Album cover spoofs, goofs, tributes

The guy in the portrait is Spencer Elden, and he’s in his last year of high school. Back in the day he was the baby on the cover of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album. I love the way still images let us see how time flies. The original image has to be in my top-three album cover list. It still amazes me they left the penis in. According to the Wikipedia entry about the album, they almost didn’t.

According to Cobain, he conceived the idea while watching a television program on water births with Grohl. Cobain mentioned it to Geffen’s art director Robert Fisher. Fisher found some stock footage of underwater births but they were too graphic for the record company…. Instead, Fisher sent a photographer to a pool for babies to take pictures. Five shots were yielded and the band settled on the image of a three-month-old infant named Spenser Elden, the son of the photographer’s friend Rick Elden. However, there was some concern because Elden’s penis was visible in the image. Geffen prepared an alternate cover without the penis…but relented when Cobain made it clear that the only compromise he would accept was a sticker covering the penis that would say “If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.”

http://buzzfeed.com/scott/lego-album-covers

Nevermind lego album cover

Bart was a little more shy in 2002 when he recreated the image for the cover of Rolling Stone.

The original Nevermind cover, with a little Spencer and a little Little Spencer.