By John Ruch
Photo: Artworks from Danzig's Danzig III: How the Gods Kill, Celtic Frost's To Mega Therion and Dead Kennedys' Frankenchrist. (John Ruch/copyright 2014)
The Alien guy died.
That’s about all the major-media obits for H.R. Giger will tell you. If they’re feeling all hipster, they may also tell you he did some album art for Debbie Harry and, hilariously, Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
This is the final revenge of the mundane middlebrows as they tame every piece of news to be water-cooler-safe. Even the lifework of this visionary surrealist whose erotic, sadomasochistic, fetishistic, “biomechanical” art tore the flesh off consensus reality to expose the bones and wires beneath.
No doubt that his painting-derived Alien (1979) work was extraordinary, worthy of the Oscar it won, and the last truly innovative movie-monster design until Guillermo del Toro came along nearly 20 years later.
But the only reason Giger was involved with Alien in the first place was his determined, consistent embrace of subcultural visionaries and avant-garde extremists, and his willingness to meld his art with theirs. That stance repeatedly placed him at the cradle (and sometimes the grave) of key moments in underground music and film.
Here are three non-Alien things Giger did that are also cool—so cool, in fact, they might still make the water-cooler gang choke on their Crystal Springs.
1. His art made a punk album the target of a landmark obscenity trial
In 1985, the Dead Kennedys—a San Francisco punk band as relentlessly offensive and politically pungent as their name promised—were casting about for cover art for their latest album, dubbed Frankenchrist. Singer Jello Biafra happened across Giger’s Landscape XX, a grotesque image of disembodied penises and vaginas fucking in what appears to be a vat of sewage. To Biafra, the image perfectly captured the album’s theme: the heartless, exploitative screwing-over—metaphorical and otherwise—that defines American consumerism. Ever willing to support incisive troublemaking, Giger licensed the painting to the band at a discount price.
Giger’s vision proved too uncompromising even for Biafra’s fellow punks, who refused to put the painting anywhere on the album jacket. Landscape XX, with a star-spangled border sardonically added, instead appeared as a separate insert. (Ironically, the replacement cover, a snarky but safe photo of a Shriners mini-car parade, got the band sued, too.)
With three-quarters of a band named for assassination victims fretting over Giger, you can imagine how an American mommy reacted when her teenage daughter unwrapped Frankenchrist as a Christmas present. And this was the height of the 1980s moral panic over punk and metal, when professional witch-hunters filled their pockets claiming that Judas Priest was trying to kill its own audience with subliminal suicide messages, that Metallica fans constituted a street gang, and that Twisted Sister would turn your kids into Satanic ritual murderers. Just a few months earlier, Witchfinder Generals Al and Tipper Gore had dragged musicians before Congress to demonize underground music and threaten censorship.
Soon the cops raided Biafra’s home and dragged him and several others to court in L.A. on criminal charges of distribution of harmful matter to minors. The Frankenchrist trial of 1987 was the Reagan era’s battle of Armageddon between Satanic-panic maniacs and rebels with an anti-Me Generation cause. The punks won on a TKO—a hung jury favored acquittal, and chastened prosecutors, realizing Biafra wasn’t the moronic, easy target they expected, let the case die.
The cost was enormous; the stresses of legal combat tore apart the band and almost destroyed their own independent record label, Alternative Tentacles, which lives on today as a crucial font of musical dissent. However Pyrrhic, the victory remains a cultural (if not legal) precedent—the first attempt in U.S. history to criminalize a music album as obscene, its failure seeming to scare cops away from punk and metal. (Though youth-ophobes soon went after rap instead and, with 2 Live Crew, found black musicians to be much easier targets of abuse.)
In retrospect, Dead Kennedys were among the most influential American punk bands and a historic countercultural voice in the Moral Majority era. The Frankenchrist trial is now a fabled chapter in punk lore. But while Biafra took most of the heat and now garners most of the glory, Giger’s vision was on trial, too. With the Frankenchrist poster, the Swiss surrealist and the American prankster met in an artistic combo as unlikely, as jarring and as powerful as the flesh-and-metal cyborgs that populate much of Giger’s own art. That artistic kick in the Reagan era’s groin, and Giger’s bold willingness to partner with this patently dangerous band in the first place, is what elevated Frankenchrist into the realm of punk legend and made it a landmark fuck-you to the Tippers of the world.
