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Magnificent seven rock logos

As AC/DC lead guitarist Angus Young reflects on the band's future after the departure of key members of the band, let's remember that it wasn't just the music that allowed the Australian band to take their place in rock 'n' roll Valhalla.

For seventy years now, the AC/DC logo has appeared on the lists of the best rock labels, becoming a true graphic classic. There is an amazing story behind this logo, like so many other legendary bands. Some logos appeared unexpectedly, impromptu, others - as a result of long reflections and creative searches of the musicians themselves.

So who are they, seven outstanding rock logos?

1. AC/DC: Biblical Lightning, designed by Gerard Huerta, 1977.

In 1977, Bob Defrin, art director of Atlantic Records, commissioned 24-year-old freelance graphic artist Gerard Huerta to paint the name of AC/DC on the cover of their second American album, Let There Be Rock. Huerta had already done lettering - a flash of lightning - for their first American album, High Voltage.

“My task was to represent the theme or the title of the album through letters,” says Huerta, “and “Let There Be Rock” (“Let there be rock”) caused me direct associations with the Bible.”

Two years earlier, Huerta had done typography for an album by New York-based Blue Oyster Cult: “The cover showed an empty limousine against a small church and an ominous sky. For that job, I studied religious typography." His favorite was the Johannes Gutenberg font used for the famous 15th-century edition of the Bible, which Huerta took to work on the Blue Oyster Cult logo. "So when I was given the task of working on the sign for 'Let There Be Rock', I turned to Gutenberg again."
The album cover depicts the band under a bleak sky pierced by bright lights from heaven. Huerta drew several combinations of Gutenberg typeface and lightning flash, eventually choosing a three-dimensional version in orange.

Until Huerta began drawing logos for Blue Oyster Cult and AC / DC, he had not even heard of such a musical genre as heavy metal, but his design was later parodied in the film This Is Spinal Tap (a 1984 pseudo-documentary about a fictional British rock band whose success is on the wane).
For 40 years, Huerta's drawings for "Let There Be Rock" were buried in a drawer, buried by thousands of other works, until he posted them on his Facebook page in July of this year. Huerta won't talk about how much he's paid for the logo design, which started out as a sign for just one job, but he never got to know the band and never even dated any of the AC/DC members.

Huerta has designed logos and artwork for several other bands (eg Foreigner, Boston, Ted Nugent) and designs for top magazines such as Time and People Weekly. His work includes the Swiss Army emblem and the development of the Nabisco foods brand. According to Huerta himself, the logo that became recognizable thanks to the music of AC / DC is not his greatest pride: “If I had to choose, then in 1981 I would choose the logo for CBS Masterworks, which appeared on the line of famous albums.”

2. THE BEATLES: "T" performer - designed by Ivor Arbiter, 1963.

A brief meeting in a London record store between its owner and The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein is part of the history of one of the most famous logos of all time. The famous logo of the twentieth century was drawn in a few seconds by a person with no artistic education.

In May 1963, Ivor Arbiter became the owner of the first specialty drum shop on Shaftesbury Avenue. The Premier drum kit played by Ringo Starr needed to be replaced, and the Beatles' manager brought it in just in time for Arbiter's shop. As he later recalled, he received a call from the store: ""Someone called Brian Epstein came, and with him a drummer." I hadn't heard anything about the Beatles then."

Starr wanted to replace the drums with the same Premier set, but the salesmen were instructed to promote the Ludwig brand, which Arbiter had just begun to bring in from the States. When Starr chose a Ludwig set in black and white mother-of-pearl, Arbiter was extremely pleased. But Epstein told the Arbiter that the Beatles were going to be great and that he should give them a £238 kit for free!

The arbiter agreed to take Starr's battered drummers as partial payment, but only if the Ludwig logo was on Starr's new kit. Epstein accepted the deal on the condition that the band's name be written lower and in larger type. And then the Arbiter took a piece of paper and drew on it what everyone now knows as the iconic logo of The Beatles with a capital “B” and a “T” protruding from below. These two letters create a pun: the English "beat" means beat, beat.

