6 Alternate Album Covers You Won't Believe Almost Happened

So what's with the boring-ass "open steamer trunk and off-duty wardrobe" look of Yesterday and Today? As it turns out, that JC Penney family photo snoozer was merely a last-second replacement for something far more befitting the "experimental" nature of the band at the time.

Wait, did they mean experimental as in "music" or experimental as in "Mengele"?

There's the stuff. Hacked up babies, baby -- it's what all the hippies were into. That's not true, of course, but what hippies were more receptive to was being totally against war, and that's exactly what the Beatles had in mind during the borderline terrifying photo shoot that produced this album cover.

Succinctly commenting on U.S. foreign policy in the way that only a dismembered Cabbage Patch Kid can.

It was intended to be a statement against the escalating war in Vietnam, and when that unsettling photo was chosen as the band's next album cover, no one had any reason to believe it would be a problem. After all, this was practically the exact same image that adorned promotional materials surrounding the release of the "Paperback Writer" single a few months earlier:

And the June 1966 issue of Disc magazine:

Get it?? Carve-up, like ... like the babies?

Here's the thing, though: That promotional poster is black and white, and that magazine cover features zero dead babies, making it simply a picture of four men sitting around draped in various cuts of meat. That's more of a statement against mental health than anything. The "butcher cover," as it's affectionately come to be known, however, featured lots of babies and was in full blood-spattered color. Before the album was even officially available for purchase, calls started pouring in from angry retailers who were, for some reason, hesitant to stock a record featuring the least threatening band in the world sitting among a pile of baby parts and cow blood.

The record label recalled the albums, and in a cost-saving move, just placed an album-art-sized sticker featuring that lame steamer trunk cover over the nightmare-inducing version that was causing so much outrage. To this day, if you can find an original pressing of the Yesterday and Today cover with that steamer trunk on it, a terrifying glimpse into what rich Brits thought Vietnam looked like is waiting for you just below the surface.

There's definitely something to be said for striking while the iron is hot, but it's not always an easy thing to pull off without looking obvious. A young Michael Jackson and his massive team of handlers learned this the hard way when it came time to produce a cover for the pop legend's second album, the somewhat confusingly titled Ben.

Who is called "Steve."

The problem was, the song that gave the album its name is the very definition of the word "fluke." For starters, it wasn't even supposed to be a Michael Jackson song. Donny Osmond -- who was for all intents and purposes the Mormon church's answer to Michael Jackson at the time -- turned down a chance to record the song because of a scheduling conflict. So MJ stepped in and killed it, and the song became a massive hit.

Naturally wanting to capitalize on the song's popularity, Jackson's label scrambled to put together a new album. What they came up with was a mishmash of cover tunes that gave absolutely no hint or clue as to who this "Ben" that young Michael Jackson was serenading actually was. That's a problem the label chose to fix with the original version of the Ben album cover.

Oh, ohhhhhh, now it makes sense.

Holy shit. Keep in mind, Michael Jackson was 14 at the time, which meant that his fan base was disproportionately young. And here, on the cover of their favorite singer's sophomore album, was going to be an army of rats that look like they were bred solely for the purposes of terror chasing a doomed crowd of screaming victims. Why in the hell would this be? Simple: The song was actually written for the movie Ben, which is the sequel to a movie called Willard, which fans of truly awful horror films will recall was about a boy who befriends a killer rat.

And, later, George McFly, which is a surprisingly logical conclusion to his character arc.

Ben, on the other hand, is about a boy who befriends a killer rat that has lots of killer rat friends. So naturally you're going to want a tender love ballad scene in a movie like that.

And who's going to buy a Michael Jackson album if they don't know that it's very loosely related to a rat movie of the same name? Everybody, that's who. At some point, less idiotic heads prevailed, and Ben was put on store shelves sans the terrifying rat imagery, eventually reaching No. 5 on the U.S. charts. Not bad for the creepiest fucking love song ever.

Actually, it's not that creepy when you take into account that young Mike did in fact have an army of rats of his very own that he loved and cherished right up until the point where they started eating each other. We're not joking about that, except for the part where we say it makes this song less creepy. It makes it so much creepier. So much.

The Coup is a hip-hop group that frequently writes music that is political in nature, but if you think the above cover is a tasteless reference to the 9/11 attacks, you have it all wrong. That cover design was created months before, and the attacks happened just a week before the album was scheduled to hit shelves.

