Some great examples here, including some I hadn’t seen before.
It gets harder if you try to limit it to album covers that actually feature a picture of the band/artist. The Beatles were masters at this. Most of their album covers show us the Beatles themselves, in ways that are iconic, interesting, and completely distinct. (And even into their solo careers, all four of them released at least a few albums that showed their images in non-boring, non-cliched ways.)
The only other artists I can think of that come close, in terms of number of album covers that picture the artist in varied, iconic ways, are David Bowie and Fleetwood Mac.
One more personal favorite album cover is The Swirling Eddies’ Zoom Daddy.
IMHO They pushed the envelope a little too far with the Toe Fat albums. The first album is weird enough, but Toe Fat Two…well, it’s kind of disgusting. (I’ll let you find it that your own)
One of my old bands - Soy - released this Roger Dean-fonted 7" already 20 fucking years ago - Jesus time flies by way too quickly. Good thing the b-side photo is nowhere to be found on the i-net, with some incriminatingly youthful photos of yours truly.
My husband has several album frames up on his bedroom wall, he switches them out now and then, but mostly Frank Zappa albums. I like the old Santana ‘Abraxas’ album cover, but the one framed is kind of worn out. Unlike a painting by an old master, it can’t be cleaned up and restored.
It was a “found” photo, like at a garage sale or something, and then the actual couple found out they were on the cover of an album? Something like that?
Please do flesh out! Derail away!
Also love the 1980 live double album Dead Set, with the fold-out cover (suitable for cleaning your weed, natch) with the Uncle Sam skeleton looking out over the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco, and the Skullfuck skeleton back to back, looking out over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan. An homage to the two great urban centers of Deadhead-ism.
Even though I’ve never seen them used for that purpose (though I certainly don’t doubt you), and I’ve never seen that particular album before, looking at that picture somehow made me really nostalgic for double albums (on vinyl).
I have a large sticker of that image plastered to the side of my podium. Students always ask about it, and I can turn them onto the best band of the Summer of Love.
As a spin-off, how about my favorite cover from the Jerry Garcia Band?
I apologize in advance, but my linkage is not working.
Three of my all-time favs:
1 Rolling Stones “Sticky Fingers” This was so outrageous at the time. Designed by Andy Warhol, and featuring a working fly that could be unzipped to reveal the model in his underwear, it could only have come from the Stones.
Little Feat “Dixie Chicken” In all honesty, you could substitute any of Martin Muller’s (aka Neon Park) Feat covers and I would still agree. Loved Muller’s whimsical world, and with the Dixie Chicken cover, he nailed what the Feat were all about.
Led Zeppelin “Houses of the Holy” Everything about this cover is perfect - the mystical and mysterious Devil’s Causeway, the naked Nordic children climbing toward the sun inspired by the ending of Arthur C Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End. The end result by the Hypnosis team was as otherworldly and trippy as the music this album contained.
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