Mabuse

I recently discovered a vinyl re-release of Talking Heads' album Fear of Music. I never knew the original cover had an embossed texture that looks like diamond plate steel. The CD I've had for years just has an entirely black cover.

Probably most famously The Beatle's White Album had the "The Beatles" embossed in white and for years the CD simply changed the cover to black text saying "The Beatles".

So I think I've made it clear. What are some other covers that got butchered, misrepresented, or contained something that couldn't be done in the reduced size of CD?

statcat

only one I could think of at the moment, small faces - odgen's nut gone flake

Eddie W

This one is also pretty famous, but The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers had a working zipper that you could unzip & see underpants & legs inside. But less well known was the fact that it was almost to scale, so you could hold it in front of you for joke pictures & it looked like you had a huge wang that barely fit in your pants.

Most of Kiss's late 70's albums had goodies enclosed that never got replicated in anything else. I remember Love Gun used to have a cardboard gun & you had to paste it together so that a piece of paper popped out that said BANG!

Aerosmith's Rocks was much like that Talking Heads cover, but it was the texture of a stucco wall or something. And I recall The Eagle's Greatest Hit's had the logo & skull embossed so it was raised a bit.

Nick Danger

Crosby Stills Nash and Young Deja Vu was brown flocked material.
Led Zeppelin 3 and Soft Machine 1 had moving parts.

Led Zeppelin did a lot of complicated album covers. In Through the Out Door had a record sleeve that looked like black and white art, but colored dyes were in the printing so if you got it wet you could color the art. It was an unpublicized Easter egg. Physical Graffiti had diecut windows, and the record sleeves had pictures of the windows, so you had your choice of what showed through the open window. I arranged them so the naked chick was visible on both sides.

The Doors L.A. Woman had a cellophane window with a picture of the band printed on it, and the record sleeve was yellow. On the other side of the record sleeve was Jesus (or Jim Morrison) crucified on a telephone pole.


And then, a lot of complicated images just don't work at 1/9 size. Sargent Pepper comes to mind. I spent a lot of time as kid trying to figure out who all those people were. Now they're too tiny to see clearly. Talking Heads More Songs about Buildings and Food is composed of hundreds of Polaroid pictures taken of the members of the band from very close up. You could see how the edges didn't quite line up. Now it's just a grid.

rbrown498

Madonna's Like a Prayer LP had patchouli mixed in with the glue that held the jacket together, so it gave off a strong smell even after years of sitting on the shelf. The CD doesn't have an odor.

Hiro11

The original release of Bob Marley's "Catch a Fire" LP had a cover that looked like and opened like a flip-top Zippo. The 1974 release and later CD release both have a comparatively weak picture of Bob smoking a spliff.

The original New Order single "Blue Monday" had one of the most iconic sleeves in history: a beautifully detailed and die cut sleeve designed to look like a floppy disk. Famously (and perhaps apocryphally) , the cost of producing the sleeve meant that New Order actually lost money on the single's sales, despite it being the best selling 12 inch single of all time (a record it still holds). Perhaps not surprisingly, the CD single rerelease in 1995 was a simple piece of blocky art.

I do have a few CDs that came in unique cases, notably the first release of the Pet Shop Boys "Very" which is a very cool embossed non-transparent orange box (future releases simply had a picture of the box on the cover) and PiL's "Metal Box", which came housed in a slowly rusting round metal box designed to look like a cheap 16MM film canister (in which you might find a really bad 70s porn). It helps that both of those albums are awesome as well.

Nick Danger

Mrs Danger reminded me of another cover by Andy Warhol, the peel-able banana on the Velvet Underground and Nico.

Josh-da-man

Led Zeppelin III had a die cut cover with a wheel that you turned to make different pictures appear in the die-cut holes. It could amuse a stoned hippie for hours.

AC/DC's Back in Black and Flick of the Switch had embossed covers.

Alice Cooper's School's Out folded out into a school desk and came with a pair of panties around the record.

JeremyM

They have done their best to recreate the Zeppelin covers on the recent reissues, with the windows, wheels, etc.. Pretty cool.

rw2516

In most cases the covers were changed long before cds came about. Usually only the early pressings had the gimmick. The Sticky Fingers zipper was gone after a few years. Stencil/die-cuts, etc. were usually first pressings. Even gatefolds would disappear after time. Not that often, but sometimes the inner sleeve would be changed to plain white after awhile.
Lots of albums had textured covers. Neil Young Harvest was one.

