**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 what I’m thinking. I have this unused color print from a photograph we shot for the (Furniture) Corporation brochure. 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.” They were huge at the time, so I got nervous.

I made black and white Xerox copies of everything so I could create rough layouts while preserving the ‘final’ color components. I made two and after I finished, we looked at them, picked one, made 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 headed back outside to have another cigarette when the studio door flew open, and Frankie Sullivan and Jim Peterik appeared. They saw my boss and walked past me towards the conference table where he sat. Both wore tight, leather pants, shirts with the top three buttons undone revealing their tan skin and chest hair, and 3/4 black boots like 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 from where they were meeting.

When the three of them finished they walked over to me, and my boss introduced us. Sullivan and Peterik smiled, thanked me for my help, shook my hand, and they left as suddenly as they’d arrived. My boss was smiling too because they liked the cover. Then we gathered our things and walked out together—him to the nearby parking lot to get his car and disappear into a northern burb and me to the ‘L’ station on Chicago Avenue. Meeting two pop rock stars, walking out into the humid 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, settled in, and looked east towards Lake Michigan where I’d probably spend Saturday or Sunday afternoon tanning, swimming, and eating Italian Ice on the beach with thousands of other Chicagoans.

Later that summer, my boss told me that the album cover design had been approved by the record company and there weren’t any revisions. Then months later in November, I walked into my neighborhood record store on Belmont Avenue under the tracks for my weekly visit 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, and I Feel Alright by Steve Earle