What is your favorite or most memorable album cover? (If there is a story behind the album or its cover art, tell us about it.)
One of my favorite aspects of the vinyl record era was the opportunity for "album cover art" of a decent size that could be appreciated more than the same art on CD packaging - and has all but disappeared with digital music except for the jpg's found in our music file folders alongside the MP3 or FLAC files. I would often set an album's cover up near the turntable in plain view as I listened to my music. And of course, many digital music services and player apps still display album art, either from local files or online repositories.
I still have a copy of the first album I ever bought, back in 1958, the monaural George Shearing Quintet 1957 album "Latin Escapade". (Of course, Shearing couldn't have appreciated the cover art - he was blind.) It is the only vinyl I still have, and sits on a shelf to my left as I write this - but I no longer own a turntable. I do, however, have a "ripped from vinyl" copy of Latin Escapade in MP3 format. That old monaural recording was among the first real Latin jazz records, and the quintet included Belgian guitarist Toots Thiemann, who is best known for his harmonica playing. (Cal Tjader, a Latin Jazz favorite of mine, also played vibraphone with Shearing, and later went on to form his own group and record many Latin jazz albums - but he was not the vibraphone player on the Latin Escapade album.)
When I bought the album, I was a 16 y/o Chicago high school student, and my father was a conservative Presbyterian clergyman who had helped me to assemble my first audio system - a Garrard turntable (actually a "record changer"), a Bell 20 watt mono 6L6 tube amplifier, and a big bass reflex floor-standing loudspeaker with a Jensen 12" coax speaker crossed over to a Jensen "super-tweeter. I had never been in a night club, and knew about them only from TV and movies, but I had purchased the album for the music, not the cover - although I really like that photo! The cover displeased my father, who had hoped that I would buy a classical or religious music record, since I was an usher for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the time. (Ironically, although he did not like my music with it's night club album cover, my father's favorite TV show was "Gunsmoke" where Marshall Matt Dillon hung out at the "Long Branch Saloon" with the sexy owner, "Miss Kitty" who was also a "madam" with lots of "working girls" present to hustle the cowboys and take them upstairs to the available rooms.)