viva la album art!

In my opinion these are four of the best album covers of all time (click on the image to see the high res glory).

Top left: Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers (1971) There is a legendary story behind this album cover, designed by Andy Warhol. If you want to hear it e-mail me. It's too lewd for the blog as you can probably imagine. The original album had a real zipper you could unzip like this example shows.

Bottom left: Rolling Stones. Some Girls (1978) I think this is Warhol's best album design ever -- a newspaper wig advertisement with the faces cut out and the Stones' faces on the album sleeve.

Top right: Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti (1975) This cover is a timeless classic. It makes great use of the die-cut like Some Girls and since it's a double album the windows, which are cut out, can have different backgrounds depending on which sleeve you put in which direction -- brilliant!

Bottom right: Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin III (1970) The little hand you see is pointing to the place on the album where you spin this image wheel around to make a different cover. This is another clever use of the die-cut album cover. It makes the albums three-dimensional and ever-changing.

No other decade rocked album art like the 1970's.

Comments

mojoala said…
I was partial to the album covers of E.L.O. and The Alan Parons Project.

The Alan Parsons Project is what drove me to Techno, then Herbie Hancocks' "Rock-it" reinforce that genre.

I think the "Rock-It" ushered in the dance techno that most dance night clubs play nowadays!

bye bye
Brooks Brown said…
"Rock It" is an amazing song and it did expose dance-techno to the masses in a similar way that The Bee Gees made disco available to the masses in the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack.

I was first introduced to "Rock It" through MTV and that video used to scare the hell out me with the robots and robotic mannequins, but in a good way like I couldn't get enough of it. It is still a brilliant video concept.

"Rock It" also paid major homage to what is now old school rap, but was then just rap, when the excellent scratching.

I like E.L.O. very much and haven't thought about The Alan Parsons Project in years. "Eye in the Sky" was one of their hits, right?
Anonymous said…
You should totally check out the band JUNE OF '44. If you regularly listen to NPR you have heard them (or one of their many side projects/incarnations). Their music is brillant beyond compare, and their album packageing is truly amazing. One that comes to mind right away is the CD insert that is perforated "stamps" depicting old whaling and ship images that look like they are fro old Herman Melville's time-except the lead singer did them! Brooks, being a musician you would probably really love these guys. Check out their earlier stuff-esp "Tropics and Meridians". I saw them live and was blown away by their sheer musical chops.
http://www.southern.com/southern/band/JUNEO/disc.html
tim g-aka Angela's worse half
Brooks Brown said…
Thanks for the heads up Timmy. When I was writing this entry about albums and the lost art of album covers, I was hoping to hear your 2 cents worth and glad to know you read this. Hope you and your girls had fun at the beach. B

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