I know many of you reading this have never bought an album (vinyl). But a big part of the “album experience” was the art. Sometimes the word “art” was used very loosely. Sometimes the images burned themselves into your brain like a familiar smell or sound. Sometimes they made your eyes water. For many albums, I only remember their covers, I couldn’t name a single song on the record but the image stuck. For others, I enjoyed the music so much the positive feelings were transferred to the images associated with that song/album. I can’t think of a very good analogy to album art in today’s pop culture. I guess the closest thing would be music videos.
I started to think of the “best album covers”. It was really hard to divorce the image from the music. Of course if you wander about the best, you have to consider the worst, clearly a band I linked could never have one of those but even so, there are a lot to choose from. I have posted a few that tend to stand out on both ends of the scale.
Sometimes the covers would open up to reveal even more. Other covers had moving parts. The Stones “Sticky Fingers” had a working zipper on the cover. Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti” had windows cut out of the cover and the album sleeves also had art on them, so the cover would look different depending on which sides of which albums (it was a double album) was filling in the windows. Since we used to actually sit down and listen to records from start to finish, we would often pass the time pouring over the covers and liner notes – that was our multimedia experience. Got any favorites?