My Father the Cover Artist
Craig Braun
In the 1960s and ’70s, graphic designer Craig Braun worked with the creative giants of his generation—Andy Warhol, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin among them—to design album covers that were more than just pretty pictures. From the Velvet Underground banana sleeve to the Rolling Stones’ lips and tongue logo, some of the century’s most iconic images were produced by him. Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1939 and now an actor living in Los Angeles, California, Braun has three sons, Tim, Nicholas, and Guillaume.
Craig and Tim (sixteen years old) in East Hampton, New York, 1979
here’s a snapshot of my childhood: my dad spilling out of a vintage Porsche in an embroidered goatskin coat and patchwork pants, a model on his arm, white powder visible under his nose. My dad loved—and lived—the rock-and-roll life. Whatever excesses that entailed, he only wanted more.
My parents were married just long enough to have me and realize that they weren’t suited for each other at all. My mother and I lived in an apartment in Greenwich Village, while my dad, whom I saw on weekends, had a huge nineteenth-century carriage house on Sixty-Ninth Street between Third and Lexington Avenues. One of his girlfriends at the time, fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, called his place “the epitome of cool.” It was pure ’70s, chic and decadent, with lots of chrome and velvet, Jacuzzis, and a multilevel carpeted master suite strewn with mirrored Indian pillows.
Every night was a party. In the morning, I’d come downstairs to a sea of smudged glasses and ashtrays overflowing with still-smoldering cigarette butts. Dad would stumble out of bed sometime later and we’d go for breakfast at his favorite place, the Barbizon Hotel. A women-only hotel famous for the beautiful actresses, airline stewardesses, and models who stayed there, the Barbizon had a coffee shop on the ground level that was open to the public. I’d hunker down with a pile of pancakes, submerging them in syrup, while Dad, through mirrored glasses, scoped out the “pie,” looking for “new talent.” His appetite was insatiable.
When I was nine, I was sent to the Malcolm Gordon School in Garrison, New York, an hour north of the city. It was a prim and proper all-boys boarding school, with ivy-covered walls and sweeping views of the Hudson River and West Point. On visiting day, at afternoon tea, the dads would sit with embroidered lime-green whales on their pants, their wives in simple madras shifts, while my dad sprawled in an armchair, shirt unbuttoned, legs splayed, never wearing underwear. When “the scene got too uptight,” he would disappear into the bathroom and do a few lines of cocaine.
He was at the height of his fame then. His Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album cover had just come out; he’d designed Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, which included a pair of disposable panties wrapped around every album, and Cheech and Chong’s Big Bambú with its giant rolling paper. He was creating packaging and logos for almost every major act of the era—from Led Zeppelin and the Carpenters to Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles.
Being “hip” was essential to him, and he didn’t miss a single fad, from Nehru jackets and Chelsea boots in the ’60s to safari suits and platform shoes in the ’70s. Sometimes he would show up with piles of clothes for me from Europe: tweed maxicoats with matching bell-bottom pants, flowered Liberty of London shirts, ribbed sweaters from France with buttons along the shoulder. Of course, my school required its students to wear a uniform, so I didn’t have much use for any of it.
When I was eleven, he pulled me out of school for a last-minute trip to Europe with his French girlfriend, who was so beautiful, she literally stopped traffic. We went to London and Paris and Deauville, listening to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Carly Simon’s No Secrets, and Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill on repeat on a portable turntable for the entire trip. Later that same year, my father won a Grammy for Best Art Direction/Design for the cover of the London Symphony Orchestra version of the Who’s Tommy and brought the award up to show me at school. It turned out that there had been a mix-up backstage and he had somehow ended up with Carly Simon’s Grammy for “You’re So Vain.” In retrospect, it’s almost too easy to make a crack about that.
Watching this rock-and-roll lifestyle get the better of my dad was extremely painful. He really didn’t have space in his life for a son and, because he always had to be the most handsome man in the room, didn’t relish the idea of relinquishing attention to anyone else. Even me.
And then his world started to come apart in great chunks. In 1974, he was indicted by a grand jury for multiple counts of tax evasion and narrowly escaped going to prison. I found out about it while watching the nightly news in a room filled with my classmates. He started speedballing, snorting heroin laced with cocaine. His high-flying career took a nosedive.
By thirty-six, he was washed up, his design career finished.
Just when it seemed he couldn’t sink any lower, he got lucky. A friend dragged him to an AA meeting in Los Angeles, and, somehow, the program stuck. He just celebrated forty years of sobriety.
As for me, after some therapy and a lot of introspection—along with a few years of not speaking to him—I’ve come to think of my dad as simply a toolbox that’s missing a couple of tools. If I keep looking for them, I will continue to be disappointed. As long as I don’t, we can have a relationship. There’s no reason we should have a loving one, but we do—and he still can’t believe it. He tells me how thankful he is almost every time we talk.
What I’ve learned is that you can’t be mad at ghosts. He is not remotely the man I knew when I was a child anymore. I will not be one of those grown men or women who continues to blame their parents for the childhood they missed or the person they’ve become. It’s my show now.
I am a very different sort of dad. I have twin teenage daughters and have relished celebrating and being totally involved in their lives.
Now whenever I see my dad’s work, I feel proud of his accomplishments. I don’t forget the tough times, but I feel fortunate that he survived those years and that my daughters can point to the Rolling Stones logo or the Velvet Underground banana peel and say, “Grandpa made that!”