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18


BREAKFAST IN AMERICA
Supertramp
A&M, 1979
Designer: Mike Doud
Photographer: Aaron Rapoport

he members of Supertramp didn't appear on their album covers, says keyboardist Rick Davies, because "we wanted to be around a long time, and we didn't want people watching us getting older. We were a pretty imageless lot, anyway." For Breakfast in America, the band's first LP after moving to the U.S., designer Mike Doud drew various illustrations combining breakfast and America -- one of the rejected sketches depicted giant Cheerios rolling down Arizona's Monument Valley in a flood of milk.

The band preferred Doud's illustration of the Statue of Liberty holding an orange-juice glass, so Doud's associate, Mick Haggerty, went about selecting a model. He brought in a busty beauty, then what Haggerty calls "a Tom Waits kind of girl," both of whom the band vetoed. Eventually, they found the matronly woman whom Haggerty dubbed Libby. Haggerty also built a miniature Manahattan out of breakfast implements. The motif inspired a huge promotional campaign that featured such items as laminated menus, spoons, plates and cans of orange juice.

"It's New York seen through the eyes of someone that sees it not as a gateway to the east of America but as a gateway to Route 66," says Haggerty, an Englishman. "It was a West Coast treatment of an East Coast icon."

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