“Odelay” (a pun on “Oh Delay” since the album took so long to record) was the fifth studio album (and a double platinum winner) by American alternative rock artist Beck that was originally released on June 18, 1996. The album’s cover featured a Komondor, an image chosen at the last minute after Beck couldn’t decide on an album cover. The image was suggested to him by his girlfriend after she’d spotted it in a book about dogs. In a later interview with Rolling Stone, Beck said, “I was looking at this dog book and I came to a picture of the most extreme dog. He looked like a bundle of flying udon noodles attempting to leap over a hurdle. I couldn’t stop laughing for about 20 minutes. Plus the deadline for a cover was a day away.”
The photo of of Am/Mex/Int’l CH Mount Everest Janci Jago, UD, PCE had been taken in the mid 70s by photographer, Joan Ludwig, who reigned for a half century as the acknowledged West Coast master of canine photography. It was one of several that Ludwig shot for the July 1977 issue of the American Kennel Club’s Gazette which you see below:
The photo was reproduced in countless numbers of newspapers, books, and magazines for many years thereafter, but of the original, the American Kennel Club wrote: “probably the most widely circulated image in the Gazette collection was the brainchild of photographer Joan Ludwig (1914–2004), whose eye for the odd, the comic, the ironic was unmatched among her ringside peers.”
If you look carefully at the 1977 magazine cover, however, you’ll spot that it’s a different photo than the one Beck used on that album cover. The one in the book is of the dog before he cleared the hurdle, and the original photo seems to have been altered for Odelay because the background mountains and clouds are gone, and the grass less defined. In a review written by The Future Heart, the photo was described as something “redefined into something fuzzy, much the way Beck deliberately added white noise and used lo-fi recording techniques to instill in Odelay a distinctive sonic pallet.”