©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 741 consecutive weeks. Heck, it still pops onto the Catalog Album chart from time to time, 47 years later! And the album cover is truly iconic.
(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 ’72’s Exile on Main St. I love all four of those records, but this makes this list because the album cover is so iconic.
Conceived of by Andy Warhol, with a photo by Billy Name, the original pressings of the album had a working zipper thanks to cover designer Craig Braun. Apparently, the zipper damaged a number of the albums inside, and so subsequent pressings were simply the image without a working zipper. Also, it must have been really expensive to manufacture that album cover.
Continue reading →(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 Hendrix, who took exception to it for just that reason. In a biography titled Room Full of Mirrors (Charles Cross, ©2005), it was reported that he would have rather had Native American artwork to reflect his own heritage. But Indian culture was all the rage by the late ’60’s, and so this is what the label wanted. And what they wanted, they got.
The artwork is a painting by the artist Roger Law, and it was based on a Kal Ferris photograph of the three band members’ heads composited onto the imagery from a traditional Hindu painting of Vishnu (Krishna) known as Viraat Purushan-Vishnuroopam. The songs within reflect the imagery on the album cover – they are a stoner’s dream. Lots of semi-nonsensical lyrics and backwards loops to get lost listening to. However, it does have my favorite Hendrix tune of all, “You Got Me Floatin'” on it, and another of my favorites, “Little Wing.” Most of all, once you see this cover, it sticks with you.
(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 to record an entire album as another, fictitious band in order to give the band more artistic freedom. And this was the result.
(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 by Daniel Kramer at Dylan’s manager’s brownstone in NYC, and shows Dylan looking defiant, if not confrontational. The cool Triumph t-shirt and ray-bans make up for the shiny, psychedelic silk shirt, which seems to be so not Dylanesque.
(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 blue tint was added to this release, to differentiate the two covers. This album contained only 4 of the same songs as the With The Beatles collection, eschewing almost all of the the cover songs they released on the UK album for more original songs. That’s because their popularity had exploded in the months since the UK release.
(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 and fell in love with the atmospheric, beautiful, haunted vibe of the record. At that point, when the second single “Big Sky Country” was released, I really thought he was going to take off.
(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 haven’t heard it yet, it’s a great example of hearing the songs you’ve heard a hundred times before in a new light, sounding fresher, more dynamic, and just better all around.
(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. Once I heard the whole record – whoa! Just about every song was amazing, and this is a double record. The band spanned so many styles and yet still sounded like themselves throughout, and they avoided the commercial gloss that finally crept into Combat Rock
(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 of the video are Adams playing an acoustic guitar outside, under the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side, with the Twin Towers squarely behind him. Seeing the video was unnerving, and I’m sure that caused the video to not be played as often as it otherwise would have been during what was such a sensitive time in our country. But that’s how I was introduced to not only the song, but to Adams as an artist.