Album Cover Quotes

No matter how many heavy-metal album covers you’ve seen, how many Hieronymus Bosch prints of the tortures of Hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi’s face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination.

Every time I see this one particular movie star on a magazine, I can't help but feel terribly sorry for her because nobody respects her at all, and yet they keep interviewing her. And the interviews are all the same thing. They start with what food they are eating in some restaurant. "As _____ gingerly munched her Chinese Chicken Salad, she spoke of love." And all the covers say the same thing: "_____ gets to the bottom of stardom, love, and his/her hit new movie/television show/album." I think it's nice for stars to do interviews to make us think they are just like us, but to tell you the truth, I get the feeling that it's all a big lie. The problem is I don't know who's lying.

Edie Sedgwick didn’t really fit in on this planet. She didn’t fit in anywhere. She’d spent years in mental institutions, she took far too many drugs and yet she was destined to make an impression on just about everyone who ever met her, so much so that they wanted to write about her, sing about her, put her photos on album covers and, of course, film her.

If Bruce Springsteen had ever recorded ‘Born to Lurk’, these two would have been on the album cover.

lace-up leather boots, ultra-skinny rose jeans, an untucked lime dress shirt, and a checkered skinny tie as loose as a necklace. With his thick black Ray-Bans and his choppy green hair, he looked like he’d stepped off a New Wave album cover circa 1979.

What's coming out of the stereo is like a genre unto itself, a charming, fucked-up fairy tale that immediately breaks my heart in all the best ways. I stretch out on the floor with my ear parked next to the speaker, in a trance. I place the album cover over my face to block out any interruption as "I'll Be Your Mirror" seduces me. I immediately add the song to my mental list of top ten songs ever. And as I'm bobbing my head with dreamy abandon, I hear a voice. "Nice choice, DJ," it says. I slowly slide the album cover down past my eyes and look up. My eyes spy his shoes first--paint-splattered brogues. My heart stops when I look at his face. Pale skin, messy black hair, emerald eyes...Senor Smolder! He's eighteen, maybe nineteen. And no, my imagination didn't lie, he is just as devastating now as he was the first time I saw him. Only even more, because he just complimented my taste in music.

Some thirteen-year-old with a sticker-covered guitar might right now be in a garage in Denton, Texas, or Peoria, Illinois, or Macon, Georgia, writing an album that could one day flip the world upside down.

Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith. I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue. Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive. You could say I covered all the bases. I studied Monty Python. And not just Holy Grail, either. Every single one of their films, albums, and books, and every episode of the original BBC

Two of them lurked in the ruined graveyard. Two shadowy figures, one hunched and squat, the other lean and menacing, both of them Olympic-grade lurkers. If Bruce Springsteen had ever recorded “Born to Lurk,” these two would have been on the album cover. They had been lurking in the fog for an hour now, but they had been pacing themselves and could lurk for the rest of the night if necessary, with still enough sullen menace left for a final burst of lurking around dawn.

Dads didn't care about lightning, because lightning was on the cover of all their favorite albums. Sometimes it was painted on their trucks as well. You could tell that if their kids were killed by lightning, they would be sad, but they would also feel superior about it for the rest of their lives, because it was without question the most hard-as way for a child to die. "My son Randy . . ." they would say, their voices trailing, "taken from us by pure electricity in the year Nineteen Hundred and Ninety . . .

He was over there making Yes album covers, and here I was, with my gaudy Trump Towers of rock junk.

Daisy: I’m not apologizing for shit having to do with that album cover. I dress how I want to dress. I wear what I feel comfortable in. How other people feel about it is not my problem.

Leo was reciting from the album covers: “Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, Huey Lewis, Paula Abdul? This is like a bad MTV segment of ‘Where Are They Now?’” “More like, guess who joined the Columbia House Record Club

Leo was reciting from the album covers: “Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, Huey Lewis, Paula Abdul? This is like a bad MTV segment of ‘Where Are They Now?’” “More like, guess who joined the Columbia House Record Club when she was

When I found him, he had his head shaved. He was getting ready to shoot the cover for his album. He was in the studio all the time. He really thought he was a rapper now. Bless his heart—because he did take it so seriously.

‘Paranoid’ went straight to number four in the British singles chart and got us on Top of the Pops – alongside Cliff Richard, of all people. The only problem was the album cover, which had been done before the name change and now didn’t make any sense at all. What did four pink blokes holding shields and waving swords have to do with paranoia? They were pink because that was supposed to be the colour of the war pigs. But without ‘War Pigs’ written on the front, they just looked like gay fencers. ‘They’re not gay fencers, Ozzy,’ Bill told me. ‘They’re paranoid gay fencers.’

