Andy Warhol’s zipper cover and inner sleeve for Love You Live

The Rolling Stones’ 1977 double live album Love You Live is best remembered for its frank, borderline-obscene cover: a zipper on the front that could be unzipped to reveal a pair of bulging underwear underneath. That was Andy Warhol’s idea. Warhol had been friendly with the band since the late ’60s — he’d already directed the Sticky Fingers cover, which used a real zipper stitched into denim — and for Love You Live he suggested a metallic zipper that opened to show an anatomically suggestive silk-screened drawing. The effect was both playful and confrontational, exactly what the Stones wanted after the dour Black and Blue era.

Warhol’s actual hands-on contribution was small but decisive. He designed the concept and provided the sleeve’s inner artwork: a series of his signature silk-screened lips, a tongue, and a matchbook cover that doubled as a lyric sheet. The outer jacket was executed by Warhol’s assistant Ronnie Cutrone, who adapted the zipper gimmick into a working mechanical feature. The misprint on some pressings — “Love You Live” appearing as “Louie You Live” — wasn’t Warhol’s doing, but it’s the kind of happy accident he would have loved. The cover remains one of the few album designs that literally invites the listener to touch it.