Vale Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland - Dedicated to the consummate graphic designer and illustrator (31 March 1944 - 9 August 2022)

By Ian McFarlane

**This article was originally published in Rhythms magazine Issue #314 (November-December 2022)**

SOUNDS OF THE CITY

Ian ‘the other Macca’ McFarlane pays tribute to Australia’s greatest rock’n’roll graphic designer, the late Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland.

With thanks to Dia Taylor, Otis McCausland, James Anfuso

Images courtesy of Ian McFarlane Collection and the McCausland Family

“Home is where the heart is / Closer all the while / Silver capsule in the night / Reeling in the miles / Heading back home, heading back home” (‘Heading Back Home’ by Ian McCausland, 1995)

During one fraught week in August 2022, the Australian music community lost Judith Durham, Olivia Newton-John, Archie Roach and Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland. Anyone’s death is always sad news but this was quite extraordinary. There are more connections here than at first seems obvious but for now I want to pay tribute to my friend Macca.

Ian ‘Macca’ McCausland was a graphic designer, illustrator (foremost in air brush art) and musician who gave more to the story of Australian rock music than can ever be repaid. I believe that he captured the essence, identity and framework of Aussie rock music more so than any other designer of the age. He can rightly be regarded as a national treasure.

He began his career in the 1960s, was most prominent throughout the 1970s and continued to create amazing art up to the mid-2010s when his failing eye sight began to curtail his chosen pursuits.

I first saw Macca’s artwork in the mid-1970s when, as a music obsessed teenager, I became enthralled with his numerous album covers. I first met him in the mid-1990s at the Continental in Prahran and got to know him better after the launch of Ed. Nimmervoll’s book Under The Covers: The Music Graphics Of Ian McCausland, Graeme Webber & Steve Malpass (1999).

I took to visiting him regularly and calling him on the phone just for a chat. He really was one of the most humble, friendly and loveliest blokes I’ve ever known. I’d ask him all sorts of questions about his career. He was never one to big-note himself or make out how important he was: he didn’t have to, he just was. He told me about his friendship with Gulliver Smith, photographer Graeme Webber and Mushroom Records founder Michael Gudinski; about hanging out with Keith Richards in Sydney when The Rolling Stones toured Australia in 1973 (Keith’s helpful piece of advice that day was “rub it on your gums...”); he told me about his love of music in general. I’d ask him if he kept much in the way of his original art work and he explained that most of what he created at Mushroom was eventually thrown out of the store room to make way for other stuff. He was genuine when he said that he’d moved on to other things. What an incredible archive that would be these days! His son Otis has told me that he’s kept some of the original art, so that was a relief to hear.

When he launched his art website (ianmccauslandart.com, I wrote the Introduction, so it seems relevant to reproduce my words here:

“The best graphic designers and illustrators present a unique and easily recognisable style. Melbourne-based illustrator Ian McCausland is one such individual. His illustrations and designs for albums by Little River Band, the Aztecs, Spectrum, Daddy Cool, Chain, Skyhooks, Company Caine, Matt Taylor and Carson plus his work as Art Director for the Mushroom label (in particular the triple LP gatefold release of The Great Australian Rock Festival Sunbury 1973) kept him at the forefront of the Australian rock music industry throughout the 1970s. In the days of the LP sleeve, essentially he was the designer of choice when you wanted a quality product.

“Mushroom Records head Michael Gudinski is quoted in Under The Covers by Ed. Nimmervoll (Electronic Pictures, 1998) as saying, ‘Ian McCausland started Mushroom Art. He was Mushroom Art. He drew it, he looked it, he lived it. I thought he was peerless. There wasn’t anyone else near him, especially for the type of music Mushroom was about at the time. He was a master of airbrushing’.

