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Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
©1973, Capitol Records After showing a bunch of photo-based covers, here is one of the most recognizable graphic covers of all time. Floyd’s eighth album was a true game-changer. It is one of the 3 or 4 best-selling albums of all time, selling more than 44 million copies since it’s release, and was on the Billboard Album chart for…
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The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers
(Album ©1971, Rolling Stones Records) This was the Stones’ first album of the 70’s, their first on their own label, and was the third in what has to be considered one of if not THE most impressive four-album run of any band in rock history, from ’68’s Beggar’s Banquet through ’69’s Let It Bleed, this one, and…
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The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Axis: Bold As Love
(Album ©1967, Reprise Records) Jimi’s second album was also the second one he recorded in 1967 alone! While it is the most abstract of his three albums with the Experience, it is one of the coolest album covers of all time. It’s so of the time – so stereotypically ’60’s. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with…
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The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
(Album ©1967, EMI/Capitol Records) Here is the other most important album in rock-n-roll, in my opinion. The Beatles had heard Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (which itself had been heavily influenced by The Beatles’ Rubber Soul), and responded with perhaps the most ambitious album to date. Paul McCartney had an idea…
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Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited
(Album ©1965, Columbia Records) This is (IMO) one of the two most important albums of all time (along with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), containing songs that brought a depth to rock-n-roll. (Read Greil Marcus’ Like A Rolling Stone to learn more about the impact of this album.) The cover image was a photo taken…
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Meet The Beatles! – The Beatles
(Album ©1964, EMI / Capitol Records) This record was the first “official” LP released by the band in the US, and the photo on the cover is truly iconic, having also been the image used on the UK LP With The Beatles, released a few months earlier. The photo was taken by Robert Freeman, and a…
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Chris Whitley – Living With The Law
(Album ©1991, Columbia Records) Today, it’s Chris Whitley’s debut album Living With The Law. Released in 1991, I heard his first single, the title track, while I was a DJ on WIZN in Vermont. We were playing it in medium rotation, so it was getting heard a bit. I grabbed a copy of the CD…
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The Kinks – One For The Road
(Album ©1980, Arista Records) One of my all-time favorite albums is The Kinks’ One For The Road. I heard it for the first time in a ski trip in eighth grade. Don Saturday, wherever you are, thank you for bringing this along. This is one of the best live albums of all times, if you…
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The Clash – London Calling
(Album ©1979, Epic Records) Today, among my favorite records is The Clash’s London Calling. I didn’t hear the whole record until 1982, after the band’s next album (Combat Rock) came out, but I already knew who they were thanks to the two radio songs from this album – “Train in Vain” and the title track.…
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Ryan Adams – Gold
(Album ©2001, Lost Highway Records) The next album on my musical journey is Ryan Adams’ 2001 masterpiece, Gold. It came out just two weeks after 9/11, accompanied by the video for the first single, “New York, New York.” The video, as it notes at the start, was filmed on September 7, 2001, and large parts…