The drum salesman was paid £5 to work with local sign maker Eddie Stokes to paint a brand new logo on Ringo's machine for an extra fee during lunch. The logo was officially registered after Epstein's death. By that time, The Beatles had founded Apple Corps (the multimedia corporation that replaced The Beatles Ltd). This is the official logo for now.

3. THE WHO: symbol of Mars - designed by Brian Pike, 1964.

According to the official history of The Who, published in 2015 and written with the participation of Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey, the iconic logo was created for the poster of the famous London Marquee Club in November 1964. On a rather expressive black-and-white poster, Townsend (lead guitarist) powerfully hit the strings. The typography is just as strong: the two letters are combined, and the arrow coming out of the "O" is a nod to the brutality of the band members.

Keith Lambert, who had just become the manager of the band formerly known as the High Numbers, along with his partner Chris Stump, commissioned a poster from designer Brian Pike. The typography from the poster soon appeared on Keith Moon's drum set.

Although Townsend studied for a time at the Ealing Art School, he had nothing to do with the logo. But Townsend influenced the popularity of the symbols of the Royal Air Force. In 1965, he began wearing a "British flag" jacket adorned with World War II medals and designed a T-shirt bearing the RAF insignia that most of his countrymen associated with the defense of Britain. It was supposed to be irony, not a gesture of patriotism.

4. THE GRATEFUL DEAD: skull and lightning designed by Osley Stanley and Bob Thomas, 1969.

Osley Stanley, the Grateful Dead's sound engineer, was always annoyed by the mess backstage, with equipment from different bands piled up in one pile. And in 1969, he decided that their band needed some sort of branding to distinguish The Grateful Dead's gear from the rest.

One day, on the way, he noticed a traffic sign that was badly distorted in the side windows of the car. All he could see was an orange top and blue bottom circle, divided in the middle by a white stripe. At that moment, the logo that brought Stanley fame was born: “If we change the orange to red, and the stripe to a lightning bolt, then we get a wonderful mark by which we could distinguish our equipment.”

Arriving home, Stanley talked about the idea to a neighbor, designer Bob Thomas, part-time security guard for the group. Thomas quickly made a sketch, and their friend Ernie Fischbach showed how the sign would look on a tree. A few days later, Stanley asked Thomas to add the words "Grateful Dead" in a circle so that from a distance it looked like a skull.
“I think I was too much influenced by the posters of the time,” says Stanley. The design was changed several times until it appeared on the cover of the Steal Your Face album.

5. THE ROLLING STONES: tongue and lips - designed by John Pasche, 1969.

In 1969, designer John Pasche was still studying at the Royal College of Art when he was suddenly called to meet Mick Jagger at the band's rehearsal space. Jagger was looking for a suitable young artist to make a poster for the upcoming 1970 Euro tour, unlike most of the band's posters.
Pasha later recalled that he and Jagger chatted about art and found a common interest in classic art deco in the travel posters of the 1930s and 40s. As a result, Pasha's work was used for a European tour in 1970, a US tour in 1972, and a European tour in 1973.

Pasha then received an invitation from Jagger to visit his home in Chelsea Chain: this time he needed a logo for Rolling Stone tickets and posters.
“In truth, the meeting was short,” recalls Pasha. “He gave me a wooden figurine he bought from a corner shop. It was an image of the Hindu goddess Kali, with her tongue hanging out. He said, “I see something like that. Go think about an idea, then we'll meet and discuss the options."

According to rumors, Pasha was immediately inspired by Kali, the mouth and long tongue of the customer. But Pasha denies everything: “Many people ask if the image was inspired by the tongue and lips of Mick Jagger. Initially no. But it could come out subconsciously. In any case, he left Jagger's house with an expressive mouth already in place. "I went and immediately made some drawings, very close to the final version." Jagger liked the sketches. “I finished the sign, he showed it to the rest of the group, and they gave the go-ahead. So the sign began to be used, and I received a fee of 50 pounds.

