Ike & Tina Turner – Outta Season
The eleventh studio album release by Ike & Tina Turner has a double cover, each showing a portrait of the couple, with their names set in Thorowgood Sans Shaded; the album title is revealed on the inside of the gatefold: Outta Season. The music consists of a mix of original tracks and covers.
At first I thought the album artwork (shot and arranged by “Amos and Andy”) was a reference to the artwork of You Don’t Have to be Black to Love the Blues by Junior Parker – but the Ike and Tina album predates Parker’s album by three years. In turn, Parker’s album is a parody of the popular “You don’t have to be jewish” campaign for Levy’s Jewish Rye bread which ran in the 1960s–70s. It looks like the designers found some inspiration in that campaign, but what about the reversed blackface? References like the racist stereotypes of black children and adults with watermelons from the US South, and Al Jolson’s blackface are easily found in reference to this cover, adding to (at least my) confusion about what we’re looking at.
The track list and credits on the gatefold are set in various styles from Univers.
2 Comments on “Ike & Tina Turner – Outta Season”
Even the design credits (“Amos and Andy”) appear be a case of parody: Amos ’n Andy was a popular US radio show (1928–1960) and TV show (1951–1953). From Wikipedia:
According to the Wikipedia article about the album, the art direction was actually by Tom Wilkes, with photography by Barry Feinstein.