When I placed the album cover side by side with the screenshot of the game screen, the two symbols matched exactly. 2112’s title track is an epic seven-part song, over twenty minutes in length. The song tells the story of an anonymous rebel living in the year 2112, a time when creativity and self-expression have been outlawed. The red star on the album’s cover was the symbol of the Solar Federation, the oppressive interstellar society in the story. The Solar Federation was controlled by a group of “priests,” who are described in Part II of the song, titled “The Temples of Syrinx.” Its lyrics told me exactly where the Crystal Key was hidden:

I see a cathedral, for instance, one that’s stood for centuries and I marvel and I wonder... How many people passed through the doors? What did they pray for? How many wars did they wish to see ended? How many christenings, weddings, and funerals? Same thing with a record, I guess. Who bought it? Did they ever make love while it was playing? How many times did they read the notes in the cover? Did a song on the album change their life? I suppose it's odd to think about things like that.

including thousands of paintings in his unique, semi-cartoonish style, often densely packed with animals and figures—Elvis, George Washington, angels—and set fancifully in apocalyptic landscapes. In short order, he was appearing on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and creating album covers for R.E.M. and Talking Heads. Upon entry to the garden, I was greeted by a giant self-portrait of a smirking Finster in a burgundy suit, affixed to a cinderblock wall. At the bottom are the words “I began painting pictures in Jan-1976—without any training. This is my painting. A person don’t know what he can do unless he tryes. Trying things is the answer to find your talent.

Two of them lurked in the ruined graveyard. Two shadowy figures, one hunched and squat, the other lean and menacing, both of them Olympic-grade lurkers. If Bruce Springsteen had ever recorded “Born to Lurk,” these two would have been on the album cover. They had been lurking in the fog for an hour now, but they had been pacing themselves

One very big album, bound in expensive leather with a gold-stamped title on the cover - This is our life: The Austers - was totally blank inside.

Then, just for a blessed few hours, he had climbed out of that chopper into the high, cold, piney air of Bhutan, and gone for a ramble in the king’s Land Rover, and hiked up a misty mountain that had struck him as being straight from a 1970s album cover. And he had done some introspection about the fact that he couldn’t even take such a lovely place at face value but only liken it to such pop culture references.

the fact is, our relationships to these corporations are not unambiguous. some memebers of negativland genuinely liked pepsi products. mca grew up loving star wars and didn't mind having his work sent all over the united states to all the "cool, underground magazines" they were marketing to--why would he? sam gould had a spiritual moment in the shower listening to a cd created, according to sophie wong, so that he would talk about tylenol with his independent artist friends--and he did. many of my friends' daughters will be getting american girl dolls and books as gifts well into the foreseeable future. some skateboarders in washington, dc, were asked to create an ad campaign for the east coast summer tour, and they all love minor threat--why not use its famous album cover? how about shilling for converse? i would have been happy to ten years ago. so what's really changed? the answer is that two important things have changed: who is ultimately accountable for veiled corporate campaigns that occasionally strive to obsfucate their sponsorship and who is requesting our participation in such campaigns. behind converse and nike sb is nike, a company that uses shit-poor labor policies and predatory marketing that effectively glosses over their shit-poor labor policies, even to an audience that used to know better. behind team ouch! was an underground-savvy brainreservist on the payroll of big pharma; behind the recent wave of street art in hip urban areas near you was omd worldwide on behalf of sony; behind your cool hand-stenciled vader shirt was lucasfilm; and behind a recent cool crafting event was toyota. no matter how you participated in these events, whether as a contributor, cultural producer, viewer, or even critic, these are the companies that profited from your attention.

One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.

The way some people read the parables reminds me of Aesop's Fables. And the way others read them reminds me of the way some discern clue after perplexing clue in their Beatle albums as evidence for a cover-up of Paul's having died in a car accident.

As for Crowley, his reputation grew and grew. His gospel of “Do what thou wilt”—modified and transformed—appealed strongly to the socially liberated sixties generation. He resurfaced as a countercultural icon; his photograph appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his ideas influenced everyone from Dr. Timothy Leary to the rock group Led Zeppelin. He was hailed as a prophet before his time for bringing together eastern and western esoteric traditions, and although he could never quite escape the “Satanist” tag that he had gained in the Edwardian newspapers, this ensured his present-day popularity.

To Lincoln, words always mattered most. Newspaper stories lived but a single day, caricatures flamed into view and just as quickly faded, and even the most flattering photographs inevitably receded behind the thick covers of family albums. But words lived forever. Writing, Lincoln believed, was “the great invention of the world.

The Beatles were working on an album called Everest (actually named after a brand of cigarettes). When it was suggested they should get the photo for the record cover taken at the actual place the album was named after - and being too lazy to travel to the Himalayas - they renamed it to Abbey Road, which was the street on which their recording studio was.

he got up and went and picked up this book, an oversized photo album, and brought it back to the table. “I’ve been following you,” he said, and he opened it up. It was a scrapbook of everything I had ever done, every time my name was mentioned in a newspaper, everything from magazine covers to the tiniest club listings, from the beginning of my career all the way through to that week.

They wash the windows, the roof, the door, all of it. Then a crane drags the house from its spot and puts it down into the pit. There's dolls and books and cans all scattered around. The excavator picks them up. Then it covers everything with sand and clay, leveling it. And then instead of a village, you have an empty field. They sowed our land with corn. Our house is lying there, and our school and our village council office. My plants are there and two albums of stamps, I was hoping to bring them with me. Also I had a bike.

For a long while I could find no game; finally, a landrail flew out of an extensive oak thicket which was completely overgrown with wormwood. I fired: the bird turned over in the air and fell. Hearing the shot, Kasyan quickly covered his face with his hand and remained stock-still until I had reloaded my gun and picked up the shot bird. Just as I was preparing to move farther on, he came up to the place where the bird had fallen, bent down to the grass which had been sprinkled with several drops of blood, gave a shake of the head and looked at me in fright. Afterwards I heard him whispering: ‘A sin! ’Tis a sin, it is, a sin!