“It was that quality which the Rolling Stones were also able to tap into. Ian had been designing posters for local bands and gigs since the late 1960s, and when the Stones announced an Australian tour for early 1973, promoter Paul Dainty commissioned him to do the poster. The iconic image of a jet airplane winging its way into the open lips and massive tongue of the famous Rolling Stones logo over a stylised relief map of Australia captured the sense of the tour’s importance with absolute perfection. Dainty, the Stones’ manager Peter Rudge and their stage designer Chip Monck were impressed, immediately asking Ian to do one for the New Zealand leg of the tour. The Australian tour poster is Ian’s most important claim to international fame and original copies are among the most sought-after items by Stones fans and rock’n’roll memorabilia collectors alike.

“Ian may have rubbed shoulders with rock’n’roll royalty, yet he remains one of life’s gentlemen and a true music fan. His career started in the early 1960s when he sang with Melbourne groups The Strangers and Little Gulliver & the Children (for whom he also played guitar). He was also a back-up vocalist and featured artist on Melbourne TV pop series The Go!! Show. All the same, design and illustration were his forte and he applied his music knowledge to his role as Art Director for seminal music paper Go-Set. He actually won a Who / Small Faces poster competition in order to get the gig. Subsequently, his work for early ’70s underground papers The Digger and Planet (in addition to his famous series of dope comix) led to his role as Art Director at Mushroom.

“Ian is quoted in Under The Covers: ‘I was very influenced by San Francisco’s psychedelic Fillmore posters, Robert Crumb and Kelly of Mouse Studios’. His work retains that same timeless sense of rock history, of capturing the essence of the performer’s music in his imagery and style. This is Ian McCausland’s life’s pursuit – embrace it as part of Australia’s rock’n’roll heritage.”

MACCA THE MUSICIAN

That’s a basic introduction, so firstly I’ll delve deeper into his music career: as a teenager obsessed with rock’n’roll in the early 1960s, Macca formed The Lincolns with his high school mates. They did birthday parties and teenage dances around his suburb of Glenroy. The big Melbourne band of the day, The Strangers, caught his attention and he started singing a couple of sets a night with them around the thriving Melbourne suburban rock dance scene. This was the era when dances at Town Halls were the places to be on Friday and Saturday nights. You could see The Strangers, Colin Cook, Betty McQuade, Johnny Chester and The Chessmen, The Thunderbirds, The Premiers, The Bluejays etc.

With the emergence of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and all the other British Beat bands of the day, the local scene was transformed irrevocably. Jazz musician Horrie Dargie saw the need for a dedicated teen music formatted TV show and subsequently, with the establishment of a new channel in Melbourne during 1964, ATV-O, he was able to launch The Go!! Show that August to great success. The Strangers were installed as the resident backing band, appearing on something like 130 episodes until 1967. The producers also launched the Go!! label. Just about every popular Australian solo artist and band signed to other labels appeared on the show: Ronnie Burns, Normie Rowe, Billy Thorpe, Marcie Jones, Lynne Randell, Olivia Newton-John, The Loved Ones, The Master’s Apprentices... you get the picture.

Having been part of The Strangers vocal line-up, this also led to Macca’s role as a solo artist on the show, doing covers of Top 40 hits. As he explained to David Laing (I Like Your Old Stuff), “I only had four appearances on the show. First up I did Chuck Berry’s ‘Dear Dad’, followed by Billy Joe Royal’s ‘Down In The Boondocks’, Cliff Richard’s ‘Theme For A Dream’ (with Pat Carroll and Olivia Newton-John beside me) and Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.”

As vocalist with The Rondells, he toured Victoria with Bobby & Laurie and The Easybeats. His mate Gulliver Smith (who had also sung with The Strangers and The Thunderbirds) then formed an R&B band, installing Macca as rhythm guitarist, backing vocalist and harmonica player. Smith had been playing around with stage names with which to launch his solo career. Originally he was Little Otis (after Otis Redding) before settling on Little Gulliver. Thus the band was Little Gulliver and the Children. They issued one self-titled EP on W&G Records in 1966; Macca sang the bass parts on the track ‘I Was Bewitched’.