Alternative Tentacles, the label that Biafra still runs, remembered Giger today in a Facebook statement:
“We urge you all to take a moment and enjoy the astounding artwork of this true visionary. Our deepest condolences to the friends and family of Giger. The world has lost a unique voice and an astounding talent. We are all poorer for it.”
2. He was an early supporter of death metal
Even today, with Metallica having escaped Tipper’s clutches to sell 10 billion albums, associating oneself with the dark and angry world of heavy metal carries social risks. Giger frequently and boldly collaborated with metal bands, most deeply with his fellow Swiss princes of darkness in Celtic Frost. He served as friend and cheerleader to the band as it helped invent the death/black metal subgenres and in general sharpened metal’s cutting edge.
Giger actually embraced the Frost guys when they were in an earlier, little-loved band called Hellhammer and they were starstruck fanboys ringing him up. In a remarkable gesture, he offered them free use of his diabolical painting Satan I—depicting the Devil using the crucified Jesus as a slingshot—as an album cover.
“At a time when almost everybody ridiculed, ignored or even obstructed the music the then almost completely unknown Swiss underground band Hellhammer was creating, Giger listened to us, talked to us and gave us a chance. Not least at a time when he was at one of many peaks of his path,” recalled former Celtic Frost frontman Tom Gabriel Fischer on his blog yesterday.
Hellhammer didn’t last long, but when Celtic Frost formed in 1984, Giger was by their side as “mentor” and friend, Fischer recalled. Satan I finally saw use as the cover to Celtic Frost’s 1985 album To Mega Therion, a seminal slab of thrash-metal wax. For giving Celtic Frost the juicy Giger bump, the artist charged the same Hellhammer fee: nothing except goodwill.
Giger continued collaborating with Fischer in recent years, providing cover art for his post-Frost band Triptykon, an avant-garde group that continues to chart new metal terrain.
“…[I]t was his mentorship, friendship and art that enabled us, once again, to release a second album on which music and cover art formed a seamless symbiosis. Only a few weeks ago, he held the result in his hands and loved it,” Fischer said in his blog statement.
“Regardless of anything I may write about H.R. Giger, however, none of these words will ever be able to truly, accurately describe him as a person and as a friend. It is utterly inconceivable to imagine a world without his wit, his perception, his genius, his horizon, his determination, his humour, his friendship, and his immeasurable kindness. And yet, we are now left in exactly such a world.”
“We” really means the entire, vibrant, but rarely championed metal world. Giger’s work shows up everywhere from that Korn guy’s crazy mic stand to the cover of Danzig’s standout album How the Gods Kill. In the latter case, he also sued Danzig over misuse of the art on T-shirts. (That spawned a classic metal myth that Giger hired a process server who crowd-surfed his way to Danzig at a concert to slap the lawsuit papers on him.) Still, even that dispute shows how serious and measured Giger was about who he shared his art with. It’s fair to note that Giger’s style seemed to freeze and verge into shtick at some point, particularly as he became a metal brand name. But there’s little doubt his collaborations came from genuine sympathy for metal’s devils.
This guy was throwing devil horns for proto death metal before a lot of today’s hell-raisers were even born. Few are the famous artists who can say they used their power to help out some obscure band that 99 percent of people would loathe on sight—and that went on to change the musical world.
3. He helped reinvent the science-fiction genre
The first attempt to make a movie version of the sci-fi novel Dune was a glorious failure. Despite never being made, the film’s planning effort in the 1970s profoundly influenced sci-fi for decades to come—and Giger was a big part of that.
Mystic-genius director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s bizarro scheme to make Dune a 14-hour mega-movie is the stuff of legend. His magnificently weird ideas are too many to name, and in fact, you can go watch a whole movie about them (Jodorowsky's Dune).
We’re interested in one of those ideas: bringing in Giger, then known only for painting and sculpture, to work on his first-ever film project. Jodorowsky set Giger to work designing nightmarish architecture and spaceships.
The whole project fell through, and Dune eventually would be made by surrealist-lite director David Lynch. Meanwhile, Jodorowsky’s freshly unemployed special effects guy, Dan O’Bannon, wrote some screenplays. One of them was a sci-fi movie called…yep, Alien.
When the movie got the greenlight and it was time to design the alien, O’Bannon remembered this painter he worked with on the failed Dune.
So yeah, Giger was the Alien guy. But only because he created that opportunity by being the Dune guy first.
And that’s a lot cooler than the water-cooler crowd will tell you.
