“OH BOY … the front sign is going up on the gallery,” an excited Ruby Mazur posted on his Instagram account on Aug. 7, accompanying a video of his son hanging a carved wooden sign reading “The Ruby Mazur Gallery.” The sign is instantly recognizable because even if you don’t know Mazur, you probably know his work. In between the words Ruby and Mazur is the world-famous “Mouth and Tongue” design from the Rolling Stones’s Hot Lips record, seen on T-shirts everywhere. That logo is the most famous thing the 77-year-old has made in his long career in rock and roll art, but by no means the only famous thing.
Mazur created the art for over 300 records for the likes of B.B. King, Steely Dan, Bob Marley, Billy Joel, Ray Charles, and Elton John. In fact, after talking music with Mazur for a while, it feels like naming the acts he hasn’t worked with is easier than naming those he has. But today, it’s hard to watch the video of the triumphant hanging of the Ruby Mazur Gallery sign on Front Street in Lahaina, on the island of Maui.
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“When the fire hit, I was just going to open up the gallery,” Mazur told me, referring to the August wildfires that consumed much of the historical seat of the kingdom of Hawaii. Inside, the gallery building held some incalculable treasures from the history of rock, both “a collection of 50 years of paintings” and, Mazur told me, “some of my vintage album cover art in there.” Mazur himself barely made it out, sleeping in a U-Haul truck in an airport parking lot for days after the fires. His son and dogs were nearly swallowed by the flames, the former only surviving because he disobeyed the police and drove around a barricade to speed past — the last car, Mazur says, out of town.
It was the high winds that alerted Mazur to the coming danger. He felt gusts of up to a hundred miles an hour in his house up the hill from Lahaina and saw his patio furniture being blown around “like toothpicks.” After conferring with his son and realizing they and the scared, barking dogs were in danger, he decided to evacuate. “We’re going down the volcano, and we start seeing flames all over the place.” Eventually, after hitting police roadblocks and finding no hotel rooms available in the safer parts of the island, they hatched their plan to sleep in Walmart airbeds in the back of a U-Haul. When communications came through, “the next thing we heard, Lahaina was gone. Totally gone. Completely. Ashes. Everything. Ashes.” They’d spend three days in the U-Haul before Mazur heard from a collector of his work in LA, who had a house on the unaffected side of the island and offered the favorite artist-turned-disaster victim its use.
It was a long road to life in Hawaii for Mazur. Born at the first bang of the baby boom in 1946 in Brooklyn, Mazur started painting at 4. His family moved to Long Island, and his father was in the nightclub game, which is how as a young man Mazur came to meet a pre-stardom Billy Joel. Art and music combined early. After going to the Philadelphia College of Art, he moved to New York, and at only 21, in 1967, he was art director of Paramount. “That first year, I was nominated for the Grammy Award for best album cover.” Not bad.
Mazur’s art graced the sleeves of vinyl pressings of some of the biggest and best sounds. He was as close to a rock star as you can be as a painter and artist in that era. Sometimes, even, more than he realized: “When I was doing all these album covers in America, I decided I wanted to move to England,” he told me, “and when I went to England, I would call up a record company and say, ‘Listen, I was wondering if there’s any way I could set up a meeting with the art director. I’d love to do an album cover for you guys. ‘What’s your name?’ they’d ask. And I say, ‘Ruby Mazur.’ ‘No way!’ they’d say. My name was on all these album covers. Everybody knew. I opened up my studio in London, and I was doing so many album covers for Warner Brothers, Pye Records, EMI, everybody!” That’s how the kid from Long Island got to work with the Stones, Elton John, and so many others.
Eventually, the ’60s and ’70s were gone, and radio stations playing the music that had been created during those decades started to be called classic rock stations. Mazur didn’t like covers for CDs, seeing the canvas as too small, though he’s delighted to see vinyl making a comeback today. The rockers were taking farewell tours (sometimes even six or seven of them, ahem, Sir Elton), and Mazur was surprised to find himself falling in love with a warmer clime. “Twenty years ago, a friend of mine asked me, ‘Do you want to come to Hawaii with me?' We went to Oahu first and I went, ‘Yuck, I hate it.’ Honolulu, it's like LA. And then we went to Maui, and I went, ‘Oh my god. I found my home.’ The Aloha, the love, the people. So laid back and friendly. And everybody says good morning, and they really care. It was just paradise. And I woke up every morning with a smile on my face. It was just the happiest 20 years of my life.” Luckily, though his gallery and so much of his work was incinerated, Mazur’s home up the hill from Lahaina was spared total destruction. But still, you can’t live through something like those fires without rethinking your picture of where you live as a paradise. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, get up, and move on,” Mazur told me, describing his attitude, which has taken him through three bouts with cancer and now through this. He’s downbeat when we talk, but only because his old friend Jimmy Buffett just died. He’s taking his own hardship in remarkable stride, already making plans to rebuild his life and painting every day. “That’s what I’m doing again, getting up and moving on.” But for him, that’ll mean moving, literally. “I can’t stay on Maui anymore. I can’t. I woke up every day crying. My beautiful Maui was gone.”
Rock and roll, they say, will never die. It will, and it has, moved on from its most glorious phase, when the icons of the ’60s and ’70s changed the way the world sounds, so often sheathed in art Ruby Mazur made. For Mazur, today, regrouping and figuring out his new life in California, he’s still got dreams. He’s excited about the new collaboration Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are apparently working on with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, having always wished he’d gotten to do art for the Beatles. “I would be so intrigued to get a call from them and hear the tracks and come up with an album cover to blow the world’s mind. That would be the highlight of my life.” It’s almost cute for someone with such a deep rock legacy to feel still like he’s got work to do and inspiring to hear someone focusing on that when only weeks ago he saw his own dream gallery in paradise burned down right on the eve of its opening. But that’s the ambition and the good attitude that it takes to make stuff that lasts and to rebuild from the ashes.
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Nicholas Clairmont is Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.