The Story Behind Andy Warhol’s ‘Velvet Underground and Nico’ Cover, the Newly Crowned Best Album Art of All Time

On Monday, Billboard released its list of the greatest album covers of all time, and the winner was not Robert Mapplethorpe (the photographer behind a famed Patti Smith record), Peter Blake (who, with his wife Jann Haworth, did an iconic image for the Beatles), or even George Condo (whose paintings became synonymous with Kanye West for a bit), but Andy Warhol, who took the top honors for the 1967 album The Velvet Underground and Nico.

To those with a passing knowledge of rock music, this seems like an uncontroversial choice. But on social media this week, the Billboard list became the subject of discussion after some users asked variations on a question that caused others to cringe: A banana, really?

It may be hard to recall a time when The Velvet Underground and Nico was unpopular, but in fact there was one, and it was 1967, the year it came out. While the record is now considered a towering achievement—its aggressive sounds and subversive lyrics now seen as precursors to so many sonic trends afterward—The Velvet Underground and Nico did not find a mass audience at the time.

Behind the scenes, Warhol was influential in the creation of the album. Serving as the band’s manager, Warhol was the one who linked up The Velvet Underground with Nico. The musicians ended up taking part in Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances. Yet even Warhol’s involvement did little to boost the band’s commercial prospects.

Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik has reported that The Velvet Underground and Nico only made it #171 on the Billboard 200 charts and that, between 1967 and 1969, its sales accounted for just $22,000 in royalties. The Pop artist’s management company, Warvel, took a one-fifth cut from that—a meager sum, even when inflation is taken into consideration. (In 1982, producer Brian Eno claimed that the album only sold around 30,000 copies in its first five years.)

The music on the album was considered improper—its lyrics take up doing drugs and S&M, among other activities—and so many radio stations declined to play it. That’s one reason the album didn’t fare well at the time. But another may be its album cover, a Pop image whose double entendre is laid on thickly.

JPEGs of the cover for The Velvet Underground and Nico conceal the fact that Warhol designed the album cover so that it had an interactive element. The banana’s vinyl skin could pulled away, offering a view of a pink fruit beneath it. “Peel slowly and see,” some unsubtle text on the cover reads. Gopnik has compared all this to peeling back a foreskin and written that the jacket “aligned the Velvets with the hard-edged queer culture that the Factory was coming to represent.”

Or, to put it another way, here’s what Lou Reed, the band’s frontman, had this to say about the album: “The banana actually made it into an erotic art show.”

In fact, it wasn’t the only erotic art show that Warhol created for a musician. Another was produced in 1969 for the Rolling Stones, whose 1971 album Sticky Fingers features a close-up of a man’s torso clad in denim, his left bulge plainly visible. That album cover featured a zipper that could be pulled down to reveal underwear beneath. Later reissues of the record nixed the zipper, so that all that was left was Warhol’s picture.

The reception for Sticky Fingers was much different. Warhol, along with the designer Craig Braun, received a Grammy nomination for it. Sticky Fingers also appeared on the Billboard 200 list—more than 20 spots behind The Velvet Underground and Nico.