Even beyond the iconic grooves “My Own Summer (Shove It)” and “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”, few early Deftones moments have captured the imagination quite like the hot tub-close-up found on the album cover to the band’s 1997 sophomore LP, Around the Fur.
With the alt-metal band currently experiencing a monumental resurgence in the public consciousness — from TikTok virality, to massive arena tours to the exquisite crush of last year’s private music — Jenkem have now put together a video essay on how the iconic shot came to be.
The video-makers first tracked down former Big Brother magazine photographer Rick Kosick to get into the origins of the snap. Kosick was invited out to Seattle, Washington — the band had been recording at the city’s Studio Litho — and ended up taking pictures one night at the condo Deftones had been renting. Acting as a fly-on-the-wall, Kosick’s chance encounter with cover star Lisa Hughes by the jacuzzi ended up becoming a lasting image in alt-metal history.
“They were kind of in their party phase stage of the band — as you probably should be — and so we went back to their condo that they rented during the recording of this record, and there was this girl hanging out in the jacuzzi,” Kosick recalls whilst hanging onto an LP copy of Around the Fur, “And I just went up and took a couple… two photos. That’s it. Walked away.
“Few weeks later, I get a call from the label. ‘Hey, come by and check this out. We want to show you something.’ And the art director [Kevin Reagan], he was like, ‘Well, what do you think?’ I was like, ‘Wow.’ I was blown away. I was like, ‘This is so cool looking. This looks… I love it’ — of course, I’m going to say I love it. It’s my photo — But I was just really… looking back, I was just really excited because it felt right after all the mockups and everything, this one looks incredible.”
Reagan goes on to explain that the intimate photo — a provocative fish-eyed perspective of Hughes by the water — was an “eye-opener” that made him “a little uncomfortable,” and that its effect went “under your skin.” He left the photo reasonably untouched, and describes a blemish on Hughes’ chest and the brief bit of tooth he would’ve removed from the pic had it been a Madonna cover shoot (of course, Around the Fur came out on the pop star’s Maverick Records).
Last but not least, the interviewers tracked down Hughes herself, who still lives in Seattle. They met up at a local skate park, and after being given a LP copy of Around the Fur to hold, she explained that she’s been signing CD copies for her daughter’s friends.
Hughes goes on to explain that she ended up at the Deftones’ condo through friends. “I was oblivious of who they were,” she notes of the circumstances, adding that people were having fun and drinking, with her drink of choice being “Silk Panties,” a concoction of vodka and peach Schnapps. A glass of “Silk Panties,” she confirms, is on the album cover.
At the time, Hughes recalls, articles speculated on whether or not she was a groupie. She dispels this in the interview, but adds that she’d sometimes get into clubs because of the shot, and would go to Deftones concerts following the album’s release.
Of the lasting impact of the image, she says: “It’s a pretty cool looking shot, right? Like with the fisheye lens just looking down. You know, it’s kind of risqué a little bit with my breasts, and people have asked, ‘Oh, look, you got a pimple there.’ I’m like, ‘Who gives a shit?’ What does that really matter? I’m a human being. I’m not a model and I could care less really. That’s me. It’s just cool looking. And if you look at the whole shot and the legs going into the hot tub, it just looks pretty awesome.”
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