18 Of The Riskiest Album Covers That Ever Existed

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s fifth studio album was released on October 17th, 1977; three days later, the band’s airplane crashed in Mississippi, killing three members, including leader Ronnie Van Zant. That made the cover photo, of the band standing in front of a backdrop of flames, seem in exceptionally poor taste. The band didn’t change the Street Survivors title (which was problematic itself), but they did substitute a different photo of the band with a plain black background.

Warner Bros. didn’t want to release this Funkadelic record as a double album, so George Clinton whittled it down to a single disc. It also wouldn’t approve the Pedro Bell cover art of a naked woman inside a phallic spaceship: Bell covered most of it up with a big splash of green and the message “OH LOOK! The cover that “THEY” were TOO SCARED to print!”