Side" (which was released as an edited picture sleeve single in Japan). A special promotional album entitled Kansas Monolith Tour 1980 in Japan was issued to radio stations there to publicize the dates and featured three songs from Monolith and five of their earlier popular songs (2 studio versions, and 3 live versions). Monolith initially sold about 800,000 copies, obtaining gold status, but ultimately went platinum in the early 1990s. Kerry Livgren donated his platinum record to the Kansas State Historical Society. The album stayed on the Billboard album chart for a total of 24 weeks, and was one of the Top 100 charting albums (#100) for the calendar year 1979. Even though MTV was still two years away, promotional music videos were produced for four tracks on Monolith: "On the Other Side", "People of the South Wind", "Away from You", and "Reason to Be". Livgren's lyrics on Monolith were partly influenced by The Urantia Book, of which he was a devotee before his conversion to Christianity. Cover art As Phil Ehart, drummer for the band Kansas, shared with Jeb Wright (a legendary rock radio and print interviewer) in a Goldmine interview called "behind the paintbrush", Ehart told stories about the artwork for Kansas album covers and this is what he said about the Monolith album cover... Bruce Wolfe, an artist that did a Levi’s commercial, did that album cover. He had done one of the first animated commercials on television. By the time CBS approached him, he had been doing some album covers. We had sent him the song “People of the South Wind” and he sent back this fricking painting … it was huge. It was not a drawing; it was a real painting of this Indian whose headdress was a space helmet. There were all of these overpasses that were broken and there were a bunch of Indians on the back that looked like they were at a Boy Scout camp or something. He did an incredible job. He took our logo and made it work. It was always a challenge to take that logo and make it look cool. He used the features on it and it really worked. Again, what an icon … it was a 9-foot-tall Native American chief wearing some sort of buffalo robe and a space helmet with horns. The guy must have done a lot of drugs, but we thought it