I especially miss the novelty LP album covers (like my original Led Zeppelin III cover with the picture wheel in it) and the double albums with suitable-for-hanging-in-your-dorm-room trippy artwork inside. It's a real shame: the death of the LP and the small size of CD and tape covers seem to have killed most of that whole art-concept aspect of albums.
I'm guessing cost cutting would have killed them anyway... I remember the Alice Cooper LP where he was released from the sanitarium, and the cover had all sorts of folding and sliding panels in all sorts of places, so that it was effectively a cardboard model of the sanitarium, with views in through the windows to the characters mentioned in the songs, and opening doors that let him out etc.
Must have cost a fortune to produce compared to a simple card sleeve. I had a Led Zeppelin album which had about 4 covers between you and the vinyl, and my personal favourite - Led Zeppelin's In Through The Out Door - the cover was a bland sepia look, but if you painted it with a wet paintbrush, it came out in vivid colours...wierd but fun.
Cheers Russell C.
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