That's right -- it's pure billion-to-one coincidence that the design that was completed in June of 2001 perfectly recreates the attacks, unless it was created by that guy from Heroes who could paint the future. Boots Riley, the group's founder, fought to keep the original cover, which he said was a "metaphor for the capitalist state being destroyed through the music." Yeah, we're pretty sure the events of that September obliterated any chance of you getting that message across, dude.

Needless to say, the release was pushed back anyway while they found a more suitable cover.

They also removed the track titled "Death to the Infidel Pigs."

Riley protested, claiming that the reasons for the cover being censored were political and not out of respect for the victims. Meanwhile, his desire to keep the cover as is? Totally out of respect for the victims.

For some reason, retailers were less than enthused with the prospect of stocking a close-up shot of a Hustler girl's overflowing pubes on their store shelves. With several outlets, including the almighty Walmart, refusing to stock the album, the band stuck to their guns and decided that their artistic vision was more important than the cash windfall that accompanies being able to sell your albums in places where people shop.

Just joking. They immediately set about doctoring up a version of the album cover that would be palatable to the less-pube-friendly tastes of the big box department stores.

"See? This could just as easily be a folded flag that's being given to a widow."

To keep their integrity intact, the band argued that for some kids, places like Walmart were the only option for buying music, and not having their album stocked there meant that those kids couldn't buy it. The problem eventually worked itself out when nobody bought the album.

All of the talk about the 1960s centers on how loose and free things were. It was a time of rampant sexual experimentation and copious amounts of drugs and opening your mind to new experiences. That said, it was also a decade that ended more than 40 years ago. The hippies were running wild, but everyone else was still living the 1950s dream of an America where things were orderly and proper and nobody put a picture of a toilet on their album cover. As you can see, the Mamas & the Papas did not share that dream.

It seems unfathomable nowadays, but at the time of its release, the above album cover was highly controversial. So much so, in fact, that it was recalled by the label. All because the prevailing opinion of the day was that actually showing a toilet was indecent, on the same scale as (insert whatever you've seen done with a toilet on the Internet, we don't have all day). That toilet might as well spell the word "fuck" in big porcelain letters, because that's how store owners viewed its presence in that photo.

Scrambling for a solution, record executives decided to just slap a sticker over the unsightly commode.

If they'd really been thinking, they would have just put the album next to the hand fans and smelling salts.

That ridiculous sticker did the trick. When the album was sent back out to record stores, there were no complaints. At least, there were no complaints about the toilet. Future versions of the album just cropped out the toilet, the bathtub, and generally any signs that they were in a bathroom at all, because really you can never be too careful:

"But how do we know they're not nude from the waist down?!"

This is one of those odd cases where what the artist wanted was actually way more tame than what wound up on some record store shelves. In 1968, Jimi Hendrix was ready for his first real album and had a grand vision for the art. Basically a collaboration between him and Linda Eastman, it was to be set in Central Park and feature kids of each race on a statue of Alice from Alice in Wonderland.

"OK, now Jimi, you'll be the Whiiii- Mad Hatter. You can be the Mad Hatter."

While tame by modern standards, a "one world, one race" message in the late 1960s was not appreciated by record executives, who instead went with this:

"Nothing says rock and roll like Ronald McDonald."

But in England, the label wanted to take things in, uh, kind of a different direction. They decided to humor Hendrix's race-oriented idea, and hired 21 women of many different races. The ladies were originally supposed to be around Hendrix like he was a god, but he had second thoughts and decided not to go to the shoot. When he didn't show up, the women were told that if they disrobed, they would be paid more money, and the rest is "You should have been there, man" history.

Censoring courtesy of us, because the Brits sure as hell weren't going to do it.

Afterward, Jimi would talk openly about how much he despised the English version of the album cover, which was on a completely different planet from what he wanted.

So what's the moral here? Always attend your photo shoots, because you never know when the titties are coming out.

You can find Kier on Twitter, his blog, and more recently, toiling away in the depths of Gomorrah. Evan can be found on Facebook, gloating over kicking Kier into the depths of Gomorrah.

For album covers that maybe should've gotten a second look, check out The 19 Most Hilariously Failed Attempts at Sexy Album Covers and The 15 Worst Album Covers of All-Time.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out 4 Insane Pieces of 'My Little Pony' Fan Art (By Grown Men).

And stop by LinkSTORM because it's Friday, it's cold -- so screw it.

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