BEHIND THE COVER ART: Wilco, SUMMERTEETH and Jack Moebes

On March 9, 1999, Chicago-based indie rock outfit Wilco released the band’s third studio album, Summerteeth. A crafty and ambitious innovation on the band’s alt-country sound, band members Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett led the group’s charge headlong into a more expansive sonic landscape via new technology and a determination to create something truly new under the Wilco moniker. Summerteeth arrived in an equally imaginative package. The LP’s cover displayed a beautiful black and white image of a young girl blowing a bubble with bubblegum.  

The iconic cover photo was taken by legendary photographer Jack Moebes, who also took another iconic photo. Moebes is famous for his February 1, 1960 photograph of four young African-American men, then freshmen at what is now North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, sitting at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC to protest segregation. Moebes’ photo (which now resides in two Smithsonian museums) has been cited as a critical moment that spurred the civil rights sit-in movement that spread across the American South in the early '60s, resulting in the desegregation of lunch counters throughout the region.

The online Jack Moebes Photo Archive, which includes the Summerteeth cover photo, is dedicated to the conservation and curation of the photography of Jack Moebes. During his 30 years as a press photographer, he captured those unposed heartbeats of humanity we see through the lens of a sensitive and artful artist given unique access to his subjects in the American South. The Archive is dedicated to furthering racial equality through images that educate and enlighten and to supporting and partnering with organizations that champion racial equality.