Fans first saw the logo on the cover of the Sticky Fingers album in 1971, then it became the group's registered trademark and appeared on all of its albums. Why is the sign still relevant today? “I think the logo has stood the test of time because it's versatile,” Pasche says. “Hanging out the tongue is associated with protest, the denial of authority, this gesture is relevant for every generation.”

Pasha's original sketches of the logo are now in a private collection in London, and the artist sold them in 2015 for an undisclosed amount.

6. KISS: a flash of lightning - designed by Ace Frehley, 1973.

Paul Daniel Frehley, better known as Ace, joined Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Peter Criss as lead guitarist in January 1973 under the name Wicked Lester. And it was he who designed the logo for the reborn group, which fell under the guns of all the media because of the obvious reference to Nazi symbols.

For the first time, Frehley scribbled the sign right on top of a Wicked Lester poster. The letters "K" and "I" were accepted normally, but the double "S" caused a lot of problems. Paul always claimed to have depicted them as lightning bolts, but the design began to attract attention due to the resemblance to the epaulets of the Nazi SS. In 1979, Germany banned the logo (and then Israel, and a number of other countries), associating the "SS" with the Nazis and the Holocaust. In these countries, the group still uses the less controversial spelling.

After KISS broke up with their "farewell tour" in 2001-2002, Stanley and Simmons (who are both Jewish) accused Frehley and Criss of being anti-Semitic in the band's early days. In his 2002 autobiography Kiss and Make Up, Simmons wrote, "Ace was fascinated by Nazism and in a drunken stupor shot several tapes of himself and his friend dressed as Nazis." Simmons claimed that on one occasion, Ace flew into his hotel room dressed in a Nazi uniform and yelled "Heil Hitler!"

7. NIRVANA: smiley face, designed by Kurt Cobain, 1991.

The band's typography came about quite by accident, thanks to their first album, Bleach, on Sub Pop Records in 1989: in an effort to cut costs, Lisa Orth, the label's art director, suggested to designer Grand Alden that he use the first typeface he came across. It turned out to be Onyx, which is still applied to all the attributes of the group.
There are many theories about what exactly inspired Root to draw that emoji. According to one version - the emblem of the strip club "Lustful Lady" in Seattle, 150 km from the city of Aberdeen, Washington. But the smiley, usually yellow on a black background, had already surfaced in 1964 as a symbol of insurance company employees, drawn by graphic artist Harvey Ball. Alas, the truth about the origin of the emoji died with Cobain in 1994.

Given his suicide and his endless drug history, there's some surprising contradiction between the name Kurt gave to his band - the ultimate goal of Buddhism, the liberation of the soul from the cycle of death and rebirth - and the out-of-control, irrelevance of his sketch. This combination of incongruous, perhaps, makes the logo so strong. And to tell the truth, it doesn't really matter why or how he came into being, as long as he personifies the NIRVANA band.

Today we offer to recall the most famous logos of bands from all over the world that have long lived outside of music and, it seems, are no longer associated with specific musicians.

1. "Snaggletooth" (War-Pig) - Motorhead

The legendary "Snaggletooth", aka "War-Pig", appeared on Motorhead's first studio album in 1975. The main author of the drawing was the artist Joe Petagno, who combined the skulls of a gorilla, a dog and a wild boar to create a "fighting pig". Lemmy later stylized the character, adding to his brutality through chains and spikes. "War-Pig" appeared in various variations on 20 covers of the band's 22 studio albums. Motorhead branded merchandise has been around for decades.

2.Misfits


The ghost of the Misfits first appeared on the cover of the third single "Horror Business". The musicians, inspired by the series "The Crimson Ghost", filmed in the mid-40s, took the appearance of the main character - the Crimson Ghost as a basis. The image is used everywhere, anywhere, and seems to exist already separately from its cinematic and musical progenitors.

