Raymond Pettibon’s Punk Album Covers For Black Flag, Sonic Youth and More Hardcore Bands

“My work is intimately connected to paper in ways I don’t even understand myself…”

– Raymond Pettibon

 

Did you ever buy an LP because you liked the cover design? Maybe you bought music by Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Iggy Pop, Lana Del Rey or Black Flag, the Los Angeles punk band synonymous with the 1970s hardcore scene?

The band’s name and logo were given by artist Raymond Pettibon to symbolise their themes of rebellion and anarchy. As the band gained popularity the logo was graffitied in and around Los Angeles, drawing the attention of the police to the band’s activities.

Pettibon’s work is epitomised by his ink drawings, which pair stark, graphic imagery with handwritten text, drawing on sources from literature and comics to religion, politics and popular culture to expose the violence, contradictions and myths in American life.

Pettibon was part of the punk scene in Southern California. His brother, Greg Ginn, formed Black Flag in 1976. Pettiborn’s drawings appeared on flyers and singles for other acts on Ginn’s label, SST Records, such as Hüsker Dü, Meat Puppets and Dinosaur Jr.

“They’d go through two hundred drawings and take the worst one possible. The one I did as a joke or something,” Pettibon noted in his book Homo Americanus (2016). “But then, you know, punk rock is music, it’s not art.”

 

His work is on show at Nervous Breakdown at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany. The associated catalogue looks at every record, CD, and cassette cover since 1979 that features his artwork – more than two hundred works from the Stefan Thull Collection. As Thull says: “As a collector, the music itself wasn’t important. Rather, it was the drawings – the motifs, the style, the attention to detail – that mattered to me.”

 

“The distinctions between museums, galleries, books, fanzines, high, low, comics, cartoons, commercial art, fine art are not there for any useful purposes, especially when they’re enforced for marking one’s turf or keeping people out. Entry form above, below, the sides, whatever. My art found its own place.”

– Raymond Pettibon

You can see Pettibon’s cover for the 1990 album Goo, the major-label debut of the New York rock band Sonic Youth. Kim Gordon, the band’s then bassist and singer, recalls meeting Pettibon at a party in Hermosa Beach in the early 1980s. “He was already sort of mythical in our minds,” she says. “There was always a pile of drawings spilling over a tabletop… They were way beyond illustrative.”

The image is based on a 1966 press photograph of Maureen Hindley and David Smith (below), taken in connection with the Moors murders, one of Britain’s most notorious criminal cases. Myra Hindley’s sister Maureen Smith was instrumental in exposing her sister’s depraved crimes.

 

 

Reworked in black ink and Pettibon’s graphic line, the image draws on influences ranging from Goya and William Blake to the visual language of political cartoons and comic strips. The text is sometimes self-generated; other fragments are drawn from the books that filled Pettibon’s parents’ house, ranging from a few words to longer passages – snatches from John Ruskin, the Bible, or, more recently, material encountered online.

 

Other works in the exhibition show Pettibon’s work into colour, such as the red and mustard yellow cover of the 1983 LA punk compilation, Life Is Boring So Why Not Steal This Record (1983). His humour surfaces elsewhere on the cover for The Magic Magicians, where a single lightbulb hovers within a comic book-style burst. Beneath it, Pettibon’s hand runs the line: “As bare as any bulb may be … wishing what I write may be read by their light”.

 

 

“The computer is great in the way it can link to much information at the touch of a keyboard, even though I am a slow typer. The internet does it faster. Does it do better? Not for me. I need the tactile, visual, smell, the paper lice of a page. Otherwise, it’s just gossip and pornography. I never got any inspiration from the electronic media.

“My work is intimately connected to paper in ways I don’t even understand myself, perhaps it is generational. Old dogs can’t learn new tricks.”

– Raymond Pettibon in Flaunt

 

 

 

 

Nervous Breakdown by Raymond Pettibon is on show at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen until 20 September 2026.

Lead Image: Various Artists, Life Is Boring So Why Not Steal This Record, 12 vinyl, Compilation, New Underground Records, Lawndale, CA, 1983