Storm Thorgerson at John Varvatos

Mars Volta's rejection of their design for 2006's Amputechture especially disappointed Thorgerson. "The Mars Volta told us that one of the inspirations behind the record had been this story about a nun that had been crucified in a monastery," he said at the time. In Thorgerson's proposal, "Here's the nun being pursued by her vision — the head of a pagan god — across the countryside at Dead Man's Hill and Wimbledon Common. The band then went and hired someone else. It's a bit like losing a girlfriend who won't tell you why."

While Thorgerson seems intent on matching particular concepts to particular albums, sometimes the connection between an artwork and a record can be negotiable. For instance, there was the time Perry Farrell — the frontman for Jane's Addiction and an art director in his own right for the albums Nothing's Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual — commissioned an image "about female sexual allure and sexual contrariness," Thorgerson recalled. After meditating on "Alice in Wonderland via Toulouse-Lautrec, French cancan, red-/black-striped corsets, Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge or Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," he and his partners devised an image: two women whose bottom halves were red onions.

The Division Bell (Pink Floyd, 1994)

The onion ladies, who wound up on The Bottom Half (Umphrey's McGee, 2007)

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After Farrell and co. passed on "the Onion Ladies" — "They clearly don't know their onions," Thorgerson determined — the design team unsuccessfully tried to unload the image on electronic band Deepest Blues. The label's marketing rep turned it down. "I don't get the onions," he protested.

For an uncertain hiatus, according to Thorgerson, "the Onion Ladies themselves were so exasperated at not being realized for so long that they still couldn't get over it."

But then, another prog jam band knocked at StormStudios' doors. And so the Onion Ladies found a home on the cover of The Bottom Half, a B-sides collection by American jam band Umphrey's McGee.

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