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June 21, 1948: Columbia’s Microgroove LP Makes Albums Sound GoodColumbia Records introduced the first successful microgroove long-playing phonographs way back in June 1948. But it took decades before album cover artwork came into its own.

To celebrate the LP's birthday, Wired.com's staff compiled the following list of stellar albums featuring mind-bending graphics and kick-ass inserts. Got your own favorites? School us on unforgettable cover art in the comments section.

The Beatles: Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Abbey Road——————————————————————————

As with pretty much everything the band did, The Beatles set a trend, this time for LP covers, with the release of 1966's Revolver. Employing the illustrations of their pal Klaus Voorman and the photography of Robert Whitaker, Revolver ushered in the psychedelic era with force. Its name was even agreed upon while all four members worked on a psychedelic painting.

But The Beatles' influential 1967 record Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band blew minds wide open. The Grammy-winning cover was created by art champion and director Robert Fraser, and married the work of designers Peter Blake and Jann Haworth with more than 70 artists, writers, thinkers and figures influential to The Beatles. The Beatles themselves appeared alongside simulations of themselves, a nod to the death of Hard Day's Night–fueled Beatlemania. The cover, which included cutouts for mustaches and badges, eventually warranted its own legend for disciples who just love to Geek The Beatles. The whole epochal art project proved about 100 times more expensive than any cover made before. Its influence has been immeasurable.

By the time The Beatles got to their last proper album, 1969's Abbey Road, they stripped themselves entirely of simulations and presented four friends parting at the road responsible for pop music's most memorable sonics. And even that self-referential maneuver started a trend: Bands, including the naked Red Hot Chili Peppers, similarly walked across roads in ironic homage. Baby, that's art.

The Rolling Stones: Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St., Some Girls———————————————————————–

Speaking of simulations, The Rolling Stones spent much of the '60s copying their friends The Beatles. But once the Fab Four fragmented in 1970, the Stones kicked into overdrive, especially in the cover-art department.

Masterful 1971 rocker Sticky Fingers featured a crotch-shot cover – conceived by Andy Warhol – that boasted a real zipper. The Stones' 1972 double album Exile on Main St. employed a gatefold cover and a series of 12 perforated postcards with inserted images from photographer Norman Seeff. The band's last great release, 1978's Some Girls, showed off the Stones in drag in a heavily detailed die-cut package with varying color sleeves. It even scored copyfights from Lucille Ball, Farrah Fawcett, Liza Minelli and more starlets.

Pink Floyd: A Saucerful of Secrets, Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon ... OK, Everything From Hipgnosis ———————————————————————————————————-

Shortly after The Beatles blew out LP cover art on Sgt. Pepper, Pink Floyd commissioned art pals Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, later known as design gods Hipgnosis (a name they took from graffiti), to draft up the dizzying graphics for 1968 effort A Saucerful of Secrets. After that illustrious pairing, Pink Floyd and Hipgnosis collaborated together on every major album the band made, including Dark Side of the Moon, Wired's choice for best concept album ever.

Thorgerson and Powell summarily became the best-known cover artists of all time. As Hipgnosis or alone, they eventually created brain-teasing graphics for old-school heavyweights like Led Zeppelin, The Who and Genesis, and new-school noisemakers like The Mars Volta and Muse. Visualize that.

The Moody Blues: Days of Future Passed, and Well, Everything Else They Did —————————————————————————-

In late 1967, The Moody Blues abandoned their early R&B roots and released the successful Days of Future Passed, a head-tripping concept album about the life cycle that seamlessly married psychedelic pop and classical music. Its intertwining cover painting from David Anstey, which could be viewed with thematic coherence from all angles, set the arty standard for all of The Moody Blues' subsequent albums. Pick any record from the band's career, and you'll find some complicated art demanding analysis.

The Velvet Underground and Nico: The Velvet Underground and Nico——————————————————————

Not all album art from the '60s was a visually and intertextually complex exercise. Andy Warhol's cover for the 1967 classic The Velvet Underground and Nico shows nothing but a banal yellow banana. It was a clever example of his merge of art and marketing – what are album covers, anyway, but kick-ass marketing for music? Warhol skewed the art critique strange by printing instructions for readers to peel the banana, which then gave way to a flesh-colored one. What a dirty boy.

That trick demanded special machines to build the cover, which contributed to the album's delayed release. At first, the LP art showed Warhol's signature but didn't feature the band's name at all. The group's name was added on later pressings, and early copies became extremely rare collectors' items. What a dirty genius.