They appeared at all the Melbourne discotheques of the day, such as the Thumpin’ Tum and The Biting Eye, but when the band folded at the end of 1966 Smith headed to Sydney. As 1967 dawned so did the psychedelic era. Naturally, being an eccentric character to begin with, Smith became involved in this burgeoning underground psychedelic scene. He invited Macca up to Sydney to join a psychedelic soul/R&B band he was forming, Dr Kandy’s Third Eye. As Macca explained to me, after a few rehearsals he felt out of his depth with this new sound and took his leave.

Besides, as a 22-year-old he was already married with a young child. He had to support his young family and to make a living he turned his attention back to his art career.

Macca reflected on his friendship with Gulliver when he told me:

“I first met Gulliver in about 1964 and we became good friends. Gully and I were very in tune with each other. He already had a great record collection of all these black American blues and R&B singers. It was everything from Sleepy John Estes to James Brown. And that’s where Gully got his inspiration from initially.

“Gully was like a white bluesman, even in the mid-’60s. He could do an impromptu blues song with this great rave and it would be completely off the cuff. Whether it made sense or not didn’t really matter. Later on we used to listen to Frank Zappa and The Mothers and that kind of avant-garde / rock / jazz sound was also an influence on him.

“That first time I met Gully was interesting to say the least. I was singing a couple of sets with The Strangers at the Essendon Plaza. They were one of the best bands in Melbourne at the time and they had this regular Friday night gig. On this particular night, the Sharpies were causing trouble, there were fights breaking out everywhere with the mods.

“So this big Sharpie called Charlie, who was the king of the Carlton Sharps said to the promoter, ‘Oi, if you don’t let our mate sing, the whole place will go up!’ And so his mate was Gulliver Smith. Gully was originally from Carlton and, reluctantly on his part, he’d been adopted by the local gang and they wanted him to sing. So Gully sang a few songs, like a Larry Williams song or two, and I thought ‘gee, he’s a pretty good singer’. And so I started talking to him and we forged a lifelong friendship out of that crazy night.

“This was around the time that The Beatles and The Stones had started to take off and the whole local music scene was changing. Everyone wanted to sound like them, but Gully already had his own unique sound and style based around his love of the black blues guys. He decided to call himself Little Gulliver because he wanted his name to sound black, like Little Johnny Taylor or Little Richard. He thought it was a cool name.

“Gully might have been ambitious but he wasn’t a driven person, he just loved his music. After Little Gulliver and The Children had split up Gully decided to move up to Sydney. This was in early 1967 and he rang me up and asked me to go up to Sydney to join this new band he’d formed, Dr. Kandy’s Third Eye. I only lasted a few weeks in the rehearsal stage; I had a young family to support and I eventually came back down to Melbourne when I was offered the job as Art Director for Go-Set.

“Dr. Kandy’s Third Eye turned out to be a really great band. Gully had recruited sax players like Mal Capewell and Zane Hudson, who he called Zane Tootsville. So he had that kind of Frank Zappa / Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band vibe going on there.

“Gully stayed in Sydney for a few years. He was such a great singer, so charismatic. By the time he joined Company Caine, he wasn’t that young kid anymore. He’d matured and changed, drugs had started to come into it. But I thought Company Caine was an important band, a real standout on the Melbourne scene. Musically they were fantastic, really adventurous. It suited Gully to have such a great band to sing with.”

He left the music to the professionals until the 1990s when he formed country rock band Chicken DeVille. As he put it, “We played at country themed suburban pubs and rural Victorian venues (anywhere with a mechanical bull) for four years before we broke up.” As well as playing covers, Macca wrote a few songs for the band; at his funeral we heard his songs ‘So Far So Good’, ‘Can’t Stop My Heart’ and ‘Heading Back Home’.

