Thirty years ago today, The Replacements released Tim, an album that amounted to their career pivot point. Not only was it the band’s first album on a major label, Sire Records, but it was their last record to feature guitarist Bob Stinson. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tim is a full-length focused on growing pains: Songs discuss leaving behind old haunts, past loves, and youthful abandon—and how scary and frustrating that can be—and being homesick for a time and place that’s just out of reach.
The record’s cover art reflected this shift in perspective. A 2013 article on The Current, the blog arm of Minneapolis Public Radio, detailed how art director Deborah DeStaffan worked with artist Robert Longo (at the behest of Tim Carr) to put together the artwork. The cover was a shift from 1984’s Let It Be, which featured the band members languidly hanging out on the roof of bassist Tommy Stinson’s Minneapolis house.
The top third of the Tim cover features drawings of each band member, with dramatic magenta coloring combining with black shading to add moodiness. “His work is a lot about a moment, a gesture,” DeStaffan told The Current. “There is a little bit of angst, a little bit of tension, a little bit of foreboding. It really was his style to capture individuals in that moment.” The bottom half, meanwhile, is an austere painting of a tunnel with a slightly shiny, grey-silver finish. “It’s architectural, it’s structural,” she says “It’s going somewhere, but you don’t know where it’s going.”
Today, DeStaffan says she wouldn’t change too much, save for making the back cover photo of the band bigger, and hand-drawing the word “Tim” on the front and back. Still, there’s something charming about how Tim’s artwork turned out: With deceptively simple imagery, it captured a band stumbling into adulthood with no real road map, just earnest intentions and honest songwriting to light their way.