Led Zeppelin: I, II, III, IV, Physical Graffiti and So On —————————————————————–

Right from the start, Led Zeppelin's album art was godlike. The band's self-titled 1969 debut bore a cover image of the flaming Hindenburg airship. The untitled fourth Led Zep album burst with iconic city-country collages and mystic runes. Physical Graffiti intrigued with art-conscious photo-sleeves of a New York tenement. Led Zeppelin III's gatefold sleeve even featured a rotating volvelle of images.

Zeppelin eventually hooked up with Hipgnosis' Aubrey Powell, whose cover for Houses of the Holy was a nod to Arthur C. Clarke's sci-fi classic Childhood's End. Storm Thorgerson's cover for the underrated Presence was a nearly deliberate homage to Clarke and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Zeppelin's epic full-lengths remain testaments to ferocious riffage and cerebral graphics.

The Who: The Who Sell Out, Tommy, Quadrophenia—————————————————-

Like Pink Floyd, The Who mastered the merge of concept albums and art, creating timeless work buttressed by seeking brains and ferocious musicianship. The quartet's 1967 effort The Who Sell Out was a stab at commercialism emblazoned with fake ads for deodorant and beans. The resilient 1969 double-album rock opera Tommy unfolded into a triptych with spanning graphics that recalled the arty math of M.C. Escher.

Incendiary 1973 concept album Quadrophenia psychoanalyzed The Who using field recordings, unhinged rock and butterfly packaging that, like Tommy before it, contained an image-studded minibook that explained the story and showed off the lyrics. Throw in the controversial piss party of Who's Next as a chaser, and you've got a band with album imagery that remains as powerful as its music.

Small Faces: Ogden's Nut Gone Flake————————————-

This 1968 effort from British standout Small Faces topped the British charts with heavy rock and soul tracks anchored in a conceptual quest for a missing half of the moon. The release's novel early packaging – which replicated a tobacco tin and was rounded out by an enclosed poster created by assembling five paper circles – thoroughly hooked the public.

Like other work from the '60s, Small Faces' Ogden's Nut Gone Flake combined modern art and music in ways that revolutionized not just LP graphics and packaging, but also the industry. By the time the '70s arrived, mind-wiping cover art had become practically mandatory.

Miles Davis: Bitches Brew—————————

Called the Picasso of jazz by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis had already sequenced the genes for cool and modal jazz by the time he got to 1970 effort Bitches Brew, which smashed jazz through an electronic rock grinder. Celebrating its 40th birthday this year, Bitches Brew continues to be one of the most celebrated musical efforts in history of any genre, at least partially because of its stunning gatefold cover.

Created by acclaimed artist Mati Klarwein, who studied with Salvador Dali and Ernst Fuchs, Bitches Brew's spacious, surreal cover art folded out into a stunning mural. Klarwein also designed covers for Santana, Last Poets, Brian Eno and more. He died in 2002.

Yes: Fragile, Close to the Edge and Anything by Roger Dean ————————————————————–

English artist and designer Roger Dean is synonymous with fantastically swirling dreamscapes. Like most other icons on this list, he made art in the late '60s, but blew up like an acid trip in the '70s.

Dean worked on almost all albums by prog-rock legend Yes, designing instantly recognizable, shimmering tableaux that seemingly merged Dali and Dr. Seuss. In the end, Dean's fluid sci-fi visuals proved inextricable from prog's infamous indulgence, and he has since worked chiefly on Yes-related projects.

But he redesigned the Tetris logo. So, there.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Brain Salad Surgery and Everything from H.R. Giger —————————————————————————-

H.R. Giger's singular, sexualized cyborgs reached an apotheosis in Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi movie Alien. But the Swiss artist has also lent his distinctively destabilizing art to bands like Danzig, Celtic Frost, Deborah Harry and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, whose 1973 prog-rock classic Brain Salad Surgery helped make Giger an international art star. Speaking of Giger, music and sexual perversity ...

The Dead Kennedys' Frankenchrist, The Buzzcocks' Orgasm Addict, The Minutemen, Minor Threat and Other Punk Eye-Poppers —————————————————————————————————————————-

What could be more punk than H.R. Giger, The Dead Kennedys and graphically rendered, but ultimately dehumanized, sexual intercourse? That's right, nothing. Which is why Kennedys front man Jello Biafra wanted Giger's colloquially named "Penis Landscape" as the cover of his band's 1985 burner, Frankenchrist.

