1000 Record Covers

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Record Covers’ (2002) by Michael Ochs – is essentially an interesting photo collection of album covers throughout the decades – but ultimately this amounts to nothing more than a vanity project for its author/curator Michael Ochs. Rush’s greatest album covers expressed both their grand concepts and their cerebral sense of humor. In this staged cover for Moving Pictures, which features many of the characters from the songs, we detect at least three different visual plays on the album’s title. There's not a lot to actually *read* in this 50-year survey of LP record-cover design, but the absence of text is more than compensated for by high-quality photo reproductions of a huge representative sample of what was a thriving art-form until the demise of vinyl records in the 1990s - and may yet become so again now the format has regained popularity. Sporting a photo of JS Bach with a Moog synthesizer, Wendy Carlos’ pioneering electronic album Switched-On Bach was unlike anything people had seen (or heard) before in 1968. As the first classical album to go platinum in America, Carlos helped to bring Bach… to the future. Raise your hand if you also thought the cat was a head of lettuce. 46: Pink Floyd: Animals (design by Hipgnosis)

Peter Blake’s pop-art assemblage on Sgt. Pepper’s famous album changed record covers forever, and kept many of us occupied for weeks trying to identify everybody at the ceremony. This famous album cover did wonders with its simple strategy. On his Dr. Dre’s solo debut The Chronic, the design assumed that Dre was already an icon and presented him accordingly. George Clinton’s gonzoid take on outer-space adventure found its perfect match in the effortlessly cool spaceship-party cover for Parliament’s Mothership Connection. The fact that it looked remarkably low budget only made it funkier. Robert Fripp saw this dramatic painting after In the Court of the Crimson King was completed and knew it perfectly suited the music, with the crazed cover figure as the 21st century schizoid man. Sadly, the artist passed away only months afterwards. 78: Moby Grape: Wow (design by Bob Cato) There were nearly as many copies of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out in 1970s high schools as there were actual school desks. Ten points if you got the original with the underwear inner sleeve. 65: Aerosmith: Draw the Line (design by Al Hirshfeld)A nod to how Thelonious Monk must’ve felt as a pioneering jazz artist, Underground casts the pianist as a French Resistance fighter in WWII. Columbia Records art director John Berg was responsible for iconic covers like Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits and Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, but this was likely one of his more expensive: They built an entire set, complete with costumed extras, to create Monk’s arresting album cover. 53: Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin II (design by David Juniper) Jefferson Airplane’s Long John Silver hails from the golden age of elaborate album covers. Since people were already using LPs to store and clean marijuana, the Airplane gave you a cardboard box holder for it, along with the pot, or at least a realistic-looking photo. 94: Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (design by Kenneth Cappello) Listen here 8: Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass: Whipped Cream & Other Delights (design by Peter Whorf Graphics)

Any artist who dares to look this terrifying on the cover of their first album deserves all the platinum success they get. Inspired by the album’s themes of the subconscious, the dark sleeve of Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? served notice that Eilish was here to mess with your head. Anyone who went to plays or read the New York Times in the 70s will recognize the work of the line-drawing caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who did his magic on Aerosmith’s members here. As always, his daughter Nina’s name was hidden a few times in this famous album cover. 64: Eric B. & Rakim: Paid in Full (design by Ron Contarsy) The iconic cover for Who’s Next worked on two levels: first as a futuristic image of The Who against a monolith; and second, when you noticed their zippers and realized what the guys had been doing. 21: Uriah Heep: The Magician’s Birthday (design by Roger Dean) The pictures are arranged first by decade, then thematically by image, rather than by more detailed chronology, by musician, or by designer. This gives the advantage of enabling one to see correspondences, similarities, visual echoes between individual designs that can be fruitfully mined for their contemporary social and psychological significance. Perhaps here some additional text might have been of use, but on the other hand its absence ensures the observer must use his or her wit, perception and knowledge to establish connections and draw conclusions about the Zeitgeist. Some of the 1970s images, implying rape or other sexual exploitation, are highly disturbing to the contemporary sensibility, and it's telling to speculate on how they could not have been so when originally produced. Their debut album pictured Oasis in the world’s coolest crash pad, showing every band of the era how it ought to be living. 36: Grace Jones: Island Life (design by Jean-Paul Goude)

