Album Cover Friday Fun Challenge! (Difficult)

Many iconic album covers were shot in particular locations - many that bear little resemblance today - Crosby Stills and Nash famously returned only a day later to re-shoot the cover of their debut album (in order to have them sitting in the correct name order) only to find the house that provided the backdrop had been demolished.

At the time of the shoot, the band did not have a name yet, so they didn't consider their seating positions.

Nevertheless the band liked the photo which they felt matched their "downhome and comfortable" music and the original picture stayed. Nash complained that many people continued to think he was Crosby for many years!

Nash, Stills, Crosby in reverse order

I had rather romantically assumed the CSN shack stood alone far out in the Californian countryside somewhere but now learn that it was actually a West Hollywood parking lot.

The site today with the long gone shack superimposed

In reality of course the apparently exotic locations such rock stars frequent on their photo shoots or in their apparent everyday lives are often a disappointment. Here's another one - the cover of Bob Dylan's Street Legal album, which graced the top of this website through 2016, was always imagined by me to be a hot dusty side street on a hill somewhere in Sicily (no doubt influenced by his songs of that period) - Dylan perhaps stepping out, with leather jacket over his arm, from his guest house or a bar on tour?

Bob Dylan, Street Legal, April 1978

Here is the reality today, courtesy google maps.

Main Street, Santa Monica - the site of former studios where Street Legal was recorded

Are any album geeks able to guess any of these album covers below from the pictures of the locations as they appear today? Original covers to be revealed later in a separate post.

Iconic locations immortalised in album covers as they appear today

[This post is indebted to the fascinating page at http://www.popspotsnyc.com/crosby_stills_nash/ for the CSN story including Henry Diltz's photographs and the very clever http://www.musicalmaps.com.au/]