Katie Allen
Associate Specialist
Lot 12
Crosby, Stills & Nash: Three album cover proofs for their debut album Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1969, 3
20 – 30 June 2025, 12:00 PDT
Online, Los AngelesSold for US$1,536 inc. premium
Looking for a similar item?
Our Popular Culture specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialistAsk about this lot
Fred Lawton
Cataloguer
Claire Tole-Moir
Head of Department
Crosby, Stills & Nash: Three album cover proofs for their debut album Crosby, Stills & Nash,
1969,
a full color printer's proof of the front and back covers, with trim marks; accompanied by two full color printer's proofs of the inside covers, with trim marks,
27 x 14 1/2in each (3)
a full color printer's proof of the front and back covers, with trim marks; accompanied by two full color printer's proofs of the inside covers, with trim marks,
27 x 14 1/2in each (3)
Footnotes
Crosby, Stills & Nash:
Burden remembered; "This is one of the first covers I ever made. In those days they demanded that you have certain things on the front of the record cover, like where it says stereo, the company logo and the type on the top. I tried to lay everything in so that it would be least conspicuous so that you could see Henry Diltz's photograph in the best possible light."
"You can probably tell that the band is not in the proper order here. A few days after taking this picture they named themselves Crosby, Stills & Nash. At the time of this picture they hadn't settled on a name, so when we looked at the picture they were backwards. We all agreed that we would go back later to re-take the picture. When we returned the next day to re-shoot it, the house was gone! It wasn't there. It had been bulldozed and was just a pile of timber in the back. Crosby says this is why people who don't know him come up and greet him as "Nash"."
"This was my first foray into using the power of the band to get the record company to spend the money needed to make it right. At the time album covers cost like eight cents per to make. CSN cost a quarter per x millions of units and the company freaked out. Three of the owners of the label came out from New York and cornered me in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel to tell me in no uncertain terms that they weren't going to spend the money. It was artist's appeasement! The famous line was: "You could put a good record in a paper bag and no one would care." In the end they did what I asked and in fact lots of subsequent releases by this label were printed on the same expensive laid finish stock."
Henry Diltz and Gary Burden:
The pair were close friends and collaborators. Diltz remembers about the making of this album, that because Gary "was an architect, he was used to working with different materials. So when we went to print, when he had that album cover printed, he called the printers. He said, "I want you to turn the paper over and print on the uncoated side of the paper," because all album covers were glossy. And they said, "Well, wait, we can't do that. I mean, it's going to soak up the ink. We never printed on the uncoated side." He said, "I don't care. I want you to do it." Well, it turned out to be so wonderful because if you remember that album cover—it's a foldout album of them sitting on the couch in front of the old house—it's got a texture to it. It's got a matte feel to it. It's not glossy. It's got a texture. So it went along with sort of their organic, wooden music kind of a thing".
Additional information
Bid now on these items