Each Beatle is to receive one of the first four albums in the run, with a sequential number printed on each cover. John wants the first of the first, calling out, “Bagsy No. 1!” “John got 000001 because he shouted the loudest,”12 Paul remembers. Ringo keeps his double album in a bank vault. And there it stays until 2015, when the drummer discovers that his copy, not John’s,13 is the original — number 000001. That Saturday, December 5, 2015, Julien’s Auctions, in Beverly Hills, sets a guide price of $40,000 to $60,000, which will go to Ringo’s charity, the Lotus Foundation. The bidding shatters records, bringing $790,000. Ringo has a message for the buyer: “Whoever gets it it will have my fingerprints

By the time I first encountered Jung, as a teenager in the early 1970s, this was certainly happening. Jung may not have been accepted by mainstream intellectuals—Freud was their psychologist of choice—but he had certainly been adopted by the counterculture. When I first read Memories, Dreams, Reflections—his “so-called autobiography”—Jung was part of a canon of “alternative” thinkers that included Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, D. T. Suzuki, R. D. Laing, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Madame Blavatsky, and J. R. R. Tolkien, to name a few. That his face appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, in a crowd of other unorthodox characters, was endorsement enough.

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

Both the date of Lennon’s murder and the careful selection of this particular victim are very important. Six weeks after Lennon’s death, Ronald Reagan would become President. Reagan and his soon-to-be appointed cabinet were prepared to build up the Pentagon war machine and increase the potential for war against the USSR. The first strike would fall on small countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. Lennon, alone, was the only man (even without his fellow Beatles) who had the ability to draw out one million anti-war protestors in any given city within 24 hours if he opposed those war policies. John Lennon was a spiritual force. He was a giant, like Gandhi, a man who wrote about peace and brotherly love. He taught an entire generation to think for themselves and challenge authority. Lennon and the Beatles’ songs shout out the inequalities of American life and the messages of change. Change is a threat to the longtime status quo that Reagan’s team exemplified. On my weekly radio broadcast of December 7, 1980, I stated, “The old assassination teams are coming back into power.” The very people responsible for covering up the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, Reverend Martin Luther King, for Watergate and Koreagate, and the kidnapping and murder of Howard Hughes, and for hundreds of other deaths, had only six weeks before they would again be removing or silencing those voices of opposition to their policies. Lennon was coming out once more. His album was cut. He was preparing to be part of the world, a world which was a worse place since the time he had withdrawn with his family. It was a sure bet Lennon would react and become a social activist again. That was the threat. Lennon realized that there was danger in coming back into public view. He took that dangerous chance and we all lost!

Why were hippies such a threat, from the President on down to local levels, objects for surveillance and disruptions? Many of the musicians had the potential to become political. There were racial overtones to the black-white sounds, harmony between Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix. Black music was the impetus that drove the Rolling Stones into composing and performing. The war in Vietnam we escalated. What if they stopped protesting the war in Southeast Asia and turned to expose domestic policies at home with the same energy? One of the Byrds stopped singing at Monterey Pop to question the official Warren Report conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a “lone assassin.” Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home album features a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the cover of Time. By 1966, LBJ had ordered writers and critics of his commission report on the JFK murder under surveillance. That research was hurting him. Rock concerts and Oswald. What next?

Several years ago, I was invited to deliver a lecture on art and literature to the Tinworth Historical Society. While searching in the attic for a treatise of mine written during my student days at the Sorbonne, I came upon a large, dust-and-cobweb-covered trunk bearing the initials W.W. which I had never before noticed. Inside were stacks of paper tied in neat bundles and a large quantity of fascinating memorabilia - faded flowers, old invitations, scraps of satin, velvet and lace, postage stamps, jewelry, postcards from foreign capitals. The variety was endless. As I examined several bundles of paper more carefully, I realized I was holding a collection of drawings by Amelia Woodmouse, a promising young artist and a member of the family who had lived in the house at the turn of the century. From the delightful portraits and paintings depicting the life around her, and the accumulation of personal mementos, it was obvious that the artist had begun her collection in order to compile a family album, which for some reason, sadly, she never completed.

Quickly she shredded the cabbage on the chopping block and tossed it along with the onion and tomatoes in a blue Pyrex bowl. Then she slid the lamb chops, encrusted with fresh rosemary, into the oven. While the lamb baked, she brushed her hair in the washroom and pinned it back again. Then she zipped on a silk floral dress she'd purchased in Bristol and retrieved her grandmother's rhinestone necklace, one of the few family heirlooms her mother packed for her, to clasp around her neck. At the foot of the bed was the antique trunk she'd brought from her childhood home in Balham more than a decade ago. Opening the trunk, she removed her wedding album along with her treasured copy of 'The Secret Garden' and the tubes of watercolors her father had sent with her and her brother. Her father hoped she would spend time painting on the coast, but Maggie hadn't inherited his talent or passion for art. Sometimes she wondered if Edmund would have become an artist. Carefully she took out her newest treasures- pieces of crystal she and Walter hd received as wedding presents, protected by pages and pages of her husband's newspaper. She unwrapped the crystal and two silver candlesticks, then set them on the white-cloaked dining table. She arranged the candlesticks alongside a small silver bowl filled with mint jelly and a basket with sliced whole-meal bread from the bakery. After placing white, tapered candles into the candlesticks, she lit them and stepped back to admire her handiwork. Satisfied, she blew them out. Once she heard Walter at the door, she'd quickly relight the candles. When the timer chimed, she removed the lamb chops and turned off the oven, placing the pan on her stovetop and covering it with foil. She'd learned a lot about housekeeping in the past decade, and now she was determined to learn how to be the best wife to Walter. And a doting mother to their children. If only she could avoid the whispers from her aunt's friends.