MACCA THE ARTIST

After leaving high school, Macca worked as an illustrator and designer for Studio Services. His first notable rock’n’roll art work achievement was when he submitted a poster for a competition run by Go-Set magazine, advertising the upcoming Who / Small Faces / Paul Jones tour of Australia (January 1968). His poster won and he was later installed as Art Director for the magazine. At that time Go-Set was the country’s foremost pop paper and his role in presenting a commercial format for music fans was pivotal. He left Go-Set around 1970 when publisher Philip Fraser launched The Digger, a radical, politically motivated broadsheet that tackled subjects such as the Vietnam war, abortion and pornography.

It reflected the rise of the counter-culture and the anti-Vietnam movement, in particular, when the Moratorium marches around the country combined student protest with rock music. As Art Director, Macca once again played a significant role in the look of the day. It was here that he created his series of dope comix, heavily influenced by the likes of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton who had created The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in 1968. Under the pen name of ‘McCosmic’ he created a comical representation of the stereotypical dope smoking hippie, Ace, and his pals on their never ending search for the perfect high and their hilarious efforts to avoid getting busted by the fuzz.

He gave these strips titles such as: The Official Drug Addict Test; Highway Hi-Jinx; Down On Karmic Farm; A Quiet Day In The Country; Tee-Vee Jeebies; Strangers In The Night; School’s Out!; Country Capers; Outfoxing The Ferret; The Hungries; Guru To You Too; Just Cruisin’; Walkin’ Sideways; Footy Fever; Way Out West; and Porn Scorn.

Around that time head shops had started to open up, stocking drug paraphernalia and so all this fed into the youth culture divide between the ‘heads’ and the ‘straights’. Macca had the idea of combining these dope cartoons in a book called Ace And His Adventures In The ’70s to sell in the head shops. He did a full colour illustration for the front cover but never got around to completing the project. Some of the strips were later compiled in the likes of The Wild & Woolley Comix Book (1977), Cobber Comix (1978) and Down Underground Comix (1983).

Macca has always been honest about his personal inspirations in the art world. As well as Crumb and Shelton, mentioned about, he has also cited the likes of Alton Kelly, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson and others from the San Francisco psychedelic scene of the 1960s, Milton Glaser (Bob Dylan poster), Heinz Edelman (who drew The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine) and, closer to home, NZ artists Chris Grosz and Reg Mombasa with his art for Mental As Anything and Mambo.

In 1971 two young music promoters, Michael Gudinski and Ray Evans, launched music paper Daily Planet (later Planet) with Macca as Art Director. Ostensibly set up as counter-cultural competition to Go-Set magazine, it was also a way for them to promote their bands and booking agency, the Australian Entertainment Exchange (AEC). They set up office in an old house in South Yarra and as he explained to David Laing, “It was very hippie, lots of marijuana and teenage runaways crashing there. I worked laying out the paper in the kitchen down the back where the electric stove provided heat as well as red-hot coils for spotting hash. I worked with some great people who enjoyed the fun times.” They included David ‘Dr. Pepper’ Pepperell, Jen Jewel Brown, photographer David Porter (Jacques L’Affrique), Lee Dillow and Terry Cleary.

Macca had also continued creating poster artwork for various bands, and some of his early poster art included pieces for Gulliver Smith, Company Caine, Daddy Cool and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs (‘Most People I Know Think That I’m Crazy’). He was also the go-to guy for the best album cover art of the day. In 1971 to 1972 alone he created iconic covers for The Aztecs’ The Hoax Is Over and Live! At Sunbury, Chain’s Toward The Blues and Live Again, Carson’s Blown, Company Caine’s A Product Of A Broken Reality and Spectrum’s Milesago. In addition he provided the cartoon Daddy Cool shown on the front cover of their debut Daddy Who? Daddy Cool!, the inner gatefold comic strip for their Sex, Dope, Rock ’n’ Roll: Teenage Heaven album and the intricate, fold out design for the D.C.E.P.

