Designing a billboard is a different task than designing an ad for a magazine; it’s got a very different set of requirements. It has to read really fast, because it’s aimed at people driving by. I think they’ve got about six seconds to digest an image and get the message. To make them stand out, the designers would also add sculptural elements.
There was an Eric Clapton billboard for “Backless” where he was sitting alone in a room and there was a three-dimensional lampshade on the billboard that lit up at night. Alice Cooper had billboards with light-up eyes that changed from day to night…
I think the thing that set the rock-’n’-roll billboards apart from other billboards at the time, and probably ever since, is that it really wasn’t about making a sale. It wasn’t about getting somebody to a cash register to buy something. It was about creating an image, and about a trust between the artist and the record companies… One great billboard for a recording of the “Tommy” album—not by the Who but by the London Symphony—had these two giant chrome pinball eyes photo-realistically painted on it. If you were driving down the street, you’d practically hit the brakes when you saw it. You might have no idea what this was about, it didn’t say “Tommy” or anything on it. They had this leeway to treat these billboards as art pieces, bridging that gap between fine art, commercial art, and the urban landscape.