Ellis dutifully opens the top half of the bisected lid... and there's Jimmy Stoma. All things considered, he looks pretty darn spiffy. Better, in fact, than he did on some of his album covers. He's so lean and fit, you wouldn't guess he once outweighed Meat Loaf.

The barrels were on a platform and to keep the platform level someone had shoved a quarter-inch tape box underneath it. I pulled it out. Covered in old beer and sweat and condensation, it was one of the master tapes of Joy Division's debut album, Unknown Pleasures. It made me smile. It was an absolutely perfect metaphor for the Haçienda. Joy Division had held the whole fucking thing up.

Between screams, Mom managed to cover the snake with a bucket, which she duct-taped to the floor, so that when Dad came home from work eight hours later in a suit and tie he found, in the dark, an enraged reptile—coiled and claustrophobic—waiting to strike. He just managed to slide a copy of the REO Speedwagon album You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t

Everybody of my generation has the same memory. We were twelve or thirteen or we were twenty-one, for that matter, and we were going to be veterinarians or we were, like Ringo, going to own a hairdresser’s parlor. We walked into the record store and saw the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We thought together, 'Life can be other than it has been.

In walked a vision of elegance that might have just stepped off the pages of a Jane Austen novel. She didn't even bother trying not to stare. Peach Gallagher had arrived. And all her expectations exploded. Not only did he appear to understand the meaning of black tie, he walked into the reception room as if he had invented the look---a perfectly fitted tuxedo jacket and matching trousers, a shirt with studs and cuff links, an expertly tied bow tie, and black laced oxfords. His long hair managed to make the attire seem more formal. He was every crush she'd ever had from junior high onward. Every album cover she'd stared at, listening to torch songs until she cried. Every mooned-over heartthrob she could never have.

Pierre wakes up for good. As he's lying there yawning, he vaguely remembers a couple of false starts inspired by a ringing phone. He looks to his left. It's eleven. Next thing, he's stumbling down the hall toward his phone machine. 'Wait. Coffee,' he whispers in a shredded voice, veering back into the kitchen. He does what he has to, then plays back the messages, sips. Beep. 'It's Paul at Man Age. Appointment, twelve-thirty P.M., hour, Gramercy Park Hotel, room three-forty-four, name Terrence. Later.' Beep. 'Paul again. Appointment, two P.M., Washington Annex Hotel, room six-twenty, a play-it-by-ear, name Dennis, I think the same Dennis from last night. Check with us mid-afternoon. You're a popular dude. Later.' Beep. 'P., it's Marv, you there? . . . No? . . . Call me at work. Love ya.' On his way to the shower Pierre makes a stop at the stereo, plays side one of Here Comes the Warm Jets, an old Eno album. It's still on his turntable. It has this cool, deconstructive, self-conscious pop sound typical of the '70s Art Rock Pierre loves. He doesn't know why it's fantastic exactly. If he were articulate, and not just nosy, he'd write an essay about it. Instead he stomps around in the shower yelling the twisted lyrics. ' "By this time / I'd got to looking for a kind of / substitute . . ." ' It's weird to get lost in something so calculatedly chaotic. It's retro, pre-punk, bourgeois, meaningless, etc. ' ". . . I can't tell you quite how / except that it rhymes with / dissolute." ' Pierre covers his ears, beams, snorts wildly. Tying his sneakers, he flips the scuffed-up LP, plays his two favorite songs on the second side, which happen to sit third and fourth, and are aurally welded together by some distorted synthesizer-esque percussion, maybe ten, fifteen seconds in length. Pierre flops back in his chair, soaks the interlude up. It screeches, whines, bleeps like an orgasming robot.

Newton spent under quarantine at home in rural Lincolnshire, sheltering from the Plague that was ravaging his chosen home cities of London and Cambridge, has come to be thought of today as his annus mirabilis – his ‘year of wonders’. It’s when he formulated what would become calculus and the laws of motion, for example, and it’s when he worked out the nature of light – this is when he performed his famous prism experiment that demonstrated how white light could be split into all the colours of the rainbow, a discovery so monumental that it would later be memorialised on a Pink Floyd album cover.

story that will sketch out the first U2 album, Boy, including its cover and final track, “Shadows and Tall Trees,” which borrows its title from chapter 7 of the book:

Radar, his youngest brother, who appeared on the cover of two of U2’s early albums, Boy and War.

He diverted his gaze once more, looked down at the album cover in his hands. She made him feel awkward, vulnerable, scrambling his thoughts with the curve of her lips. His heart palpitated with the way she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, as though dancing to a beat only she could hear.

