The Greatest Album Covers of All Time

Editorial Review from Amazon.com:

"To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the LP chart, this superb and visually awesome book brings you the very best rock, pop, rap, reggae, soul, and punk album covers ever created.

At a time when listeners increasingly download or upload songs, creating personal playlists on MP3 players and I-Pods, the art of packaging music seems to be fading away. But for the past 50 years, musicians have released their work inside brilliantly-designed packages that made an important statement about their music and style. Look at the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Band, for example--just one of the 500 memorable images in this amazing collection, all chosen by a panel of 50 experts and each accompanied by enlightening commentary. Among the choices: the brilliantly psychedelic and way-out art from the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request; Peter Tosh's fiery cover for Bush Doctor; and the somewhat demented-looking prom queen on Hole's Live Through This album. From rock to pop, jazz to blues, these are all artistically, stylistically, and culturally significant in their own way, and will undoubtedly spark a debate with fans around the world."

Best Selling Records of All Time

A Cool Album Cover Story From M Music & Musicians Magazine:

In 1971, photographer Henry Diltz and Art director Gary Burden were invited to the home of an unknown singer and songwriter named Jackson Browne to dream up the cover of his first album. "We went into his house, he gave us each a beer and started playing the piano," Diltz recalls. "He started singing 'Rock Me On The Water' full voice, and I got the shivers. It was just awesome." Diltz instinctively grabbed his camera and began snapping photo's of the impromptu performance, but admits he had trouble concentrating. "I could barely take pictures," he recalls. "It was like I was floating in air." Minutes later the trio decamped to Brownes backyard, where Diltz took the portrait that would become the basis for the iconic cover of "Jackson Browne" Burdon treated the photo with a silk-screen effect and duplicated the appearence of a canvas water bag (used at the time to keep auto radiators from overheating in the desert), right down to the precaution "Saturate Before Using." Browne worried that listeners would believe that was the album title, and for good reason—by the 1980's a CD reissue of the album mistakenly listed its title on the spine as "Saturate Before Using".

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