JT: Satan is Real is hands down the best album cover in music history. Can you tell me a little bit about the process of creating it?
CL: After the song was finished, it hadn’t been released yet. They wanted to put out an album, and we asked if we could make Satan is Real the album title. We got the okay on that. My and Betty’s oldest son had a Lionel train on a four by eight foot piece of plywood. At the time, money was scarce, so we removed the train from the plywood, cut it in two and made Satan sixteen feet tall. We pictured Satan as having a pitchfork and horns; that’s what we were told when we were kids, but I find that it’s not true: I’m pretty sure I saw Satan the other day in a bikini on the beach. So he comes in all different forms now, but when I came up he was just the mean man with the pitchfork, and if you wasn’t a good kid, he’d get you.
Close to where my wife and I lived at the time was a gravel pit and nobody would mind if we went in there, so we took some car tires and filled them full of kerosene. The Capitol Records photographer came in from California to shoot the picture. We dressed and got out there and the fire was going good, but about that time it started sprinkling rain. The photographer said “We’re going to have to do this later,” and we said “We can’t do it later; everything we’ve done will be destroyed in a few minutes. We can stand in the rain and it won’t hurt your camera.” So he went ahead and shot. The rain was coming down in big drops, and there’s a certain kind of rock that, if it gets real hot and you put something cold on it, it’ll blow up. We had rocks as big as your fist that would blow up and go way up in the air and you didn’t know where they were going to land. I don’t know if we were stupid or brave, but we really wanted to get that shot done. So we did it, then we put the fires out. The photographer took his work back to California, and the rest is history.

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