RiffRaf

Banned Album Covers: Black Crowes' "Amorica"

              

If we've learned anything from our "Banned Album Cover" series it's that pubic hair is bad. Really bad! Just ask the guys in Roxy Music whose album Country Life was also banned for the album cover's display of pubic hair (as well as unclad feminine body parts). So what were the Black Crowes thinking when they released their third album, Amorica (1994), nearly twenty years after Roxy Music's Country Life? Haven't the Crowes learned anything? Pubic hair is bad for album sales!

Some believed that the photo was of a male model who strategically tucked, but it was actually taken from a 1976 Bicentennial issue of Hustler magazine. It's like somebody stuck a bikini bottom over Dr. J's head.

              

According to singer Chris Robinson who contributes to the cover art for the Black Crowes' records, the cover was "cartoonish and uber-psychedelic" and not particularly offensive. "The most controversial part of it was the flag itself," Robinson has stated.

American Recordings eventually put out an alternative cover that blacked out the offending image. Despite all the hoopla, Amorica eventually reached Gold status in the United States.

Can anybody say Brazilian?

                

Banned Album Covers: Roxy Music's "Country Life"

                         
Why do the censors find the human body to be so offensive? To them, nips and pubes aren't erotic they're especially repugnant. They must have had a field day with the cover to Roxy Music's fourth album, Country Life (1974).

The album's title was intended to parody an upscale glamor magazine. Bryan Ferry, the band's singer, keyboardist and principal songwriter, borrowed the title from the British lifestyle magazine Country Life. 

Ferry met the two models who grace the cover, Constanze Karoli and Eveline Grunwald, while he was vacationing in Portugal. The singer asked them to pose for the cover as well as assist him with the lyrics to "Bitter-Sweet." They obliged on both accounts.

Photographer Eric Boman's shot of the two scantily-clad women was considered highly indecent in several countries such as the United States, Spain and the Netherlands. At first, the LP was wrapped in a green package, while subsequent reissues replaced the models with a photograph from the album's back cover that featured a shrub.

Eric Boman reflects: “When we looked at the film back in London, I got the feeling that Bryan wasn’t very happy. I think there was a lack of the slickness that he was used to, but gradually everyone realised that there was another quality, hard to put your finger on, of ambiguity and, as we now call it ‘rawness’ that worked. I think we were all surprised when the cover became such a classic.”

Doesn't a shrub make for a more decent album cover?

                    

Banned Album Covers: "Electric Ladyland"

    
Hey now! There were far too many breasts for Reprise Records. Even for 1968.

Needless to say, the record company nixed the photograph of the anonymous harem, so Hendrix suggested that the cover for Electric Ladyland, his third and what would be his final album of new material, be a color photo taken by Linda Eastman of the band sitting with children on a sculpture from Alice in Wonderland in Central Park. Instead, Reprise used a fuzzy photograph of Jimi's head that was taken by Karl Ferris. 

Electric Ladyland reached the #1 on the Billboard 200 for two weeks in November 1968.

             

Banned Album Covers: The Beatles' "Yesterday and Today"

                       

The Beatles have had so many compelling album covers: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Rubber Soul, The White Album and Abbey Road, to name a few. Yesterday and Today isn't one of them.

John Lennon might have thought that the cover was as "relevant as the Vietnam War" and Paul McCartney described it as "our comment on the War," but there was one Beatle who did not advocate for the album cover - George Harrison. The Quiet Beatle said that the whole idea "was gross, and stupid." Harrison claimed, "Sometimes we all did stupid things thinking it was cool and hip when it was naïve and dumb; and that was one of them."

Capitol Records apologized for Robert Whitaker's crude photograph of the Fab Four, but not until 750,000 copies had been printed in the United States, it had been used as promotional advertisement for "Paperback Writer" and decorated the cover of Disc, a British magazine.  

In April 2006, a sealed copy of Yesterday and Today fetched $39,000 at an auction in Dallas.

               

Banned Album Covers: Jane's Addiction's "Ritual De Lo Habitual"

   
Some folks were deeply offended by singer Perry Farrell's nude clay figures. Really? 

In response to the outrage, Jane's Addiction issued a "clean cover" so the album could be distributed in stores that refused to stock a record with nude clay figures on the cover. The "clean cover" features black text on a white background, listing the band name, album name, and the text of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. 

The back cover contains the text:

"Hitler's syphilis-ridden dreams almost came true. How could it happen? By taking control of the media. An entire country was led by a lunatic... We must protect our First Amendment, before sick dreams become law. Nobody made fun of Hitler??!"

             

Banned Album Covers: David Bowie's "Diamond Dogs"

            
David Bowie is no stranger to controversy.

Diamond Dogs, Bowie's 1974 concept album, features a painting by Guy Peelleart in which the singer is featured as a kind of centaur (except he's half-man/half-dog instead of half-man/half-horse). That's rather tame. Right? However, Peelleart's creature is anatomically correct.

Afraid of causing a stir, RCA Records withdrew the records and ordered the artwork to be reproduced with the canine genitalia airbrushed out. (The cover below is the airbrushed version.)

Like most controversial album covers that have been rejected by record companies, several unaltered versions still survive, and I'm sure are quite valuable. Allegedly the original artwork can cost up to $10,000.

Does anyone own an original copy of the album?