Photo: Artworks from Danzig's Danzig III: How the Gods Kill, Celtic Frost's To Mega Therion and Dead Kennedys' Frankenchrist. (John Ruch/copyright 2014)
The Alien guy died.
That’s about all the major-media obits for H.R. Giger will tell you. If they’re feeling all hipster, they may also tell you he did some album art for Debbie Harry and, hilariously, Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
This is the final revenge of the mundane middlebrows as they tame every piece of news to be water-cooler-safe. Even the lifework of this visionary surrealist whose erotic, sadomasochistic, fetishistic, “biomechanical” art tore the flesh off consensus reality to expose the bones and wires beneath.
No doubt that his painting-derived Alien (1979) work was extraordinary, worthy of the Oscar it won, and the last truly innovative movie-monster design until Guillermo del Toro came along nearly 20 years later.
But the only reason Giger was involved with Alien in the first place was his determined, consistent embrace of subcultural visionaries and avant-garde extremists, and his willingness to meld his art with theirs. That stance repeatedly placed him at the cradle (and sometimes the grave) of key moments in underground music and film.
Here are three non-Alien things Giger did that are also cool—so cool, in fact, they might still make the water-cooler gang choke on their Crystal Springs.
1. His art made a punk album the target of a landmark obscenity trial
In 1985, the Dead Kennedys—a San Francisco punk band as relentlessly offensive and politically pungent as their name promised—were casting about for cover art for their latest album, dubbed Frankenchrist. Singer Jello Biafra happened across Giger’s Landscape XX, a grotesque image of disembodied penises and vaginas fucking in what appears to be a vat of sewage. To Biafra, the image perfectly captured the album’s theme: the heartless, exploitative screwing-over—metaphorical and otherwise—that defines American consumerism. Ever willing to support incisive troublemaking, Giger licensed the painting to the band at a discount price.
Giger’s vision proved too uncompromising even for Biafra’s fellow punks, who refused to put the painting anywhere on the album jacket. Landscape XX, with a star-spangled border sardonically added, instead appeared as a separate insert. (Ironically, the replacement cover, a snarky but safe photo of a Shriners mini-car parade, got the band sued, too.)
With three-quarters of a band named for assassination victims fretting over Giger, you can imagine how an American mommy reacted when her teenage daughter unwrapped Frankenchrist as a Christmas present. And this was the height of the 1980s moral panic over punk and metal, when professional witch-hunters filled their pockets claiming that Judas Priest was trying to kill its own audience with subliminal suicide messages, that Metallica fans constituted a street gang, and that Twisted Sister would turn your kids into Satanic ritual murderers. Just a few months earlier, Witchfinder Generals Al and Tipper Gore had dragged musicians before Congress to demonize underground music and threaten censorship.
Soon the cops raided Biafra’s home and dragged him and several others to court in L.A. on criminal charges of distribution of harmful matter to minors. The Frankenchrist trial of 1987 was the Reagan era’s battle of Armageddon between Satanic-panic maniacs and rebels with an anti-Me Generation cause. The punks won on a TKO—a hung jury favored acquittal, and chastened prosecutors, realizing Biafra wasn’t the moronic, easy target they expected, let the case die.
The cost was enormous; the stresses of legal combat tore apart the band and almost destroyed their own independent record label, Alternative Tentacles, which lives on today as a crucial font of musical dissent. However Pyrrhic, the victory remains a cultural (if not legal) precedent—the first attempt in U.S. history to criminalize a music album as obscene, its failure seeming to scare cops away from punk and metal. (Though youth-ophobes soon went after rap instead and, with 2 Live Crew, found black musicians to be much easier targets of abuse.)
In retrospect, Dead Kennedys were among the most influential American punk bands and a historic countercultural voice in the Moral Majority era. The Frankenchrist trial is now a fabled chapter in punk lore. But while Biafra took most of the heat and now garners most of the glory, Giger’s vision was on trial, too. With the Frankenchrist poster, the Swiss surrealist and the American prankster met in an artistic combo as unlikely, as jarring and as powerful as the flesh-and-metal cyborgs that populate much of Giger’s own art. That artistic kick in the Reagan era’s groin, and Giger’s bold willingness to partner with this patently dangerous band in the first place, is what elevated Frankenchrist into the realm of punk legend and made it a landmark fuck-you to the Tippers of the world.