For the next few months I had no contact with John. He and Yoko were involved in a series of what were – to me anyway – increasingly odd stunts. First they issued their Two Virgins album, three weeks after our divorce. The furore about the cover picture, which featured them naked, overshadowed the music, which was a critical and commercial flop.

If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears was one of the first albums to make use of multiple covers, the most notable of which was a photo of the entire group wedged into a single bathtub. That cover was pulled due to the presence of a toilet.

Jaxton smiled and caught his hand, holding it tight in both of his. “Are you burnt out? Is it all too much?” he asked, getting straight to the root of the matter, in one go. “Yes,” he sighed, hating that it was true. “Then you'll stay home.” “You know I can't. It's impossible,” Roman complained about the unfairness of it all. He was due to return to the studio in two days times, to finalise the tracks he'd recorded yesterday. Then he had to sit down with Jalen next week, to pick out a new piece of his artwork for the next album cover. And two weeks after that, he had three interviews with three different music channels, to film. “Try telling that to Ben.” Jaxton winked at him, then ducked down to kiss him. ~ From the Heart

Fans buy the music, then the T-shirt. However, true fans visit the locations featured on album covers.

Rachel is a smart marketer. How do we know this? She’s promoting her album on her cover photo, and also -- in the description.

Coosawhatchie, South Carolina December 25, 1861 My Dear Daughter: Having distributed such poor Christmas gifts as I had to those around me, I have been looking for something for you. Trifles even are hard to get these war times, and you must not therefore expect more. I have sent you what I thought most useful in your separation from me and hope it will be of some service. Though stigmatized as “vile dross,” it has never been a drug with me. That you may never want for it, restrict your wants to your necessities. Yet how little will it purchase! But see how God provides for our pleasure in every way. To compensate for such “trash,” I send you some sweet violets that I gathered for you this morning while covered with dense white frost, whose crystals glittered in the bright sun like diamonds, and formed a brooch of rare beauty and sweetness which could not be fabricated by the expenditure of a world of money. May God guard and preserve you for me, my dear daughter! Among the calamities of war, the hardest to bear, perhaps, is the separation of families and friends. Yet all must be endured to accomplish our independence and maintain our self-government. In my absence from you I have thought of you very often and regretted I could do nothing for your comfort. Your old home, if not destroyed by our enemies, has been so desecrated that I cannot bear to think of it. I should have preferred it to have been wiped from the earth, its beautiful hill sunk, and its sacred trees buried rather than to have been degraded by the presence of those who revel in the ill they do for their own selfish purposes. I pray for a better spirit and that the hearts of our enemies may be changed. In your homeless condition I hope you make yourself contented and useful. Occupy yourself in aiding those more helpless than yourself. Think always of your father. R.E. Lee

I went back on a daily basis until I saw IT. The album cover, the greatest album cover of all time (tied with Highway 61 Revisited). All it said was Meet the Beatles. That was exactly what I wanted to do. Those four half-shadowed faces, rock ’n’ roll’s Mount Rushmore, and . . . THE HAIR . . . THE HAIR. What did it mean? It was a surprise, a shock. You couldn’t see them on the radio. It is almost impossible to explain today the effect of . . . THE HAIR.

Then came on a thaw for three or four days, with really warm weather, when everything melted; when the streams burst their bonds; when the earth became soft until it seemed to have no bottom and mud reigned supreme. It was everywhere; the roads were almost impassable and it was difficult to haul the rations to camp from the station. A detail of seventy-five was made from the Seventeenth to assist the brigade wagons back to camp. It was a cheerless task. The heavy army wagons came toiling laboriously along; many became stalled in the mud, the wheels sunken below the hubs, horses straining, the drivers cursing and lashing the poor animals, while a dozen men pushed at each wheel, all and everything covered with the liquid mire; such was December in Virginia. The Christmas of 1862 was cheerless indeed; the weather was frightful, and a heavy snowstorm covered everything a foot deep. Each soldier attempted to get a dinner in honor of the day, and those to whom boxes had been sent succeeded to a most respectable degree, but those unfortunates whose homes were outside the lines had nothing whatever delectable partaking of the nature of Christmas. Well! it would have puzzled [anyone] to furnish a holiday dinner out of a pound of fat pork, six crackers, and a quarter of a pound of dried apples. We all had apple dumplings that day, which with sorghum molasses were not to be despised. Some of the men became decidedly hilarious, and then again some did not; not because they had joined the temperance society nor because they were opposed to the use of intoxicating liquors, but because not a soul invited them to step up and partake. One mess in the Seventeenth did not get so much as a smell during the whole of the holidays; and a dry, dismal old time it proved. We read in the Richmond papers of the thousands and thousands of boxes that had been passed en route to the army, sent by the ladies of Richmond and other cities, but few found their way to us. The greater part of them were for the troops from the far South who were too distant from their homes to receive anything from their own families. The Virginians were supposed to have been cared for by their own relatives and friends; but some of them were not, as we all know.