3. Slayer


Thrash metallers Slayer, as well as musicians from Motorhead, have been repeatedly accused of sympathizing with Nazism. The main reason for this was the logo, supposedly similar to the coat of arms of the Third Reich. For the first time, crossed swords with the name of the group in the center appeared on the first album "Show No Mercy" in 1984. The author of the drawing was the father of one of the members of the "road team". At the beginning of their journey, the guys from Slayer used a satanic image, so three sixes, various variations of crosses and images of demons were regularly added to the allegory of the pentagram. Today, the legendary print appears on all kinds of clothing for people far from not only heavy music, but also from understanding the meaning of this image.

4.AC/DC


It's hard not to notice that the name of the group was not difficult to depict in a graphic style. Sharp and angular letters, which in the original version were more rounded, came out from under the hand of American designer Gerard Hurt in 1977, becoming one of the components of hard rock. The lightning symbol located in the middle gave the logo a special recognizability. One of those logos that will be understandable even to those who have never heard their music.

5. "Dead Smile" - Nirvana

For his main project - Nirvana, Kurt Cobain drew the logo himself. Despite the obvious simplicity, the image quite clearly conveys the nature of the music and the style of the grunge band. Known to millions of music lovers, the dead-eyed emoticon did not appear on any of the band's studio or live albums. Reflecting ambiguous emotions, the drawing became popular in itself and is associated with the prototype of Kurt Cobain himself with all his internal struggles and contradictions.

6. Ramones


The Ramones logo is the full seal of the fathers of punk rock, similar in style to the official seal of the President of the United States. The author of the logo was a longtime friend of the musicians Arturo Vega, according to whom the band was the best in America and had every right to borrow the president's seal. As planned, the eagle holds a baseball bat for the opponents of the group and an apple tree branch for the followers. Biographers noted that the musicians earned a tidy sum selling T-shirts with this image, and some punk bands still invent their own variations of the logo.

7. "Hot Lips" - Rolling Stones

Surely everyone knows these "lips" from the cradle - and it doesn't matter if you heard about rock and roll at that moment. The author of the work, John Pace, was 24 years old when Mick Jagger offered him to develop a logo design for the Rolling Stones. Using the prototype of the Hindu goddess Kali, as well as the wishes of Jagger himself, the designer prepared an ambiguous image of lips with a tongue, which looked somewhat provocative and vulgar, especially for the early 70s. However - doesn't all this best describe rock and roll? Almost 50 years after its appearance, the logo does not lose popularity and according to many music magazines is the most successful and recognizable in the world.

Despite the abundance of pop singers and singers on the modern stage, rock, as well as other directions in music, continues to live. We all know bands like AC/DC, KISS, The Rolling Stones and others. They are recognizable not only due to their creativity, but also due to the symbolism that could previously be seen on almost every fence, both here and abroad. Let's see how some of the logos that have become very famous came about.

Let's start with perhaps Grateful Dead

This logo, which has become the band's official logo, is one of many created by Bob Thomas. The logo has been constantly improved as the band has risen to prominence. The first version of the logo appeared in 1969, and the purpose of creating a recognizable sign is to distinguish the group from constant flights / moving during tours. At first it was just a red and blue circle, to which Bob Thomas added a skull. The logo didn't see much use until 1976, when the band decided to add their logo to the cover of the "Steal Your Face" album.

After that, the logo became as recognizable as the musicians themselves, and until now, the simple stylized drawing that you see in the photo is the most recognizable symbol of the group. By the way, the style in which this drawing is made is very interesting - according to Thomas' plan, it should have been something like "Yin-Yang". Indeed, there is something in common.

