Remembering Ken Kelly’s Metal Album Artwork
He painted his portion of our collective metal imagination
The artist Ken Kelly died yesterday. He produced a vast body of work, but I have to admit that he’s not someone I knew by name. It was only after people started posting about his demise that I realized that his album artwork has been a part of my life since I was a kid in the 1970s. He did the cover on the very first metal album I ever had, KISS Destroyer.
At that time,I and a few of the other boys on my street were absolutely obsessed with KISS! What’s not to love? Hard-driving riffs and solos, cool lyrics half of which we didn’t understand at that age, costumes and makeup. . . and this album cover embodied it all! Four personas striding precariously forward to rock all of us!
Kelly painted several other iconic KISS covers and artwork, including Love Gun the next year. There are interesting backstories for those two album covers, which you can read about here.
He also did the album artwork for Ace Frehley’s much more recent (2014) Space Invader
Going back to the 1970s, in that same era he produced those emblematic KISS album covers, he generated an image perhaps even more stark and striking, gracing what is arguably the best album of a mid-70s seminal metal band, Richie Blackmore’s group, Rainbow.
You don’t get much more metal — at least of a certain classic sort — than that! A symbol so rich in interpretation gripped solidly in an upraised massive fist, in the midst of crashing waves, jutting mountains, and turreted castles. The backstory to this one has Kelly being approached by Ronnie James Dio, probably one of the most thoughtful players in heavy metal.
He did one other interesting album cover in the 1970s, for a rather obscure band, Kid Dynamite’s self-titled and apparently ill-starred debut (you can read about them here).
I think those three KISS/Rainbow album covers alone would have established Kelly as a significant artist forming the imagination within the heavy metal scene, but he then went on to solidify that status by doing no less than six album covers for Manowar, starting in 1987.
As this piece by Deuce Richardson rightly points out, Kelly reworked his successful compositions from KISS’s Destroyer to Manowar’s Fighting The World, and Love Gun to Gods of War.
A year prior to his first Manowar commission, he also produced this album cover for the less-well-known band Asgard. When it comes to bands, they can’t all be winners, even if the artwork rocks!
From 1999 onward, Kelly produced a lot of other interesting album artwork for a number of metal bands. According to Discoqs (so assuming these are completely accurate), these covers are all by Kelly. Quite a variety of metal acts spanning quite a few genres. Check them out!
Kelly also created this cover for the 2007 compilation album featuring 15 different contemporary bands
As you can surmise, there was a thriving market in fantasy-warrior-centric album covers in the metal scene from the late 1990s onward!
So there you have it. A long and productive life of craft, contributing iconic album art early on, and continuing to generate cool imagery for heavy metal bands as the decades went on up the present.
I’m Greg Sadler, the Heavy Metal Philosopher. You can join me and my co-host Scott Tarulli each month for a new session of Classic Metal Class).
I’m also the president of ReasonIO, the editor of Stoicism Today, a speaker, writer, and a producer of highly popular YouTube videos on classic and contemporary philosophy. I teach at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and offer classes to the wider public in my Study With Sadler online academy. I also produce the Sadler’s Lectures podcast and co-host the Wisdom for Life radio show