Alternative Tentacles, the label that Biafra still runs, remembered Giger today in a Facebook statement:
“We urge you all to take a moment and enjoy the astounding artwork of this true visionary. Our deepest condolences to the friends and family of Giger. The world has lost a unique voice and an astounding talent. We are all poorer for it.”
2. He was an early supporter of death metal
Even today, with Metallica having escaped Tipper’s clutches to sell 10 billion albums, associating oneself with the dark and angry world of heavy metal carries social risks. Giger frequently and boldly collaborated with metal bands, most deeply with his fellow Swiss princes of darkness in Celtic Frost. He served as friend and cheerleader to the band as it helped invent the death/black metal subgenres and in general sharpened metal’s cutting edge.
Giger actually embraced the Frost guys when they were in an earlier, little-loved band called Hellhammer and they were starstruck fanboys ringing him up. In a remarkable gesture, he offered them free use of his diabolical painting Satan I—depicting the Devil using the crucified Jesus as a slingshot—as an album cover.
“At a time when almost everybody ridiculed, ignored or even obstructed the music the then almost completely unknown Swiss underground band Hellhammer was creating, Giger listened to us, talked to us and gave us a chance. Not least at a time when he was at one of many peaks of his path,” recalled former Celtic Frost frontman Tom Gabriel Fischer on his blog yesterday.
Hellhammer didn’t last long, but when Celtic Frost formed in 1984, Giger was by their side as “mentor” and friend, Fischer recalled. Satan I finally saw use as the cover to Celtic Frost’s 1985 album To Mega Therion, a seminal slab of thrash-metal wax. For giving Celtic Frost the juicy Giger bump, the artist charged the same Hellhammer fee: nothing except goodwill.
Giger continued collaborating with Fischer in recent years, providing cover art for his post-Frost band Triptykon, an avant-garde group that continues to chart new metal terrain.
“…[I]t was his mentorship, friendship and art that enabled us, once again, to release a second album on which music and cover art formed a seamless symbiosis. Only a few weeks ago, he held the result in his hands and loved it,” Fischer said in his blog statement.
“Regardless of anything I may write about H.R. Giger, however, none of these words will ever be able to truly, accurately describe him as a person and as a friend. It is utterly inconceivable to imagine a world without his wit, his perception, his genius, his horizon, his determination, his humour, his friendship, and his immeasurable kindness. And yet, we are now left in exactly such a world.”
“We” really means the entire, vibrant, but rarely championed metal world. Giger’s work shows up everywhere from that Korn guy’s crazy mic stand to the cover of Danzig’s standout album How the Gods Kill. In the latter case, he also sued Danzig over misuse of the art on T-shirts. (That spawned a classic metal myth that Giger hired a process server who crowd-surfed his way to Danzig at a concert to slap the lawsuit papers on him.) Still, even that dispute shows how serious and measured Giger was about who he shared his art with. It’s fair to note that Giger’s style seemed to freeze and verge into shtick at some point, particularly as he became a metal brand name. But there’s little doubt his collaborations came from genuine sympathy for metal’s devils.
This guy was throwing devil horns for proto death metal before a lot of today’s hell-raisers were even born. Few are the famous artists who can say they used their power to help out some obscure band that 99 percent of people would loathe on sight—and that went on to change the musical world.
3. He helped reinvent the science-fiction genre
The first attempt to make a movie version of the sci-fi novel Dune was a glorious failure. Despite never being made, the film’s planning effort in the 1970s profoundly influenced sci-fi for decades to come—and Giger was a big part of that.
Mystic-genius director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s bizarro scheme to make Dune a 14-hour mega-movie is the stuff of legend. His magnificently weird ideas are too many to name, and in fact, you can go watch a whole movie about them (Jodorowsky's Dune).
We’re interested in one of those ideas: bringing in Giger, then known only for painting and sculpture, to work on his first-ever film project. Jodorowsky set Giger to work designing nightmarish architecture and spaceships.
The whole project fell through, and Dune eventually would be made by surrealist-lite director David Lynch. Meanwhile, Jodorowsky’s freshly unemployed special effects guy, Dan O’Bannon, wrote some screenplays. One of them was a sci-fi movie called…yep, Alien.
When the movie got the greenlight and it was time to design the alien, O’Bannon remembered this painter he worked with on the failed Dune.
So yeah, Giger was the Alien guy. But only because he created that opportunity by being the Dune guy first.
And that’s a lot cooler than the water-cooler crowd will tell you.