The Covered Uncovered: The freezing beans and suit-baiting of ‘The Who Sell Out’
By 1967, the term “concept album” had entered the pop lexicon. The Kinks had already released their collection of personality studies Face to Face the year before, prior to which Frank Zappa had dropped Freak Out!, a psychedelic opera skewering American society. Inspired by these holistic approaches to album-making, The Who developed their own concept.
It was initially band manager Kit Lambert’s idea to build an album around the concept of a pirate radio show. A UK law had enforced the banning of almost all pirate radio stations that summer. Meanwhile, the mod subculture to which The Who owed many of their most ardent fans had developed around pirate radio.
Drawing on real commercial brands, the group proceeded to record a series of adverts, jingles and announcements with which the album’s other tracks were interspersed. Heinz Baked Beans, Odorono deodorant and Medac acne ointment even get their own songs.
In this way, The Who Sell Out established the long-running trend of albums mimicking radio shows, cutting between music, commercial messages and DJ patter. Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf and Janelle Monae’s Electric Lady are just two of many 21st-century examples to have taken their cue from Pete Townshend and co.
The band even extended their “selling out” beyond the recording of the album to its cover sleeve. It was this move that really landed them in hot water – or cold beans, in the case of singer Roger Daltrey.
American photographer David Montgomery (later of Electric Ladyland fame) created the artwork. He used four separate pictures, one of each band member satirically marketing a real-world product, as panels on the front and back covers. On the front cover, Townshend is proudly shoving an oversized can of Odorono into his bare armpit, while Daltrey is bathing in a giant can of Heinz Baked Beans.
The latter claims the shoot made him ill, as the beans had just come out of the freezer. “The back of me was cooking, and the front of me was freezing,” he later told the BBC. “And so I got pneumonia.”
He wasn’t the only one frozen out by the cover. Heinz were reportedly unhappy they hadn’t been consulted by the band’s representatives before the artwork’s flagrant mockery of their signature product. Their irritation didn’t last too long, however, as they suddenly realised all the free promotions they were getting all around the world. Thanks to The Who, bathing in beans would even become a favourite pastime of world record-breakers like Barry Kirk (aka Captain Beany).
Deodorant company Odorono had more reason to be annoyed by their unsolicited appearance on the album cover. The band’s business manager, Chris Stamp, had the nerve to request product endorsement fees from the company for the pleasure of being satirised. Naturally, Odorono didn’t take too kindly to this request. It only served to draw their attention to the song named after them on the record about a woman whose “deodorant had let her down”.
If anything, though, the corporates whose culture it was skewering kicking up a fuss only meant the album had landed on the mark. Its brazen use of actual brands for the purposes of lampooning them and everything they stand for successfully encapsulates the countercultural spirit of the late 1960s.
And it means The Who Sell Out has gone down in history as one of the great satirical album covers of all time. Advertising an album that does exactly the opposite of what it says on the tin.
