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Death Of Guy Webster, Who Photographed Rolling Stones, Byrds LP Covers And More
Webster shot many famous album cover images of the 1960s and early 1970s.




Guy Webster, the photographer whose images adorned vintage album covers by the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel and countless others, died on 5 February at the age of 79. He had been suffering from diabetes and liver cancer.
“A slew of album covers Guy snapped in 1965 and ’66 of the Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, the Doors, Love and the Byrds altered my life along with the sounds I investigated inside the cardboard.”
Webster, whose father was the Grammy and Oscar-winning songwriter Paul Francis Webster, was still in high school when he shot his first album cover, for surf band the Rip Chords. He went on to work in rock and pop throughout the rest of the 1960s and into the early ’70s.
1967 brought his work on the next Mamas and the Papas album Deliver, the sessions for the Beach Boys’ abandoned Smile album and Safe As Milk by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. The following year, he shot the covers of the Doors’ Waiting For The Sun, Nico’s The Marble Index among others. Webster also photographed such artists as Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, Janis Joplin and Harry Nilsson, and film stars including Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper.



