Roger Dean Selected Album Covers Part 2: 1973 - 2003

Part two was supposed to follow hot on the heels of part one. But... well, that didn't really happen, did it? So I've been sitting on these happy little .jpgs for months now. And here they are, perhaps a little flattened. Pretty much everything you think of as 'a classic Roger Dean design' can be found in part two, and sadly... little else. Having found a niche, Dean finds little reason to stray from it. And I suppose that makes sense, really: as you can especially see in the latter-day work, bands call up Dean specifically because they're looking to tap into a particular vibe, to connect themselves with the music that was first illustrated by Dean himself. In particular, on these next few albums.

Badger: One Live Badger: Badgers it is, then. A naturalist landscape, wintry, with not one but two of the titular creatures, looking cute. Did they change the album title at the last minute, then?

Budgie: Never Turn Your Back on a Friend: A different band, though you could be forgiven for confusing them. No budgie on the cover this time, exactly: some mammoth sci-fi bird instead, being reined in by some guy standing on one of several inuksuit. Or not.

Greenslade: Bedside Manners are Extra: A multi-armed green wizard and a cat in front of a Dr. Seuss landscape - the landscapes are prominent now, as they always will be, but they don't quite look like Roger Dean yet. After all, there are buildings here. Really?

Magna Carta: Lord of the Ages: Right out of some German epic, a trio, perhaps of gods, ride mythical creatures on what is perhaps clouds. Animals are a really big theme in 1973, it would appear.

Snafu: Snafu: Self-titled album for obscure group named after swear-wordy army acronym. The Grim Reaper with yoked oxen on a really sunny day, and an odd layout with a black frame.

Yes: Tales from Topographic Oceans: And finally, the 'golden age' is upon us. A fantastic landscape looking right out of those kinds of paperbacks I didn't personally read when I was a teenager, it's pretty - the same combination of naturalistic and surreal that his prog-rock clients were undoubtedly hoping for. But why no ocean? Didn't read the title again?

Yes: Relayer: Another Yes, two in a row, and this one is even more iconic. These are mountains straight out of Dr. Seuss, with two horses only semi-visible there in all the whites and beiges. I wonder if Dean was actually creating these pieces based on the contents of the albums, or if he just made them and Yes stuck whichever one took their fancy on the cover of their next album?

Steve Howe: Beginnings: Peter Jackson took a real risk making The Lord of the Rings as a live-action film. He knew you could only make it work with a huge budget and lots of CGI. Otherwise, you get this rather horrid cover, which attempt to portray the side-project-indulging Yes man playing from within one of Dean's landscapes, but in fact just looks ridiculous.

Dave Greenslade: Cactus Choir: Greenslade gets a particularly lovely one, with gloomy clouds, a churning ocean and a really cool mushroom-building. But weren't these artists bothered by looking so much like each other?

John Lodge: Natural Avenue: Another side-project (Moody Blues, not Yes) with a photograph, but there's no attempt at 'integration' here, so it's less embarrassing. Floating rocks, yay.

Steve Howe: The Steve Howe Album: And yet another solo jaunt. Yes, again, and this time no picture at all and also no fantasy. Craggy rocks and a pond. Or..., wait, is that a dead body floating in the pond? Well, nothing fantastic about that. Carry on, then.

Yes: Drama: Back to the mother-band again. I'm starting to flick through the years much more quickly, and we're up to 1980, with a seeming attempt to 'update' the series, if those monochrome cats and bird are anything to go by. The result is something a bit less than impressive, I think - a turn-of-the-decade relic, though.

Asia: Alpha: Ah, Asia. There's something really unlovable about this band, even for prog rock fans. The trying-too-hard cover is fitting, then, as it's not very attractive, either. Tropical stuff mixes with some more mushroom-buildings in the background. Birds!