Alice Cooper-Killer. Cover folded out into calendar
Alice Cooper-Billion Dolllar Babies- cover was wallet textured like leather. Came with a billion dollar bill and perforated 5x7 wallet photos of band
Alice Cooper-School's Out- school desk that opened and came with pair of girl's panties
Alice Cooper-Muscle of Love-came in plain brown shipping carton like Columbia House used to ship LPs
LZ-In Through the Out Door- There were 7 different covers of the first pressing. There are 7 people in the bar and each variation was through the eyes of a different person in the bar. Came wrapped in plain brown paper with the letter A-G stamped on it to differentiate the different covers.
Nazareth-Rampant-cover art is a whisky bottle label. Early UK pressing had a paper seal, like that on liquor bottle tops, over the opening. US and later pressing just had the seal printed on front/back. No seal to actually break.
Captain Beyond-first album had lenticular cover. Later just printed.
Jethro Tull-Thick As A Brick. Cover folded out into several page newspaper.
Early pressings of some albums were colored vinyl.
Grank Funk-An American Band-gold vinyl
J. Geils-Bloodshot-red vinyl
Aerosmith-Live Bootleg- cover was cheap cardboard like real bootleg.

Nick Danger

My CD of Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick has a large booklet that unfolds into a newspaper. It's an early CD. I imagine that the booklet is no longer included.

cungar

Some albums in the 70s were like fan club packages containing gatefold covers, posters, booklets, stickers etc. One of the biggest selling was Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy which was known for its artwork and fan booklet, poster and lyric booklet (as well as being the first album ever to go to #1 the first week which is pretty much weekly these days). I remember they released a miniature version with mini poster and booklets.

TheKing

There's also albums that just completely changed their covers.

For instance, KISS with Creatures Of The Night.

Original:

First CD Release in 1985:

The CD release was also remixed and the track listing was altered. The remastered CD released in 1997 restored the original mix and cover.

Why So Blu?

Yeah, that's the first one that came to mind when I clicked into this thread. The Creatures of the Night edition. Back when I discovered that album I was all like Bruce wasn't even in the band yet!


The new LP remasters of all their catalog feature the original inserts but they're pricey. I know that the Love Gun LP comes with that cardboard Love Gun now.

rw2516

Grand Funk-E Pluribus Funk. Artwork face of a coin. Cover was round.
Uriah Heep-Look At Yourself- mirror on cover was some kind of silver reflective material.
Rod Stewart-Every Picture Tells A Story-cover folded out into poster that was perforated and could be removed.
Traffic-Shootout at Fantasy Factory. For whatever reason cover had no corners. Stop sign shaped.
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road- cover was a trifold that had all the lyrics
Early pressings of LZ III had a line from Alistair Crowley etched in the runoff, "So mete it be"

KaBluie

Jason

A lot of the stuff people are listing really couldn't be replicated well in the CD format, and the impact would have been lost by having it in the CD case.

The long box could have offset that, but they never really did much if anything with them.

hdnmickey

Almost all these examples have changed over the years as special edition releases that mirror the original album design have been released.

Some of my personal favorites were Styx albums. Cornerstone where the album sleeve was the object being found on the cover. And the before and after of the Paradise Theater, and the holographic logo on the album itself. Far as I know, there hasn't been any re-releases of Styx albums on CD. Given how many bands have had their entire catalogs re-released over the last decade or so, multiple times in some cases, that always seemed odd to me.

rw2516

Blue Oyster Cult-Tyranny and Mutation has a song called "The Red & The Black". Side 1: The Black, had a black Columbia label. Side 2: The Red, had traditional red Columbia label.
The latest cd remasters in the big box set restore the original label art. For Tyranny and Mutation the label is half red/half black.

arminius

The Stones-Through the Past Darkly was octagon shaped. Their Satanic Majesties Request had a 3D lenticular cover. Sticky Fingers had a working zipper. Exile on Main Street came with a bunch of postcards. Some Girls had pictures of celebrities that were removed.

The Who-Live at Leeds came with a bunch of stuff like pictures, song fragments, receipts, letters and a poster.

davidh777

I always liked this one:



But this one never made sense to me--it didn't even seem like the right era:

CRM114

The Mothers of Invention album "We're Only In it For The Money" finally restored what Frank Zappa wanted as the cover (a spoof of Sgt Peppers) but the record company made him put it on the inside of the gatefold and moved the inside spoof (the band members on a yellow background) to the front cover of the LP.

CD Cover:



LP Cover:



So, in this case, the CD cover was the superior one.

CRM114

It's not. Miles wore suits and ties in the 50's. On the other one, he's clearly balding a bit and wearing a hip, 60's scarf thing. Horrible.

kenbuzz

Spinal Tap's =Smell The Glove=

Album:


CD:

Paff

It's less black now