Sometimes, my father, Burton Silverman, age 89, has trouble remembering certain things. He worries about this. My mother, a psychologist, 79, worries even more, parsing his speech patterns and emails for any clinical signs of cognitive impairment. He always hand waves away these concerns, partly for our benefit and partly because there is little to be done.
But as some details — the name of a former friend, where he last stashed his wallet — seem to fall just beyond his fingertips, dad’s focus has turned towards something less definable: his career. More to the point, the end of a career that has seen him become one of the more prominent realist painters of his time. And yet, for all the artwork he’s created, the accolades and awards, it bothers him, in a way he can’t really express and may not want to recognize, that one of the first lines in his obituary will mention a “throwaway gig,” from the winter of 1970: the artwork for Jethro Tull’s best-known and best-selling album, Aqualung.
Seven million copies of Aqualung have been sold over the last five-odd decades and the cover has become one of the most recognizable in rock and roll history, migrating from vinyl albums to cassettes, CDs, and iTunes art, plus an unending supply of Aqualung-embossed merchandise. But dad’s earnings had a hard cap. In 1971, Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Records, paid him a flat $1,500 fee for the three paintings which would comprise the album’s artwork, consummating the deal with nothing more than a handshake. No written contractual agreement was drawn up, and, much to his eventual dismay, nor was any determination made about future use.
In the past, dad has huddled with a lawyer or two, hoping he might be able to take the record company to court or claw back a portion of what he felt he was owed. No one felt his case was strong enough to recommend going forward, thanks to the nonexistent contract and older copyright laws which greatly disadvantaged artists. 25 years ago, he even reached out to Ian Anderson, the lead singer of Jethro Tull, to see if he might be interested in joining the cause. Anderson declined. And no matter how much dad tried to put it out of his mind, the paintings would inevitably burble back to the surface. A patron or even a friend would be reduced to a gawking fanboy after learning he painted Aqualung. Or the possible art thief-slash-con man who came crawling out the woodwork in 2012, claiming he’d unearthed the presumably lost cover and hoping to sell the valuable artifact back to dad.