“If I don’t like the music, I don’t do the project.” “When someone asks me to do a cover, first I listen to the music,” he told a crowd of several dozen onlookers after Parks’ erudite and loving introduction. Still, the line drawing he created, a pastiche incorporating bits and pieces of photos and other visuals, was considered the perfect counterpart to the Beatles great stylistic leap forward. “For me, I can only focus on one at a time, so when I was doing music, I did not do art,” he said. When the Beatles suggested he come up with art work for “Revolver,” which represented a quantum leap forward for the group musically, thematically and technically, Voormann said, “It was difficult to switch back” from music to graphic art. Subsequently, he largely gave up the pursuit of visual art in favor of playing rock ‘n’ roll in various bands, usually playing bass, but also occasionally picking up a saxophone. There are some things I never would have chosen, but since they picked them, I said OK.”Īround the time that the Beatles’ scuffling days in Hamburg were coming to an end as Beatlemania began to erupt in 1963 that Voormann also got the bug to play music. “My daughter Ruscha, my son Maximilian and my wife, Christina, chose them for my 80 th birthday without my knowledge. “You will laugh when I tell you how the pieces were chosen,” Voormann told The Times in an interview before the formal opening of the show. The exhibition was created in recognition of Voormann’s 80 th birthday in April. The show at NAVEL spans more than 50 years’ worth of Voormann’s work and includes cover art he created for numerous other artists’ recordings, including Van Dyke Parks, who attended Tuesday’s opening to offer introductory remarks, Ringo Starr, the Bee Gees, Spooky Tooth, Stan Getz, Turbonegro and Jackie Lomax. Titled “It Started in Hamburg,” the show is billed as the first major exhibition of artwork by Voormann, best known to music fans for his Grammy-winning design for the Beatles’ 1966 album “Revolver.” Veteran musician, graphic artist and lifelong Beatles pal Klaus Voormann returned to Los Angeles this week for the opening of a relatively short-term career-spanning exhibition of his artwork at the downtown-adjacent NAVEL art gallery, where Voormann mixed Tuesday night with an assortment of music and art-world friends and admirers.

The beatles revolver cd cover