The Rolling Stones

The symbolism of this famous rock band was created by an ordinary student from London's Royal College of Art. A student was asked to create a poster to "promote" The Rolling Stones' tour of Europe. The poster was so successful that Mick Jagger asked the author to come up with a logo, showing the artist a drawing of the Indian goddess Kali, which he wanted to use as a base.

The work was done, done perfectly, and now the symbol of the group is known to almost every music lover on our planet. By the way, the rights to the drawing, to its original, still belong to the creator, and now he decided to sell his creation for 300 thousand euros. True, the buyer has not yet been found.

It rarely happens that the musicians themselves create a symbol of their own group, without the help of artists and designers. However, the Kiss band did just that - the band's guitarist, Ace Frehley, created the logo back in 1973, for the second album "Hotter Than Hell". Since then, this character has been almost the second "I" of the group.

The logo design was part of the overall idea, with the creation of their own style - painted faces, original stage costumes and everything else. Probably, the popularity of the logo is due to the fact that despite its simplicity, the logo very well symbolizes the strength and energy that is inherent in this team.

This group is very different from the previous one, and yet, in the style of the logo of both groups, there is something in common. The history of the origin of the logo is also somewhat similar: the AC/DC logo was created by Gerard Guerta for the original cover of the "Let There Be Rock" album. Immediately after the release of the album, the sign became a symbol of the group, which is known to all rockers, it is simply impossible to confuse it.

An interesting fact is that the group did not use the symbol until 1978, when the new album "If You Want Blood You've Got It" was released. Fans of the group believe that this particular logo became the link between this musical genre and Gothic symbols.

The first version of the logo of this singer was created by Paul White for the album "Debut", released in 1993. the logo was used for the first three albums and then dropped as the singer began working with other designers.

Paul White also designed the logo for Björk's former band, Sugar Cubes. Some of the work included 3D modeling and other advances in modern computer technology. Interestingly, it was this logo that served as the basis for the formation of the style of groups of a similar genre in the 90s of the last century. Currently, only the first letter of the logo, "b", is most often used in various variations.

This release is a trial one, if you like it, there will be the next ones, because there are many well-known bands, and all of them are interesting in their own way.

There was also a lot of talk about logos. Today for you, another graphic dozen - symbols that reflect the style, ideology or "encrypted" names of groups; the most successful artistic solutions that live not only on, but also in numerous tattoos, stripes and other merchandise. In general ... a laconic stylized drawing (but not a logo), when you look at it, you instantly remember one or another musical team.

Sponges, tongue… unobtrusive and iconic pop art, created by John Pasche in 1971, has evoked a single association for 40 years.

2.HIM
"Heartagram", invented by Ville Valo on the eve of his twentieth birthday, is a grandiose in its simplicity a combination of a pentagram and a heart, tenderness and hatred, as well as a graphic display of the essence of the style known as love metal. A common theme of tattoos and avatars - according to the ironic remark of its creator, has achieved even more popularity than the group itself.

3. BIOHAZARD
They did not compose anything themselves, but successfully copied what was already created. (Screams about this, see.)

4. BAD RELIGION
The band's trademark was coined in 1980 by its main composer, guitarist Brett Gurevich. And settled down. Simple, clear, obvious. And on topic. How many years has it irritated militant Christians...

5. THE OFFSPRING
Not the easiest image to reproduce, but bright and memorable - as, indeed, most of the discography of this hit pop-punk band.

6. THE PRODIGY
The insect that passes as a spider in the group's biographies is actually an ant. Google did not give an answer to the question of what exactly the musicians liked it so much. If anyone knows, please share.

Graphically rethought logo of the group - competently, admittedly, rethought. (In the same paragraph, in general, you can also add the NINE INCH NAILS and DEAD KENNEDYS logos.)

8. THE EXPLOITED
An intricate piece created by the artist Schroeder in 1983 and originally planned as an album cover. But it has moved to a much more advanced level: into the group's logo, into numerous jackets of punk fans ... and, in general, into the list of the main symbols of this style.