More Than A Pretty Face: The Women of Iconic Covers

When you’re thumbing through vinyl at your local record store, they stare back at you – the mysterious women who graced some of rock’s most memorable album covers. But who were these accidental icons? Let’s meet the babes of yore who helped make album art history.

Let’s start with Dolores Erickson, forever known as “The Whipped Cream Lady” from Herb Alpert’s 1965 Whipped Cream & Other Delights. Here’s a delicious bit of trivia: she was three months pregnant during the shoot, though you’d never know it. And that “whipped cream” covering her? Mostly shaving cream, since real whipped cream would’ve melted under the hot studio lights (though they did crown her head with the genuine sweet stuff).

A Seattle native and Eileen Ford model, Erickson earned about $1,500 for the shoot (more than ten grand in today’s money) – not bad for a day’s work that would fog up teenage boys’ glasses for decades to come. Alpert later joked at concerts, “Sorry, but I can’t play the album cover for you.” Dolores is still with us, now 90 years old.

Speaking of steamy shoots, Jerry Hall turned up the heat on Roxy Music’s Siren (1975), posing as a blue-painted mermaid on the rocks of a Welsh beach.

Ever the gentleman, Bryan Ferry held an umbrella over Hall, then his gal-pal, during the shoot to protect her azure body paint from washing away. The Texas-born beauty was only 19 when she caught Ferry’s eye, but their engagement wasn’t meant to last. Enter one Mick Jagger, who started showing up at the couple’s shared home with increasing frequency.  Hall later recalled feeling “an electric jolt” when Jagger’s leg brushed against hers at dinner. Sorry, Bryan – you just can’t compete with those moves.

Hall’s modeling career was already on fire when she landed the Roxy cover – her first big break came when fashion agent Claude Haddad spotted her sunbathing on a Saint Tropez beach. Soon she was sharing a Paris apartment with Grace Jones, and the two became notorious for their risqué cabaret acts in Parisian nightclubs. By the time she posed for Siren, Hall had worked with photographer Helmut Newton and walked the runway for Yves Saint Laurent. The Roxy shoot added more fuel to her rising star – within months, she’d graced forty magazine covers and become the face of YSL’s Opium perfume. Not bad for a Texas teenager who’d funded her move to France using insurance money from a car accident. She later traded up from Mick and married Rupert Murdoch, one of the wealthiest men in the world, until a 2022 split.

Then there’s Suze Rotolo, immortalized on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), walking arm-in-arm with the Bard of 4th Street down a snowy Greenwich Village avenue. Unlike our other cover stars, Rotolo wasn’t a model but Dylan’s girlfriend and, more importantly, his cultural compass.

This daughter of Communist Party members introduced the Minnesota boy to modern art, poetry, and civil rights politics. She inspired the acerbic classic balled “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and showed Dylan there was more to life than scratchy old Woody Guthrie records. The cover shot, by Don Hunstein, captured young love in its natural habitat – though if you look closely, you can tell they’re freezing their artistic asses off.

The relationship between Dylan and Rotolo was more than just another swinging sixties fling. She opened his eyes to a world beyond folk music, taking him to see Picasso’s “Guernica” and French New Wave films. After hearing her talk about the murder of Emmett Till, Dylan wrote one of his first protest songs. Their love story ended after three years, but Rotolo’s influence on Dylan’s artistry was permanent. She kept quiet about their relationship for decades, finally breaking her silence for Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary, No Direction Home, followed by her own memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Suze passed away in 2011 from lung cancer.

Fast forward to 1994, and we meet Leilani Bishop on Hole’s Live Through This. Photographer Ellen von Unwerth recalls Courtney Love calling her with a vision: recreate the prom queen scene from the horror movie Carrie. The 17-year-old Bishop nailed the beauty-queen-gone-wrong look, complete with smeared mascara and that slightly unhinged smile. Apparently, the iconic pig blood was out of stock at the prop store.

The timing proved eerily prophetic – the album was released just seven days after Kurt Cobain’s death, with Bishop’s emotional expression capturing the turmoil surrounding the band and its frontwoman.

Von Unwerth and Love clicked immediately, bonding over drinks the night before the shoot while Love wore her signature schoolgirl dress. Though the photographer hadn’t heard the album yet (it was still being recorded), she trusted that “Kurt’s girls would produce something equally cool [as anything by Nirvana].” The shoot proved to be perfectly timed lightning in a bottle – and Billboard later ranked it #12 on their “50 Greatest Album Covers of All Time.” Bishop is now a podcaster and conservationist.

The stories behind these covers remind us that album art isn’t just about creating a pretty package – it’s about capturing a moment, an emotion, or sometimes an entire era. These women were artists, muses, and forces of nature who helped shape the music we love. Even Dolores Erickson, who initially hid the racier outtakes from her conservative husband, came to embrace her place in pop culture infamy. Years later, when asked about the famously suggestive cover, she simply smiled and said, “I looked at it as being an ice cream sundae.” (Wink!)

From shaving cream to body paint, real romance to pure promotion, these women became part of rock history – sometimes by design, sometimes by chance. Their images have been ogled, studied, copied, and parodied, but their real stories are even more fascinating than the covers that made them famous. Next time you flip through those vinyl bins, give them a nod. They’ve earned it.

-Staci Wilson

Fair use image of Whipped Cream & Other Delights album cover