Barry Devlin: Breaking Star Codes: But by 1983, his time had clearly passed, and instead of updating his style, he took up whatever meagre offers were out there for his line of work. Who is Barry Devlin? I don't know, but with the flying fish, the craggy rocks and even that hand-written triangular logo, he was someone who very clearly wanted Dean-by-design, and got it.

Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe: Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe: And now we're all the way to 1989. A long story ensues about how Yes has, for all intents and purposes, split up into two camps. This one, made of the four individuals whose surnames form the band's name, are prohibited from calling themselves 'Yes'. Instead, in a rather clever move, they assert their Yes-ness with a decidedly retro 'Roger Dean original' cover, meant to evoke those 1970s covers of the band who they more or less are, even though they can't come out and say that. Fantastic trees, fantastic buildings, birds. This is exactly what ABWH were looking for. Who needs innovation?

Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe: An Evening of Yes Music Plus: Check out the title of this live album to see how desperate these gentlemen were. Trees on floating pod-islands. But it's 1993, and it's all a bit boring by now, isn't it?

Asia: Aria: I guess not. Not if you have this kind of music in your blood. You just want more and more albums that look pretty much exactly like this. And it's Asia, so don't expect innovation, right?

Steve Howe: Not Necessarily Acoustic: Whereas some musicians take the side-project as an opportunity to divert, you really have to admire the Yes people's commitment to the main brand. The dragon is a bit different, but little else is, right down to that classic 1970s hand-written album title.

Uriah Heep: Sea of Light: It's 1995 now, and another resurrected dinosaur gets a Dean-by-design. If you covered up the titles of these albums, how could you ever tell one from another?

Budgie: An Ecstasy of Fumbling: My God, something different! Well, kind of. The wordmark is still post-hippie, and it's still a bird and trees. But it's not a landscape, amazingly enough., And that budgie makes me think there might actually be a sense of humour at work here. Say it isn't so. This is a compilation: maybe those bring out the best in him?

Space Needle: The Moray Eels Eat the Space Needle: Little to say about this album except that the title is cute, but the self-cloning nature of the cover is just too much to take. And that's a horrid lime-green, isn't it?

Yes: The Ladder: Hatchets buried, they've got their name back. Both Yes-by-name and cover-by-Dean. What else could they ask for? Weird spindly-mountain things. Whatever. By now, no one was even looking at these covers, I don't think. Especially since this is the CD era, so they're only five inches. I might cry.

Steve Howe's Remedy: Elements: One last example, before we put Mr Dean to bed. It's Yes-man Howe again, with a band name this time, but who cares, really? This came out in 2003, 30 years after Howe and Dean were breaking ground. It's weird rock-formations rising out of the water. What else was it going to be by now?

Roger Dean Selected Album Covers Part 1: 1969 - 1972

The Hobbit himself. The man responsible, pretty much entirely, for the 'look' of 1970s prog music. From the mid-seventies on (the period looked at more fully in part two), a Roger Dean cover was instantly recognisable - a 'fantasy' landscape, looking like something out of an alien world. Dr. Seuss-like, I suppose.

Ultimately, the style became so recognisable that a band seeking to fit int oa certain demographic would take Dean on knowing that punters in record shops would immedaitely know what they were buying - a great advantage for budding prog-rockers, but it led Dean into self-repetition; people went to him with a very particular look in mind, and he was duty-bound to provide it.

So part two will be both Dean at his 'purest' and at his most cynical - superficially, the two are similar. Here, though, we've got a mixed bag of 'early efforts' - some great, some not. Some looking like his 'style', some not at all. Grwoing pains, I guess.

Earth and Fire: Earth and Fire: I think the gnarled roots of a tree are creepy, and clearly so does Roger Dean. This early work is not his earliest, but it's one of them. Pen-and-ink, it would seem.

Gun: Gun: This would be his very first, apparently, with a dark hellbeast vibe that has little to do with the main Roger Dean style. Reminds me of Gerald Scarfe and his work on Pink Floyd's The Wall.

