That's because, as I write this, I'm looking at Al as he appears on the CD cover of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and he and the dozens of other pop culture icons and historical figures are no bigger than a gnat's butt.

Record Store Day will be celebrated April 17 across the nation, including at Atlantic Sounds in Daytona Beach. Though the idea is to celebrate the spirit and culture and hipness of independent record stores (as opposed to the antiseptic big-box chains that sell music), it's also a day when record labels flood indie stores with new but rare, limited-release, good old-fashioned slabs of music-inscribed vinyl.

Never mind that labels also will be issuing limited-release CDs to indies. It's the vinyl that gives Record Store Day its mojo.

However, I must make this sacrilegious true confession on the very eve of this vinyl frenzy: The day CDs were invented, I tap danced right on top of my ancient, pock-marked vinyl copy of Led Zep IV, which had scratches deeper than the furrows of Keith Richard's face. Ditto my scarred 8-track copy of Zep's masterpiece.

Yes, vinyl aficionados swore (and still do) that CDs reproduce crappier sound. But I was glad that never again would record company fat cats get rich off me and other music-loving rubes who had been forced to re-buy the same albums over and over and over because the record label's crappy technology couldn't hold up to 100 plays or more per day.

But my gleeful celebration of the death of vinyl came with a price: I missed the album covers.

I missed those big, bold, museum-quality (well, sort of), in-your-face artistic statements that, according to Creem magazine, had held up the release of the Splats' new album for five months because guitarist Turk Turtles didn't like the way the sun gleamed off the image of his face on the African obelisk.

I missed tacking up Elton John's "Capt. Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy," Yes' "Tales From Topographic Oceans" and Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" on my bedroom wall like they were lost Van Goghs.

I missed turning the wheel on Led Zeppelin III to see what visual surprises peaked out from the cut-out circles. And I missed scouring the inner vinyl plane of that album and others for cryptic inscriptions.

All those visual pleasures -- gone. Do you think the McCartney-is-dead urban legend ever would have gotten off the ground if obsessed Beatlemaniacs had to search for clues on tiny CD covers?

As CDs slowly but inexorably began to push vinyl albums off store shelves, I had this foolish notion that some record company suit would realize how much we rock fans missed those big covers. Then that same record guy would flash upon a brilliant money-making idea: "Let's package tiny CDs inside of big cardboard slabs! Music fans will go ape-gaga!"

What was I thinking? Now it's the age of the iPod, and I'm getting nostalgic over the CD covers of "Sgt. Pepper," Zep's "Physical Graffiti," the dark beauty of Badfinger's "No Dice" and the burning man of the Floyd's "Wish You Were Here."

Perhaps nobody else cares that the art of album covers is a lost art. Maybe album covers are my "Rosebud" (check out "Citizen Kane," you younger people).

Me, I'll be checking out the vinyl album covers on Record Store Day.