Ozzy Osbourne, Blind Faith and Scorpions’ "Virgin Killer": Bare and Nude (Pre) Teens on Album Covers!

"Crazy Babies" is the third track on Ozzy Osbourne's No Rest for the Wicked (1988). The album cover features Ozzy surrounded by three (pre)teens - all scantily clad and beautified with make-up.

Until we read Evgenia Peretz’s Vanity Fair piece “Liberty [Ross], Without Torch” (November 12, 2013), we had no idea that the (pre)teens were being portrayed as Ozzy's child brides. Peretz wrote:

When she [Liberty Ross] was 10, a family friend who was also a model agent asked her parents whether their daughter might be interested in posing as Ozzy Osbourne’s child bride for his new album cover.

The response? Why, naturally. Liberty wore a tattered gauzy dress for her modeling debut and had to hold Ozzy’s hand while he sat on a throne adorned by rats and large slithering snakes.

“It’s etched in my brain for life,” says Liberty. “I remember thinking, Gosh, he’s very sweaty and shaking a lot.”

(Note: Ross, a former Chanel model and actress, divorced her husband, Rupert Sanders, after it was revealed that he was having an affair with Kristen Stewart. The age-gap affair began on the set of Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), which 41-year-old Sanders directed. 22-year-old Stewart played Snow White and, ironically, Ross played Stewart's mother. Peretz wrote that Ross was humiliated by the news that her then-husband's mistress was "someone so young and famous" with a defiant bad girl attitude.)

Here are some of "Crazy Babies" intriguing lyrics:

Crazy Babies

Born to live on a permanent high

Nobody's gonna change them, change them

They've gone over the top

Nobody's gonna tame them, tame them

They're never gonna stop

_

Crazy Babies

When they were born they were born to be wild

No Rest for the Wicked (1988) went Platinum in Canada and double Platinum in the USA.

Blind Faith (1969) is a certified platinum album by the English band Blind Faith. Unsurprisingly, the album cover sparked controversy due to the bare teen who is holding a [very] (phallic) toy spaceship. The cover was designed by photographer Bob Seidemann - Eric Clapton's friend and former roommate.

Per Feelnumb, Seidemann's rationale for having a bare teen pose on the album cover was that the spaceship symbolized the “achievement of human creativity” and that he needed “innocence” i.e., “a young girl” to carry the spaceship. Seidemann shared:

“I could not get my hands on the image until out of the mist a concept began to emerge. To symbolize the achievement of human creativity and its expression through technology a spaceship was the material object. To carry this new spore into the universe, innocence would be the ideal bearer, a young girl, a girl as young as Shakespeare’s Juliet. The space ship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life.”

“The spaceship could be made by Mick Milligan, a jeweler at the Royal College of Art. The girl was another matter. If she were too old it would be cheesecake, too young and it would be nothing. The beginning of the transition from girl to woman, that is what I was after. That temporal point, that singular flare of radiant innocence. Where is that girl?”

Initially, Seidermann planned to use a 14-year-old Brit, but he was smitten by Mariora Goschen - the Brit’s 11-year-old sister. But, unsurprisingly, the album was released with a different cover in the United States.

And a bare 11-year-old posed seductively on the album cover of the Scorpions’ Virgin Killer (1976), which was designed by Steffan Böhle - the product manager for the West German branch of RCA Records.

Here's an excerpt from an interview on Blabbermouth with Scorpions' guitarist Rudolf Schenker who revealed that the salacious album cover was the idea of the record company:

Blasting-Zone.com: In hindsight, do you regret releasing the album Virgin Killer with the original uncensored cover?

Rudolf: "No. We didn't actually have the idea. It was the record company. The record company guys were like, 'Even if we have to go to jail, there's no question that we'll release that.'

Here are some of the lyrics to “Virgin Killer”, which is, naturally, about a virgin killer.

Cry like you feel,

Try like you feel, feel it!

Try to escape,

Cry to escape, escape it!

It's so hard to run away

He's a virgin killer

_

No, no, no, can't you see?

No, no, no, can't you see?

You're a demon's, you're a demon's,

You're a demon's desire

Lastly, and unsurprisingly, like Blind Faith, Virgin Killer was released with a different cover in the United State and per AllMusic, Virgin Killer was "[...] quite popular in Japan."