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Kool & The Gang – Wild and Peaceful

Contributed by Matthijs Sluiter on Mar 20th, 2019. Artwork published in .
Kool & The Gang – Wild and Peaceful 1
Source: voluptuousvinyl.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Wild And Peaceful (1973) was the fourth album by the American funk band Kool & the Gang, and their commercial breakthrough album. The record contains a few hits including “Jungle Boogie”, which became very popular in nightclubs; it was also used as a musical background in the opening titles of Pulp Fiction some twenty years after its release.

“Jungle Boogie” is just so awesome! Funkiest song ever recorded in my opinion, sorry James, Sly, Parliament, and whoever else, but Kool & the Gang has it. Everything about it is shear perfection. (…) I played this for a girl I was dating one time and she said she’d never heard the song before. Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last long. — Dick_B1, rateyourmusic.com

The band name and the album title are set on a curve with Benguiat Downsie (Photo-Lettering, Inc., ca. 1971). A reversed contrast display type, with a design similar to Gothic Bold (1899) and Zipper (1970) but made in four differently shaded versions. For this album, Richard Askew used variant “C”, with a solid shade, and combined it with art by Joseph Askew. The back cover uses Univers, and the text on the stickers is set with Frankfurter.

Kool & The Gang – Wild and Peaceful 2
Source: voluptuousvinyl.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Typefaces

  • Benguiat Downsie
  • Univers
  • Frankfurter

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1 Comment on “Kool & The Gang – Wild and Peaceful

  1. Legit find! Downsie is a doosie – one of the many faces drawn by Ed Benguiat that didn’t make it to digital yet. I hope the folks of Photo-Lettering.com have plans to remedy that.

    I wonder if the cover artist is identical with Joseph F. Askew:

    In the middle of 1970s the American painter and sculptor Joseph F. Askew, being just a 25-year-old student of the Art Students League in New York, moved to Vienna to learn the new painting techniques with the master of phantastic realism Ernst Fuchs. Askew and Fuchs remained friends and were even neighbours for long years: the American artist moved to Vienna for half a century and later, he, like Fuchs, moved to the art center Castillon on the Riviera, where he lives and works till now. — ars mundi

    This would explain why the only other album cover he is credited for on Discogs is an Austrian schlager pop record from 1982.

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