What are some albums which are packaged in cases or sleeves featuring some kind of physical gimmick that sets them apart from a regular album?
One I can think of off the top of my head is Some Girls by the Rolling Stones with the slide-in thing on the record sleeve that you can adjust to get different heads sticking out of the holes.
Others?
Does Britney Spears’ Blackout count now?
Speaking of the Rolling Stones, I heard that on the original album cover of Sticky Fingers, there was a zipper you could zip up and down.
Lets not forget the famous Velvet Underground and Nico vinyl that had a banana sticker on the cover.
More recently Sigur Rose released an album called ( )
It’s 12 page booklet featured nothing but tracing paper and faint blurred black and white nonsense. It is all very emotially charged mood music. None of the songs are in a real language so each of the 12 pages were to write or draw some personal insight about each of the 12 songs. (each called “untitled”) When closed and held up to a light it was supposed to be some sort of personal masterpiece.
Pretentious as hell, but a fantastic album.
pink floyd’s Wish You Were here was apparently originally packaged, briefly, in a black plastic envelope that contained a smell similar to burnt flesh.
Jefferson Airplane’s Longjohn Silver folded into a cigar box replica replete with a giant photo of reefer in the bottom.
Cheech and Chong’s Up in msoke had an album sized rolling paper.
The Rolling Stones’ Sticky fingers had a working zipper.
Duly noted. 
(See the third post…)
I know and I saw and you win and you are the best. I have a copy in plastic with a sale sticker from British store, however, so that is some consolation.
May I add that the White Album was so named because it had nothing at all printed on it?
Small Faces, circular album Nut Gone.
Mamas & Papas, an album with the four members posed so that a cover split like a dutch door made it possible to combine the top half of the head of one with the bottom half of the head of another.
Santana, with a psychedelic-style cover that included a “figurehead”-type nude. On the copy I bought, her bare breasts were covered with a removable rectangle. Removable if you scratched it a lot.
Along similar lines, Mom’s Apple Pie was often censored. I doubt if the censorship was intended by the artists, but you never know.
You can tell what era I grew up in, can’t you?
Jethro Tull’s 1969 album Stand Up.
The inside of the cover contained folded cardboard cutouts of the band members. When the cover was opened, the figures would stand up.
Return of The Durutti Column, The Durutti Column - cover was sandpaper, designed to destroy the records it was placed near.
Catch A Fire, Bob Marley & The Wailers - first 20,000 copies were in a flip-top sleeve designed to resemble a Zippo lighter
Blue Monday, New Order (12") - original was a die-cut cover of a 5.25" floppy disk that was rumored to be so expensive to assemble that the band actually lost money on the single - which was allegedly the best-selling 12" single in UK history.
(It should be noted that The Durutti Column and New Order covers were designed by Peter Saville. Flash git.)
Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door was set in a brown paper envelope instead of the usual transparent plastic.
I have (still) the original. They were sued by IIRC, Lucille Ball, or her family, then others piled on, so they had to remove several pictures.
That cover has my favorite quote (words to life by) on it. Charlie Watts: “I have no regrets…I would rather be lonely than sorry.”
And their later album, Pulse, included a red LED in the front that would blink until the battery finally gave out.
Second Album by Curved Air had a rainbow shape cut out of the cover, the different bands of which were cut out through several layers of card, all of which unfolded in different directions revealing different pictures of the group. It’s awkward to explain briefly.
I think the various sections were connected in the same layout as the Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake (mentioned above). When it was all unfolded, it measured 2’ x 3’.
Front by Front (I think) by Front 242 was in a regular cardboard sleeve which was itself in a heavy plain black plastic sleeve.
The cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti featured an apartment building with a slidey insert that would change the faces in the windows.
I think it was actually Cheech and Chong’s Big Bambu which had the giant rolling paper. Unless perhaps Cheech and Chong included a big damn rolling paper with every album, which is a distinct possibility.
The only one I can think of is Smash by the Offspring, in which the two columns holding the names of the songs are placed upside down relative to each other, and the only one that reads correctly is the one on the RIGHT of the two columns, causing you to flip it over to read the left-most column, which makes the left-most column upside down again, causing you to flip it over again…
and Tull’s Thick As A Brick, which had a newspaper in it.
Dang, now what on earth did I do with that huge paper?
I have what must be a limited edition of an LP by **Scratch Acid ** (David Yow’s pre-Jesus Lizard band) called Just Keep Eating. It has this thing stuck on the cover…I don’t know what the stuff’s called, but it’s a sort of ribbed plastic that reflects different colors depending on what angle you’re viewing it from.
I also have Chomp by Pylon, where the top part looks a bit like it got, well, chomped.
If you can’t remember, I think I have an idea of what you did with it… 