McMullen insisted that it was pure luck that he ever met the Beastie Boys, given that their infamous split from Def Jam and his career owe much to serendipity. McMullen studied graphic design and film at San Diego State University and created flyers for clubs where he deejayed two or three nights a week.
“I would come out to New York for the New Music Seminar, I would visit [a friend] in the summer for a week at a time, and I would try to make contacts with people. Everyone was really friendly but didn’t need to go out of their way to find people to do graphic design work for them. I didn’t really begin doing album covers until I decided to move out here in 1996. At that point, I just wanted to give it a try. I had been five or six years out of college, and I thought, ‘I don’t really know where this is all headed.’ I just wanted to try living here for six months.” Then his good friend told him to contact his cousin at Def Jam.
After three years, McMullen had enough contacts to become an independent graphic designer. One of his fortuitous encounters led to a collaboration with Tony Chan’s urban-wear label Swish NYC and was the origin of McMullen’s “mix-tape philosophy,” which was the name of a T-shirt he made with the clothing line. “The whole mix-tape thing is one of the focal points in human history where people could actually express those different interests all in one thing…When people made mix tapes, they would abut different musical genres together, and I think that people try to do that visually, in their own interests, in their own collections, and in their own work. It’s cooler to have all these different genres on your iPod…You’re pulling from all these sources in front of you. That’s kind of what my work does as well.”
Mixing things together to create a unique object is something McMullen does well. His AD-AT toy was based on an illustration that combined “the iconic nature of the (Adidas) shell-toe sneaker” with his “childhood fascination with these giant walking attack vehicles” (the AT-AT from The Empire Strikes Back). His Shuttlemax toy with Kidrobot was the product of a similar line of thinking. “With my work, I’ll take one concept that’s in this realm and try to wedge it into another realm. I used to call it hybridization or cross-pollination. The world generally accepted the term visual mash-up.” “I’m more interested in who likes it rather than how many people like it,” McMullen said of his work.
He pointed to two or three drum machines stacked on top of each other on a nearby desk. His obsession with music production equipment was the inspiration for his MPC drum machine ring. Apparently, the ring is a conversation starter. “I’ve seen rings that are turntables, that are cassettes. It’s a secret code to a lot of people. Some people will see this ring and go, ‘Is that a cash register?’ Other people will go, ‘Is that an Akai drum machine? Is that an MPC?’ and we’ll start talking about music production.”
When I ask whether he’s met people that own the ring, he answered yes. Moreover, they’re exactly the kind of people he would expect and want to communicate with — guys that are professional musicians or are fascinated with drum machines. Although McMullen has made a career out of designing album art, he admits that the industry has changed. “A lot of the stuff I did last year wasn’t going to print at all. It was going directly to the iTunes music store.” This takes some of the joy out of the business, because “It’s fun having something printed redundantly and seeing stacks of it in the record store.”
It makes sense that he has branched out to design limited-edition rings, T-shirts, and toys. McMullen even designed a “Vader with Grillpiece” for The Vader Project, in which various artists re-imagine Darth Vader’s helmet. “As somebody that creates album art,” McMullen said, “I can just see how the pay grade has gone down, but I also think that there’s a lot of importance to create a look for a band that year or just raise awareness of that band before they go out on tour.” Of course, if you can’t find his stuff on album covers, you can always buy his T-shirt.