The stranger had a queer, quaint, and remarkable aspect. A great fur cap of the richest and darkest sable covered his head. An immense greatcoat, trimmed with the same choice fur, reached to his knees. The fur collar of his coat was upturned to cover his face. Long top boots, liked and trimmed with fur, covered his feet. In his hand he carried a black valise. At first sight we surmised that he might be a messenger from the Emperor of Russia. But on the other hand, his black valise looked suspicious. At the thought, an imaginary odor of phosphorus filled the room. Was there an infernal machine in that black valise? So prompt are the operations of the mind that but a second or two had elapsed before we had framed, weighed, and dismissed them all, and were courteously asking the stranger to state his business. Santa Clause Visits the New York Herald Office (Christmas Eve 1864)

Holly Berries A Confederate Christmas Story by Refugitta There was, first, behind the clear crystal pane, a mammoth turkey, so fat that it must have submitted to be killed from sheer inability to eat and move, hung all around with sausage balls and embowered in crisp white celery with its feathered tops. Many a belated housekeeper or father of a family, passing by, cast loving glances at the monster bird, and turned away with their hands on depleted purses and arms full of brown paper parcels. Then there were straw baskets of eggs, white and shining with the delightful prospect of translation into future eggnogs; pale yellow butter stamped with ears of corn, bee hives, and statuesque cows with their tails in an attitude. But these were all substantials, and the principal attraction was the opposition window, where great pyramids of golden oranges, scaly brown pineapples, festoons of bananas, boxes of figs and raisins with their covers thrown temptingly aside, foreign sauces and pickles, cheeses, and gilded walnuts were arranged in picturesque regularity, jut, as it seemed, almost within reach of one’s olfactories and mouth, until a closer proximity realized the fact of that thick plate glass between. Inside it was just the same: there were barrels and boxes in a perfect wilderness; curious old foreign packages and chests, savory of rare teas and rarer jellies; cinnamon odors like gales from Araby meeting you at every turn; but yet everything, from the shining mahogany counter under the brilliant gaslight, up to the broad, clean, round face of the jolly grocer Pin, was so neat and orderly and inviting that you felt inclined to believe yourself requested to come in and take off things by the pocketful, without paying a solitary cent. I acknowledge that it was an unreasonable distribution of favors for Mr. Pin to own, all to himself, this abundance of good things. Now, in my opinion, little children ought to be the shop keepers when there are apples and oranges to be sold, and I know they will all agree with me, for I well remember my earliest ambition was that my papa would turn confectioner, and then I could eat my way right through the store. But our friend John Pin was an appreciative person, and not by any means forgetful of his benefits. All day long and throughout the short afternoon, his domain had been thronged with busy buyers, old and young, and himself and his assistant (a meager-looking young man of about the dimensions of a knitting needle) constantly employed in supplying their demands. From the Southern Illustrated News.

That evening was marked by yet another magic moment in Ozzy lore as local Chicago photographer, Paul Natkin, captured the iconic onstage image of Ozzy lifting Randy by his arm during a guitar solo. The photo later graced the cover of the Randy Rhoads Tribute album.

On Achtung Baby U2 took conventional tracks and radicalized them; on this material U2 is taking radical tracks and covering them with a veneer of convention.

The thing was a horse-sized, multi-breasted, pitch black goat monster that looked like it belonged on the cover of one of those 1980s heavy metal album covers, one where if you played it backward, the words would tell you to murder your grandma.

Later Julia told me that when Mimi met John and Yoko after their Two Virgins album was released she’d said to them, ‘Why didn’t you get somebody attractive on the cover if you’ve got to have somebody naked?’ As forthright as ever.

Rick joined proceedings quite late in the day and was quarantined from any costs or legal repercussions from Roger. This was mainly a practical matter. There was some confusion over Rick’s position within the band. When David and I first wanted to talk to Rick we discovered that buried in his leaving agreement from 1981 was a clause that prevented him rejoining the group. Consequently we had to be careful about what constituted being a member of the band; only David and I appeared on the cover of the album.

His album that year was Sign O’ the Times. I took the fact that the gang in the title track was named the Disciples as a personal tribute. The tour behind that record was the best Rock show I’ve ever seen. I went three times, and it blew my mind every time. The production was the highest evolution of the live, physical part of our Artform I have ever seen. It was Prince’s vision, but his production designer, LeRoy Bennett, deserves much of the credit for pulling it off. It was Rock, it was Theater, it was Soul, it was Cinema, it was Jazz, it was Broadway. The stage metamorphized into different scenes and configurations right before your eyes, transforming itself into whatever emotional setting was appropriate for each song. On top of that, the music never stopped, for three solid hours. Prince wrote various pieces, or covered Jazz, as interstitial transitions for those moments when the stage was shifting or the musicians were changing clothes. At one point, he even had a craps game break out, which made me laugh—it brought me back to Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom and our onstage Monopoly games. They captured it pretty well on film, but it can’t compare. When you’re watching a movie, your mind is used to scene changes, different sets and lighting. Live, it’s something else. That kind of legerdemain before your eyes is mind-boggling.

The album was filled out with a faithful, ripping cover of “I Got Loaded,” a slice of swampy R&B celebrating the joys of alcoholism originally cut by Little Bob & the Lollipops on the La Louisianne label in 1965;

Bob Bigelow has also revealed that the DIA scientist told him that what shocked him at the ranch was an incident where a three-dimensional object suddenly materialised in front of him, which looked like the triangular metallic ‘bent bell’ cover art on the front of the Mike Oldfield album Tubular Bells. ‘That’s the closest thing I can come to as to what the structure of this looked like,’ Bigelow says he was told.