Macca had the knack for treating each piece of artwork as individual projects, choosing an illustration style and technique that suited the piece. He’d use pencils, ink, airbrush, collage, scraperboard or sculpture to get the result he wanted. A Product Of A Broken Reality is a great example of setting up a diorama to created the final effect. Macca explained that he was disappointed with the original photo used because it was out of focus. He told me:

“I liked the art for A Product of A Broken Reality. Instead of my normal mode of illustration, I did something different by constructing a scale model, or a sort of diorama. The inspiration came about because Gully had explored that technological aspect, it was the early computer age, and he liked my idea that Company Caine was an electronic machine pumping out this new age message, a brand new sound. So that was the little model with the big mouth and the musical note coming out. And the audience was the ping-pong balls bouncing around and whether they got the message or not, it didn’t matter.

“When Company Caine got back together in 1975, Keith Glass and David Pepperell re-released the album under the banner Rock Masterworks. I re-did the cover because the photo for the original was slightly out of focus and I was always disappointed about that. For the new cover I used a different shot from the same session and made the image smaller so that it looked sharper and you could take the whole thing in with one glance.”

By 1972 Planet had slid by and Gudinski and Evans set up Mushroom Records with Macca as Art Director. He was responsible for creating the look of Mushroom and he rose to the occasion with the first release, the expansive, triple LP The Great Australian Rock Festival Sunbury 1973. Modelled on the original Woodstock triple LP, it had never been attempted before in Australia so Macca had to work out how a tri-fold jacket with three inner sleeves and a poster could possibly work. It remains a stunning artefact.

His many other covers for Mushroom are just as legendary: Matt Taylor’s Straight As A Die (1973) and Music (1974), The Dingoes’ The Dingoes (1974), Stars’ Land Of Fortune (1979), Skyhooks’ Straight In A Gay Gay World (1976), The Skyhooks Tapes (1977) and Guilty Until Proven Insane (1979), Ayers Rock’s Beyond (1976), Various Artists A-Reefer-Derci! (1976) and Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons’ Screaming Targets (1979). Throughout this time he also did freelance work for other companies, such as EMI (Little River Band’s After Hours, 1976, using the pseudonym Preston Foster) and Epic/Portrait (Dragon’s O Zambezi, 1978).

For Music, which featured his rendering of a kookaburra, he took inspiration from nature. “Matt wanted a rural feel but basically left it up to me. I was living in Ferntree Gully with a lot of kookaburras around. Two of them had actually drowned in the swimming pool in the back yard so I buried them in the garden. Later on I was digging in the yard and unearthed their heads and beaks. I was just fascinated with the construction of them. I’ve always had an interest in birds. I’ve got hundreds of drawings of birds I’ve done for my own pleasure, not commissioned things. I welcomed the chance to use the kookaburra as the main image on Matt’s cover. I justified it by saying that was as Australian as you could get, a kookaburra singing an Australian song in the bush.”

He also admired the art work coming out of the British design group Hipgnosis, so his late 1970s work reflected that. For example, Guilty Until Proven Insane was inspired by the robots on the cover of Black Sabbath’s 1976 album Technical Ecstasy, designed by George Hardie and illustrated by Colin Elgie.

Macca was a master at creating logos, not only for the Mushroom label itself but also for Go-Set, The Digger, Chain, Madder Lake, Matt Taylor, Skyhooks, the Renée Geyer Band and most famously Little River Band. His LRB logo on velvet green background depicted an elegant platypus swimming through the letter V, and it has come to be recognised on the international stage. Later on he created logos for Wheatley Bros. Entertainment, the Frontier Touring Company and an internationally flavoured series for Dean Markley Guitar Strings.

After a decade or so at the forefront of Mushroom, Macca moved on to the corporate world of advertising. One of my favourites of his advertising posters was for Levi Jeans, “We’re gonna scare the pants off ya!”, which depicted a cartoon Frankenstein monster in Levis, surrounded by the Werewolf, Dracula, the Wicked Witch and the Mad Scientist with assorted rats, spiders, lizards and frogs scuttling around a graveyard.

