![]() ![]() Additionally, the sympathetic doctors gave Kurelek a room to pursue his artistic endeavors, a passion deemed helpful by his therapists. There, the 26 year old was given treatment for schizophrenia. When he actually made some cuts on his arm, he was admitted to a hospital for psychiatric treatment. In one of these, he imagined that if he cut off the flesh of his arm (lower right chamber) he would be shocked back to human feelings. Raised on a prairie farm in midwestern Canada, he had experienced such a brutal childhood that he had become extremely withdrawn, eventually retiring into a private world of weird fantasies. The original artwork is from a grotesque painting by Canadian artist William Kurelek (1927-1977). Yet few VH fans know the story of that album art, which has a background as disturbing as the content of the songs within it. ![]() The cover remains as stirring and enigmatic as it was upon the day of the record’s release April 29, 1981. The overall theme extended to the record’s haunting cover art, which depicted some poor guying getting pummeled in the face, along with other scenes of aggression, pain and torture. This tone was set by the album’s opening track “Mean Street,”and was continued through a song-cycle filled with dark subject matter and disillusionment. When Van Halen fans first listened to a copy of the Fair Warning album in the early eighties, few could miss the fact that the band’s sunny subject matter had turned to a more somber and threatened perspective. ![]()
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