I believe it was the Beatles and other singer-songwriters of the sixties who realized that recording your own songs was far more lucrative than doing record after record covering other people’s songs, as had often been the norm in pop music. This incentivized songwriting, and it was partly due to this insight that there was suddenly an explosion of creativity and innovation in pop music in the sixties. But it also made a few too many musicians feel more or less obliged to consider themselves songwriters. I’m as guilty as many others in feeling that I, or my bandmates, “had” to write every last song on a record, even though covering an underappreciated gem might have been a better choice than recording one of our not-so-stellar writing efforts. However, even not-so-good songs generate income from album sales, as long as there are a couple of hits on there that motivate folks to buy the whole album. The “filler” goes along for the ride and still generates money for the artists and publishers.

I remember being in this local pub,” chuckles Deek. “It was called the Tap, and all the punks used to hang out there, and bands would play sometimes too. Wattie made a rare appearance which sticks in my mind as this bloke went up to him and said, ‘Wattie, don’t you think your new album is a bit too metal more than punk?’ Wattie headbutted the poor guy in the face, leaving him staggering backwards, covered in blood, and asked, ‘Is that punk enough for you then?

Five years previously, Janice had embroidered the album cover of Madman Across the Water and was the main inspiration for the seamstress for the band in “Tiny Dancer,” a song inhabited by fragments of a handful of LA females: a Whisky a Go Go waitress, a girl who worked in a Beverly Hills shoe store, and a hitchhiker in cutoffs on Pacific Coast Highway.

The album is still a treasured possession and a source of pride that “not only was I to cover [a] Velvets’ song before anyone else in the world, I actually did it before the album came out. Now that’s the essence of mod.” In forthcoming years, David Bowie would become the world’s best-known champion of the Velvets, but in 1967, his attempts to assimilate its narco-deadpan thuggery resulted in some of his most ludicrous music.

There were a couple of Bowie twins from Hatfield in Hertfordshire. They were both tall and razor thin, and looked like a slightly more exaggerated version of David Bowie on the cover of Young Americans. Their hair was even more exaggerated: deep red with bleached streaks through the front, but also with pink highlights cascading over their eyes, and slicked back at the sides. Pencil-thin dark plucked eyebrows, very pale complexions, with black mascara. They always wore the shiniest black or red plastic dungarees. Outside the club they would wear these slightly furry leopard-skin bomber jackets, which I thought looked great. They had a mad, slurry way of talking, and kind of shouted and talked at the same time. They would jump from one subject to another in mid-sentence. They were very unusual people. Every second line was ‘Never mind the bollocks.’ They would say that three hundred times a night. Everything was ‘Never mind the bollocks.’ I know for a fact that the Sex Pistols got the name for their album from the twins. They both earned a living selling hot dogs. One worked on Charing Cross Road, the other down by Trafalgar Square. They were mad. If you stopped to talk to them, they would always be arguing with someone. Man or woman, they always had the same line: ‘Now listen, sweetheart: never mind the bollocks.

The clothes, the facial hair, the poses—the whole vibe made it feel like a Doobie Brothers album cover.

The events of 9/11 were predicted in the ‘Back to the Future’ movies, and, in dozens of other, movies, magazines, and album covers…including Busta Rhymes’ 1997 album, titled, ‘When Disaster Strikes.’ When Disaster Strikes, was released a mere four years before the events of 9/11 unfolded. The art on the DVD features a sinister-looking

Now, this meeting would have taken place in mid-to-late 2004, over two years after we started recording, and a lot happened between that summit and the album coming out. One of them was that terrible tsunami in Indonesia on Boxing Day. Because of that, the record company got cold feet on Barney’s cover image, fearing a possible media backlash, and Alan Parkes from Warners had to go to Pete’s studio, pleading with him to do another sleeve. Pete was insistent. ‘No, I don’t want to do one. I don’t want to do it,’ but Alan was just as persistent, until at last Pete got fed up and wrote ‘NO’ on a piece of paper, gave it to Alan and said, ‘There’s my answer,’ and Alan went, ‘That’ll do,’ and took it. I like it. I think it’s one of his best sleeves.

Il M° Vitaliano Gallo il 5 Agosto 21,15 dirigerà la Banda Cittadina Pasquale Anfossi in piazza T. Chierotti ad Arma Taggia. Programma: K. J. Alford: Colonel Bogey D. Shostakovitch: The Second Waltz A. Mizzi: The King G. Bizet: Carmen P. Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana Intermezzo L. Bernstein: West Side Story M. Dalprà: El Cocorito Paso Doble G. Gershwin: Summertime E. John: The Lions King J. Fucik: Florentiner Marsch Note di sala: “E tanta gente dai portoni cantando sbucò e tanta gente in ogni vicolo si riversò e per la strada quella povera gente marcia felice dietro la sua banda Se c'era uomo che piangeva sorrise perché sembrava proprio che la banda suonasse per lui in ogni cuore la speranza spuntò quando la banda passò cantando cose d'amor La banda suona per noi La banda suona per voi” Chico Buarque de Hollanda “cantando coisas de amor” La canzone vinse il Festival de Música Popular Brasileira del 1966. In Italia fu portata al successo l’anno seguente da Mina nella cover dallo stesso titolo firmata da ‎Antonio Amurri, poi inclusa nell’album “Sabato sera - Studio Uno '67”.‎ Prossimo appuntamento 10 Agosto Molini di Triora

Even George Clinton sounded befuddled by “Mind Games” when he covered it on the very odd 1995 tribute album Working Class Hero, where he joined the likes of Blues Traveler and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to raise money for the cause of spaying cats and dogs. (You’d think the sound of Toad the Wet Sprocket doing “Instant Karma” would be enough to neuter any animal.)

