Led Zeppelin III was released

I had a gardening calendar wheel and when you moved the wheel around, it would show little information windows telling you what to sow, prune and harvest and when. I thought it would be interesting to attempt a similar design for an album cover.

It would be a complicated thing to construct, and even harder to mass produce. It needed to have a lot of cut-outs on the cover, and the wheel that was within the cover needed to be profusely illustrated so that when you turned it you saw the images through the windows.

The artist Richard Drew, whom I had known since 1962, took this idea and made the Led Zeppelin III album cover into a great piece of Pop Art. The portraits he picked for the back cover weren’t what I was expecting, they were cropped images taken from photographs that I saw later. In the photographs John Bonham is actually sitting in his car, Robert is sitting on the bonnet of a car and I’m just looking like I haven’t had a shave.

I thought Richard, who changed his name to Zacron at this time, did a superb job. He really rose to the occasion.