"I was totally blown away the minute I saw it," Biafra told Wired.com in an interview timed to celebrate Giger's 70th birthday. "I thought: 'Wow! That is the Reagan era on parade. Right there! That shows how Americans treat each other now.' He captured it in a nutshell."

But Giger's phallic satire was too punk for Biafra's bandmates, and the artwork was summarily relegated to a poster inside the sleeve. Instead, Frankenchrist's cover art depicted a hilariously banal Shriners parade.

Yet other punks would carry the torch for rough, tough cover art. The Minutemen, Sonic Youth and other smart upstarts employed the deranged comic art of Raymond Pettibon to help communicate their musical mayhem. The DIY collage art for The Buzzcocks' single "Orgasm Addict" was a magazine cut-up just begging for a copyfight.

Ironically enough, punks ended up leveling the copyfight against shoe titan Nike, which blatantly lifted Minor Threat's self-titled LP cover for an obviously referential ad campaign designed to sell its crappy sneaker to a skateboarding demographic that grew up on the genre. It was Nike's most recent epic fail, and proof of good punk's resilient DIY aesthetic. Simple, powerful cover art can often be as influential as dizzying visuals crafted by painters trained by Dali.

Motorhead's No Remorse, Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast, Tool's Lateralus and Other Metal Phantasmagoria —————————————————————————————————————-

Heavy metal has been particularly ambitious when it comes to cover art, churning out LPs emblazoned with nightmarish hellscapes, unforgettable characters and conceptual coolness. Motorhead's No Remorse came with a faux leather sleeve, which is the only faux thing the band has probably ever done. Iron Maiden built a career, and a massive stage show, on the back of a monstrous mascot named Eddie the Head, created by artist Derek Riggs.

Even Wired's battle-hardened censors might bang their heads at the thought of including any of the variously garish, ultraviolent LP covers from bands like Cannibal Corpse. Which, of course, is exactly what bands like Cannibal Corpse want. But other metalheads aimed straight for the brain – literally, in the case of Tool's stellar 2001 release Lateralus. Featuring a translucent insert that opened to reveal different layers of the human body, with the word "God" imposed over the brain, Tool carried the torch for cerebral, complex metal into the new millennium. We're still waiting for that torch to get passed.

Pixies: Come On Pilgrim, Surfer Rosa, Doolittle —————————————————

Just as with The Velvet Underground, more bands (including Nirvana and Radiohead) were probably influenced by the Pixies than actually heard or saw the group during its ferociously productive heyday in the late '80s and early '90s. Those of us who did follow the Pixies around the country in those days were captivated by the brutal but beautiful music and art.

That graphically sonic merge was most capably illustrated on the Pixies' EP Come On Pilgrim, full-length debut Surfer Rosa and crossover classic Doolittle, which featured deep and arty design and photography from Vaughan Oliver and Simon Larbalestier.

Like other stunning artwork produced for albums from the influential 4AD label, the imagery of the Pixies' first three albums propelled alternative rock into the mainstream, where less talented bands like Nirvana built upon the group's foundational artistry to achieve stratospheric fame. So-called alt-rock has sucked ever since.

Hip-Hop: Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions, GZA's Liquid Swords, DJ Shadow's Private Press and More ——————————————————————————————————————–

A reminder: Hip-hop is a vinyl-based culture, and it's also geeked on graphics. Public Enemy's in-your-face 1988 classic It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back grew out of Chuck D's fiery oratory and design skills, culminating in an instantly familiar artistic and sonic branding. No other hip-hop band has so successfully merged cover art and cacophonous protest.

Wu-Tang genius GZA parleyed the Clan's deep love for comics and street knowledge into the critically acclaimed 1995 release Liquid Swords, riding Marvel and DC Comics artist Denys Cowan's vivid cover art into the record books. Meanwhile, DJ Shadow's seriously underrated 2002 effort, The Private Press, was a love letter to vinyl from a crate-digging obsessive who specializes in atmospheric, synesthetic recombinations of familiar and discarded sonics. Its defiant cover art of densely interwoven designs and surreal art flipped a middle finger at those who would bypass the LP for the compact disc.

DJ Shadow and other disciples of the LP can take solace in the fact that CD sales continue to tank while vinyl is on the rise. In fact, you can thank hip-hop and similarly inclined vinyl lovers for keeping the format, and its arresting visuals, alive for generations to come.

Blowback: What's Your Favorite Album Art? —————————————–

Did we skip your favorite arty album? Reveal your picks for most stunning LP art in the comment section below.

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