Lighthouse: One Fine Morning: Very hippie-ish. Of course, Dean's style and the artists he worked with came straight out of the hippie era, but it's odd to see it so carefully aped here.

Dr. Strangely Strange - Heavy Petting: A die-cut piece - the early years have several of those. It seems that the three faces are revealed through a die cut, and the entire cover is divided into two (three, in fact) by die-cutting. I don't know what opening the flaps reveals.

Nucleus: Elastic Rock: Another die-cut piece, reminiscent of the groundbreaking "Blue Monday" New order sleeve that would come a decade later. Roger Dean certainly worked with a good many nobodies back in the day.

Atomic Rooster: In Hearing of Atomic Rooster: This is a cute pre-rock homage, like It's a Beautiful Day. Humorous.

Midnight Sun: Midnight Sun: The Roger Dean style is slowly evolving, not least of which the fact that we see that classic 'Roger Dean font' here for the first time. A cast of odd characters, a big frog, a chariot. Surreal.

Osibisa: Osibisa: The first of two for an African-British band. Flying elephant mosquitoes, just like it ought to be.

Osibisa: Woyaya: Osibisa again, with the elephant-mosquito flying over a very Roger Dean-esque pond.

Pete Dello and Friends: Into Your Ears: An earwig and a caterpillar. And a black outline, and text - this won't survive long.

Ramases: Space Hymns: Quite beautiful, really. Not overly Roger Deanesque, though it still evokes his particular mood. Pretty green.

The Keith Tippett Group: Dedicated to You But You Weren't Listening: One of th elast we'll see here with a non-'trademark' feel to it. But it's clever as hell, a woman with a baby in her head. I kind of wish Roger Dean hadn't stuck so faithfully to his one particular 'thing'.

Yes: Fragile: And the real legacy begins. The font's not there yet - in fact, nothing is, really It's a fantasy landscape, but it's an entire planet, and it doesn't really have that classic Roger Dean 'feel' quite yet.

Babe Ruth: First Base: I doubt baseball is very much Roger Dean's thing. But what to do with a project where the band and the album are both named for Baseball?

Gentle Giant: Octopus: A wee bit too literal? It's called Octopus, here's an octopus. What more do you want?

Gracious!! - This is Gracious!!: No idea who Gracious!! are, but I like this naughty stained-glass idea a lot.

Midnight Sun: Walking Circles: Several thousand years ago, a mutant half-human half-meerkat frose to death on an ice floe. Reminds me of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth today.

Paladin: Charge!: Well, literal - a horse charging. But it's no 'Octopus redux' - the horse seems vaguely cyborg-like, and the rider seems vaguely horsey. I don't get it, but interesting.

The John Dummer Band: Blue: A die-cut masterpiece: look at it carefully to figure it out. The 'cover' itself is nothing more than a pink box with two clouds cut into it. Neither is what might be the inner side of a gatefold or what might be an inner sleeve: the 'goods' are all contained on 'layer three'. It's beautiful, even if it's not quite the right colour for the album title, and even if presumably a bit of use subjected this cover to horrid wear-and-tear.

Third Ear Band: Music From Macbeth: Well, the title screams 'prog'. This is a creepy cover of three people doing something intimate and probably unpleasant. the witches? But where is their cauldron? And whence the bubble, bubble, toil and trouble?

Uriah Heep: Demons and Wizards: I must admit - this looks like a high schooler parodying Roger Dean. It's all a bit too obvious, isn't it?

Various Artists: Motown Chartbusters, Vol. Six: How Barry Gordy got Dean's number I'll never know, and why Dean deigned to design a cover for a knock-off 'Now That's What I Call Music' type compilation I'll never know. But it's the incogruity that gets me. Giant bugship, yay.

Yes: Close to the Edge: And with his 'muses' Yes, Roger Dean manages to subvert his 'look' before he's even truly established it. I guess there are standard-Dean landscapes elsewhere in this package, but the cover is all green. Thick green fog on Planet Dean that day? Don't ask me why, but I like it.