So we’ve jumped ahead here but let’s not forget his iconic artwork for The Rolling Stones’ 1973 Australian tour. Macca didn’t create the Stones’ tongue logo for the Australian tour poster (as has sometimes been suggested) but his great skill was incorporating it into the overall design. The Stones and their fans loved it of course. Trying to get hold of an original poster now is next to impossible, but when they do come on to the market expect to pay top dollar. He also did the tour poster for the New Zealand leg, which this time depicted a kiwi bird poking its long beak at the tongue logo on the ground.

The Australian tour poster was originally folded and stapled inside the concert programme. There are stories of multiple copies of said poster discarded after the Melbourne concert (at Kooyong Tennis centre) and filling up the gutters along Glenferrie Road. If you were lucky you got hold of an unfolded copy because a small number were reserved for local record shops; when you bought a Stones record you were given a copy of the unfolded tour poster. Just how many of these posters still exist is impossible to determine. Not that Macca paid it much mind, of course; rarity or collector value was never in his mind set.

The Stones kept him in mind, because he was commissioned to do a concept rough for their next album, Goat’s Head Soup. As he explained in Under The Covers:

“Charlie Watts was the one who had his finger on the pulse artistically. He had briefed me in Sydney after being impressed by my tour posters. They wanted me to do a cover for their next album, Goat’s Head Soup. They’d recorded it in Jamaica and wanted that sort of vibe for the cover, so I came up with this idea of a fighting cock with spurs. I thought it was a very nice visual package. I sent the rough off and never heard anything more about it. Then I was contacted by Paul Dainty’s office again to say that my cover had been lost, or was at the London office but no-one had ever seen it so no decision was ever made about it and they’d gone ahead with the David Bailey photographic cover. I don’t know what the real story was. Maybe it was just misplaced, since they contacted me again to submit a cover for Love You Live. Because of the design I did for Goat’s Head Soup I was thinking roosters already, but this time I went the other way and made it cuter. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in it. I know it was completely the wrong image. They ended up using Andy Warhol. Not a bad move really.”

The intended Love You Live image is cute indeed: a strutting rooster Mick Jagger, wearing leather chaps, sings into a microphone, while rows of hens go wild in the chook house stalls.

LATER WORK

During the early 2000s, Macca retrained in the field of computer graphics and created a new series of rock posters. They included: Skyhooks, Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons, The Dingoes, Spectrum, Chain, Daddy Cool, Little River Band and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. Some were based around his earlier designs but The Dingoes one, in particular, had a distinctive twist. It showed an abandoned farm shed and you had to look very closely to realise that the various bits of wood, posts, corrugated iron and old tyres spelled out the letters of the band’s name.

Macca’s hand was still in demand and he created artwork for commissions from Frontier Touring (The Rolling Stones at Hanging Rock, 2014), Warner Music (Boogie: Australian Blues R&B And Heavy Rock From The ’70s, Silver Roads: Australian Country Rock & Singer Songwriters of the ’70s, The Glory Days Of Aussie Pub Rock Vol. 1 and Vol 2); Spectrum (Breathing Space CD), Starman Books (Rockin Australia: 50 Years of Concert Posters 1957-2007, compiled by James Anfuso) and Renegade Films (RockWiz Salutes The Bowl, 2010, on which he collaborated with his friend and fellow artist Chris Grosz).

There are probably many more stories to be told but I’ll leave it there. I’m honoured to have known Macca and to have been his friend. He certainly enriched my life. As his funeral notice stated: “Ian passed away peacefully at the Geelong Hospital 9 August 2022. Loved and loving husband of Melitta. Much loved father of Brigitte and Otis. Proud G.D. of Dia, Elke and Oscar. Father-in-law and friend to Shaun, Silvana and Jodie. Rest in Peace. Legend.”

Vale Ian 'Macca' McCausland