The World's Greatest Rock n Roll Album Covers

The Game Room
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A fine game for the whole family! Find a pic of an album cover you admire and post a link to it here. After ten or so links appear, rate each cover in the order you like them.

Please only link to one album cover per day, to allow as many players as possible.

Remember that an album cover can be very cool and the music can be crap. We’re just looking at the covers here, not your personal feelings about any band or the merits of the music.

To start off, I have always liked King Crimson’s Court of the Crimson King:

Court of the Crimson King

Certainly grabs one’s attention at any rate.

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I always loved the Peter Gabriel “car” cover - Curses, 404!

I like the composition, the raindrops, the slight tinge of creepiness. And the car itself looks like a cool car. I always wanted to know what kind of car it is. A BMW perhaps? One of those NSUs?

3

Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, “Cheap Thrills.” Artwork by Robert Crumb.

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unhalfbricking Unhalfbricking - Wikipedia

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Abbey Road

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A thread I started 02-20-2007, 01:22 PM with the title Remember that weird album cover that had… has 60 posts’ worth of ideas that may be worth looking at for triggers to others.

In the OP I mentioned

Later on (post #6), Wee Bairn provided a link to File:ExileMainSt.jpg - Wikipedia which proved to be the one in my memory.

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My favorite band and favorite album cover.

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The cover than got me through some lonely times. :smiley:

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So Simple, So Iconic.

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Flash and the Pan. The cover to their second album Lights in the Night was even greater, but you need to see the actual cover, not a picture of it Here’s a photo. Look closely at that diagonal “scratch off” toward the right and realize that you could actually see the rest.

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Sticky Fingers. I still have that album and it’s ruined vinyl.

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Wow. An impressive first round.

If I were to rank these I suppose I would pick

  1. Darkside of the Moon – classic image.
  2. Court of the Crimson King - groovy, man.
  3. Abby Road – iconic indeed!
  4. Sticky Fingers – one has to admire an album cover that slowly destroys the album next to it, like a book bound in sandpaper. Awesome pick.
  5. Cheap Thrills – Janis and Crumb! there’s a fine match up.
  6. British Steel – a fine image for Judas Priest
  7. Peter Gabriel - certainly a neat photo
  8. Exile on Main Street – two Rolling Stones covers on the list!
  9. Flash in the Pan – fun stuff.
  10. Hasten Down the Wind - starring Linda Rondstadt and her nipples.

Of course, it’s all debatable. What do you think?

And tomorrow… let’s do it all again!

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Feel free to rank the first 10 as you go along.

Happy Fourth!

LBJ showed his scars, American Stars n Bars

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Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. That tiny image doesn’t do it justice, but was the best I could find that showed the complete image. The album opened like a (ETA: vinyl) double album would, so you could see the entire image. It also had a post of the cover image. Here’s a better image of the front, but I can’t find a high-def complete image.

(The image on the cover in the OP also went onto the back.)

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Double albums were also useful in cleaning one’s dope. Or so I heard.

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My local classic rock station was interviewing Peter Framton (or maybe someone that had a triple album) and one of the things they said was “Your album was so important to college kids, do you have any idea how much weed was cleaned on it?”

Maybe that’s why they started developing weed that didn’t have seeds. It’s a lot harder to do it on a CD case.

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Thick as a Brick; here’s a site showing the entire contents of the 12 page newspaper that made up the cover.

And, sadly, so wrong. Would it have hurt to have the light bend in the right damn direction?

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Weasels Ripped My Flesh, by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

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Derek Riggs’ work for Iron Maiden should be considered as a body. If I had to pick one, perhaps Powerslave.
There’s also Hipgnosis, notable for much more than Pink Floyd.

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But not quite as simple as this one