With Their Heads in the Clouds - How John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Reverend Gary Davis all "Come Together" in the Sky

Just one of the little cool things I've discovered while writing my new bio on Rev Gary Davis - God, Guitars, Girls & Guns

Blind since childhood, Reverend Gary Davis inhabited an “inner landscape” where clocks, calendars, and the written word (apart from his Braille bible) didn’t act as the typical mileposts of the sighted world. Perhaps the surrealist cover art to his 1971 album, Ragtime Guitar, best evokes the twilight terrain in which he dwelled. Twin images of Davis playing guitar are reflected in his sunglasses while Rene Magritte-style clouds float behind him.

“The idea came from [producer] Mick McDonagh at Transatlantic Records,” Stefan Grossman recalled. “He was very proud of the design as the week it was released, John Lennon’s solo album [Imagine] came out with the same concept on his cover.”*

Designed by Hipgnosis, the team of Storm Thorgerson (who passed away on this date in 2013) and Aubrey Powell were famous for their innovative record jackets for Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here) as well as Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy – a startling vision of a tribe of naked, curly haired seraphim ascending the sun-bleached rocks of eternity.

Once again, the Reverend unexpectedly found himself rubbing shoulders with the leading counterculture figures of the day.

* John and Yoko were obsessed with the sky and had used a photo of a cloud drifting by on the cover of their earlier release, Live Peace In Toronto 1969.

After meeting John in November 1966, Yoko wrote him a letter while he was in Rishikesh, India, saying “I am a cloud. Watch for me in the sky.’” John replied with: “In the middle of a cloud I call your name” in “Oh Yoko” which later appeared on Imagine. John also quoted Yoko’s concept poem “Cloud Piece,” on the back of the Imagine cover. Written in the spring of 1963, it first appeared in her book Grapefruit: “Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.” Lennon had previously written “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” for Seargent Pepper (1967) and published a hodge podge of odds and ends called Skywriting by Word of Mouth in 1986.