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urn:lcp:1000recordcovers0000ochs:epub:6a091942-fa6e-4e31-a8a3-73f00c5b04af Foldoutcount 0 Grant_report Arcadia #4281 Identifier 1000recordcovers0000ochs Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6h252536 Invoice 2089 Isbn 3822840858 Okay, so it was a little graphic and provocative, but as the single most controversial thing The Beatles ever did (and the most expensive for an original), the cover of Yesterday and Today surely earns a place on a list of the greatest album covers. 66: Alice Cooper: School’s Out (design by Craig Braun) Beggars Banquet is a rare case where an album’s two famous covers really complement each other. Put the notorious bathroom cover together with the engraved invitation on the US replacement, and you’ve got the yin and the yang of The Rolling Stones at the time. One of the greatest joke album covers, the boxer was already a perfect image for the Pogues, but don’t miss the subtle bit of play here. (The word “peace” of course has five letters.) 71: Rush: Moving Pictures (design by Hugh Syme)

Like all goth-influenced artists, Chelsea Wolfe has a strong sense of the dramatic. The coiled-up body on the cover of her 2017 album embodies all the personal changes the songs deal with. 43: Blondie: Parallel Lines (design by Ramey Communications) The Led Zeppelin “III” cover is a far more Original and Iconic Cover even though “HOTH” is one of Hipgnosis’ most beautiful designs. It should, however, have been pictured with the “Belly-Belt”. Modern death metal bands got nothing on country duo The Louvin Brothers, who went to the inferno in 1959 and looked great in white suits while doing it. 29: David Bowie: Heroes (design by Masayoshi Sukita) Most of Pink Floyd’s covers would be in the running for a list of the greatest album covers, but we wanted to highlight something that wasn’t Dark Side of the Moon. This burst of Storm Thorgerson / Hipgnosis imagination features four versions of the same photo (except that the band rotates one position in each), matching their sense of surrealism. 58: Metallica: …And Justice For All (design by Stephen Gorman)Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-07-26 14:01:31 Boxid IA40188504 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier The album cover for Hüsker Dü’s final studio album is one of those cases where a cover is exactly like the album: vivid, colorful and jarring in a welcoming way. 44: Chelsea Wolfe: Hiss Spun (design by John Crawford) urn:lcp:1000recordcovers0000ochs_n8h4:epub:e5a6820c-3e3a-4561-9be4-65a5bb5819ea Foldoutcount 0 Identifier 1000recordcovers0000ochs_n8h4 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2k3rmr488j Invoice 1652 Isbn 3822819786 It may be a more glamorous cover after her first two, but this photo of PJ Harvey – in which she could easily be mistaken for Shakespeare’s Ophelia – implied that a newer, softer image comes at a cost.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-08-31 20:36:54 Camera Canon 5D City Köln External-identifier This is a collection of album covers, well-known and less-known. They are roughly grouped by the decade (1960s, 1970s, and 1980s-early1990s: all getting a short introduction), some appearing in other decade than their own. Each cover is accompanied by artist name, title, record label, your (or rough guess - I do wish there had been some more insisted searching), then design/collage/art/photo by, if known (but put sometimes just as 'unknown'). Sometimes there's a further comment added (these and the introduction are also in German and French).But I demur. Although I do see the funny irony in celebrating the art of the LP sleeve by reducing the reproductions to about a quarter of the size of a cd cover. You don’t necessarily get a thing of rare beauty when you load a cover with as many fold-out panels and elaborate paintings as an 11-inch disc can hold, but Santana certainly did in this case, thanks to famed Japanese designer Tadanori Yokoo. Recorded live during Santana’s performances in Osaka, Japan, the full sleeve art is an amalgamation of Buddhist and Christian imagery, along with Yokoo’s signature pop art style. 18: 10cc: How Dare You! (design by Hipgnosis) If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find Us Listen here 57: The Mamas & The Papas: If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (design by Guy Webster) One of the psych era’s great hallucinations, the famous album cover for Moby Grape’s 1968 double LP Wow showed an otherworldly landscape with the world’s largest bunch of grapes. Wow indeed. 77: Kayne West: Yeezus (design by Kanye West and Virgil Abloh)