Cordy grins as all eyes turn to her. “The original cover art of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs had a dog whose...manliness,” Cordy winks, “was clearly visible. A few hundred copies of the cover were run before the record label noticed and told them to airbrush the dog’s nuts. Those albums were supposed to be destroyed, but some were smuggled out. The last time one came on the market a few years ago, it sold for five grand. But since Bowie’s death, they’re supposed to be worth even more.” “And you have one?” I ask. “I think so. Somewhere in there.

The power of art and music to influence the mind is well known to the forces of the “Other Side.” One need just look at the effect that certain types of modern music have had on the behavior of more than one generation of youths in western society. Then the album covers for music began to graphically display disturbing images of Satanism. What was once FELT and KNOWN to be wrong, slowly became to be accepted and embraced as being right. These influences are far from benign. This process we today call “brainwashing.” It is used throughout the western world, specifically through its usage of the entertainment industry.

It has occurred to me that when one is raised in the absence of culture – without access to galleries and museums – one has to fill the void. I turned to books, album covers, magazines, slides and prints – anything visually stimulating that I could lay my hands on.

Moms were very concerned about lightning at this point in history—I don’t know if it was part of the satanic panic or what. The way they talked about it, you’d think whenever it stormed, the sky turned into black leather and Satan started ripping open his shirt, and if the lightning touched you, it was with the devil’s finger on a genital you didn’t know you had. Lightning was sunlight played backwards, and moms hated it. The rule was that whenever the lifeguard heard even a rumor of thunder, we all had to get out of the pool for fifteen minutes so we wouldn’t be electrified. I considered this to be a great pity, as well as a blatant attempt to hamstring my genius. Dads didn’t care about lightning, because lightning was on the cover of all their favorite albums. Sometimes it was painted on their trucks as well. You could tell that if their kids were killed by lightning, they would be sad, but they would also feel superior about it for the rest of their lives, because it was without question the most hard-ass way for a child to die. “My son Rondy . . .” they would say, their voices trailing, “taken from us by pure electricity in the year Nineteen Hundred and Ninety . . .

And you chose Machiavelli?” He chuckles, considering me from beneath the long curl of his lashes. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.” “You know much about him?” He pulls his T-shirt up from the hem, and my heart pops an artery or something because it shouldn’t be working this hard while at rest. I swallow hard at the layer of muscle wrapped around his ribs. One pectoral muscle peeks from under the shirt, tipped with the dark disc of his nipple. My mouth literally waters, and I can’t think beyond pulling it between my lips and suckling him. Hard. “Do you see it?” he asks. “Huh?” I reluctantly drag my eyes from the ladder of velvet- covered muscle and sinew to the expectant look on his face. “See what?” “The tattoo.” He runs a finger over the ink scrawled across his ribs. Makavelli. “I hate to break it to you,” I say with a smirk. “But someone stuck you with a permanent typo.” He laughs, dropping the shirt, which is really a shame because I was just learning to breathe with all that masculine beauty on display. “Bristol, stop playing. You know it’s on purpose, right?” “Oh, sure, it is, Grip.” I roll my eyes. “Nice try.” “Are you serious?” He looks at me like I’m from outer space. “You know that’s how Tupac referred to himself on his posthumous album, right? That he misspelled it on purpose?” I clear my throat and scratch at an imaginary itch on the back of my neck. “Um … yes?” His warm laughter at my expense washes over me, and it’s worth being the butt of the joke, because I get to see his face animated. He’s even more handsome when he laughs. “You’re funny.” He laughs again, more softly this time. “I didn’t expect that.

Matt’s Creation Room was a wide, colorful space dedicated to music. The walls were splashed with bright orange paint, green sofas, and cushions, which contrasted with the serious, dark upright Yamaha piano in the center of the room. There were other instruments in the room: several guitars, a violin, several drums, a bass guitar. The walls were like a private Hall of Fame covered with posters and even relics of famous singers. One wall was covered with pictures of Matt and his three platinum albums Matt, Superstar, and Moving On. The room was bathed in light entering through the wide windows. It was Matt’s Creation Room and he had obviously decorated the room according to his own tastes. After finishing her scales while waiting for Matt, she posted herself next to the windows to practice her audition song for La Cenerentola that Saturday evening. It was a beautiful, sorrowful song that Cinderella sang in the first scene about a king who looked for true love not in splendor and beauty, but in innocence and goodness.

Puri found the walls bare, his secretary having put away all his accolades, including his signed and personalized Kenny G album cover

My attention was temporarily thrown off course, because of the possibly decent band name. Hot Underwear: Jesus the Thong Burglar on guitar and vox, Hellerman Schmellerman on bass and vox, “Phil Rudd” on drums, first album Wet and Loaded. The album cover possibilities alone would … But I digress.