**North Avenue Beach** :: Chicago – 1986

One Friday afternoon in 1986, my boss, the owner of the design studio I worked at, came to me around 4:30 and asked if I’d stay late and help him with a project. We needed to design an album cover and generate a final comp for his meeting in our office at 7:00. I agreed. Shortly after 5:00, my co-workers began to filter out for the weekend, and I walked outside with one of them to smoke a cigarette. When I returned my boss said, “Ok, here’s my plan. I have this color print from an unused photograph we shot for the (Furniture) Corporation brochure, and earlier today I had a variety of transfers made in different colors and sizes and in various typefaces, for the album title, and the bands logotype. I’d like you to do a couple of layout options while I’m getting the final photo print ready. Do whatever you think works best combining the photo and the type, and then let’s meet about 6:00 and make a final decision.” I looked at the transfers and asked, “so the band is Survivor, you mean the Eye of the Tiger band… that’s the client?” “Yeh.” “So, we’re designing an album cover for Survivor?” “Yes.” I wasn’t a follower of Survivor, but it was Survivor, and they were huge at the time, so I started to get nervous.

I made Xerox copies of everything so I could generate the layouts while preserving the ‘final’ color components until we were ready. Then I made two full-size black and white roughs. After I finished, we looked at them together, picked one, he suggested some adjustments and then proceeded to create the final comp. We mounted it on black presentation board, looked at it for a minute, and congratulated ourselves because we’d pulled it off with time to spare.

Since there were ten minutes until the meeting, I started to head back outside to have another cigarette when suddenly the studio door flew open and Frankie Sullivan and Jim Peterik appeared. They saw my boss and walked briskly past me towards the conference table where he was sitting. Both of them wore tight, black, leather pants, shirts with the top three buttons undone showing their tan skin and chest hair, and 3/4 black boots similar to what the early Beatles wore. They met and I went out to smoke. When I returned I cleaned-up the mess we’d made at the opposite end of the studio.

When they finished, the three of them walked over to me and my boss introduced us, Sullivan and Peterik smiled, they thanked me, we shook hands and they left. My boss smiled too because they liked the cover. Then he and I gathered our things and walked out together — him to the nearby parking lot to retrieve his car and me to the ‘L’ station on Chicago Avenue. Meeting two pop rock stars, walking out into the hazy orange dusk and summer heat, with the rumble and squeal of the trains passing overhead was surreal. Everything happened so quickly and then it was over. I found a window seat on the train and looked towards Lake Michigan where I’d spend Saturday and Sunday afternoon tanning, wading and eating Italian Ice on the beach with thousands of other Chicagoans.

Later that summer, my boss told me that the cover design had been approved by the record company and there weren’t any changes. Then a few months after that, an afternoon in November, I walked into my neighborhood record store on West Belmont Avenue under the tracks, and saw the album sitting on the ‘new releases’ shelf. I’d spent hundreds of hours, hundreds of thousands of seconds in record stores in my life and felt a lot of things, but I never felt that.

Songs :: Is This Love by Survivor, Run Through the Jungle by Creedence Clearwater Revival, She Caught the Katy by The Blues Brothers, Sunshine In Chicago by Sun Kil Moon, Someday, Someway by Marshall Crenshaw, and I Feel Alright by Steve Earle