1
...there was a lot of fun ads & promo stuff to do - I was most chuffed with doing the 'Air from Akron...' spray can which, you won't be surprised to learn was just my label stuck on an empty aerosol can - but it did spray real air out of it - although probably not the actual air "as breathed by" ... all the bands from Akron - as it claims on the can...
...Canned by Stiff - Air Today - Gone Tomorrow...