I'm sure someone will want my head on a pike for omitting Music from Big Pink or White Light/White Heat.
Omissions:
Velvet Underground * White Light/White Heat (Verve)
Various * Tropicalia: Ou Panis Et Circencis (Philips)
Caetano Veloso (Philips)
Tom Ze (Sony)
Peter Brotzmann * Machine Gun (FMP)
Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band * Strictly Personal (Blue Thumb)
Dr. John The Night Tripper * Gris-Gris (Atco/Rhino)
Aretha Franklin * Lady Soul (Atlantic)
Gilberto Gil (Philips)
The Pretty Things * S.F. Sorrow (Harvest)
Nick Drake * Five Leaves Left (Island)
Serge Gainsbourg * Initials B.B. (Polygram)
David Axelrod * Song Of Innocence (Capitol)
Morton Subotnick * Silver Apples of the Moon for Electronic Music Synthesizer (Nonesuch)
The Impressions * This Is My Country (Curtom)
Nara Leao (Philips)
Serge Gainsbourg * Bonnie & Clyde (Virgin Fr)
Harry Nilsson * Aerial Ballet (RCA)
Herbie Hancock * Speak Like A Child (Blue Note)
Archie Shepp * The Way Ahead (Impulse)
Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band * I May Be Hungry But I Sure Ain't Weird (Sequel)
Aretha Franklin * Aretha Now (Atlantic/Rhino)
Sly & The Family Stone * Life (Epic)
Bob Dylan * John Wesley Harding (Columbia)
Laura Nyro * Eli and the 13th Confesion (Columbia)
Chico Buarque * Chico Buarque Vol. 3 (RGE)
The Jimi Hendrix Experience * Live At Winterland (Rykodisc)
Caravan (Verve)
Miles Davis * Miles In The Sky (Columbia)
The Heptones * On Top (Studio One)
Jimmy Cliff * Hard Road To Travel (Island)
The Millennium * Begin (Columbia)
Buffalo Springfield * Buffalo Springfield Again (Atco)
Jefferson Airplane * Crown of Creation (RCA)
Arthur Brown * The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown (Polydor)
Tomorrow (See For Miles)
The Beau Brummels * Bradley's Barn (Edsel)
The Band * Music From Big Pink (Capitol)
Small Faces * Ogden's Nut Gone Flake (Immediate)
David Ackles (Elektra)
The Soft Machine (One Way)
The United States Of America (Edsel)
Blue Cheer * Outsideinside (Philips)
Albert Ayler Trio * New Grass (Impulse)
Tim Buckley * Dream Letter, Live In London 1968 (Enigma)
Anthony Braxton * For Alto (Arista)
Gene Chandler * There Was A Time! (Brunswick)
Ornette Coleman * Who's Crazy? (Atmosphere)
Francoise Hardy * Comment Te Dire Adieu (EMI Japan)
Chick Corea * Now He Sings, Now He Sobs (Blue Note)
Sun Ra & his Arkestra * A Black Mass (Jihad)
Sun Ra & his Arkestra * Continuation (Saturn)
Steve Miller Band * Sailor (Capitol)
The Move (Westside)
Fairport Convention (Polydor)
Bob Dylan * Nashville Skyline (Columbia)
Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band * Mirror Man (Buddah)
Red Crayola * God Bless the Red Crayola & All Who Sail on Her (IA)
Pink Floyd * A Saucerful Of Secrets (Capitol)
The Bonzo Dog Band * The Doughnuts in Grannys Greenhouse (Edsel)
Jeff Beck * Beck-Ola (Epic)
Leonard Cohen * Songs Of Leonard Cohen (Columbia)
Silver Apples (TRC)
The Nazz (Rhino)
The Chocolate Watchband * Inner Mystique (Sundazed)
Steve Miller Band * Children of the Future (Capitol)
Donovan * Hurdy Gurdy Man (Epic)
Jeff Beck * Truth (Columbia)
Scott Walker * Scott 2 (Fontana)
Big Brother & the Holding Co. * Cheap Thrills (Columbia)
Nico * Chelsea Girl (Verve)
Les Fleur De Lys * Reflections (Blueprint)
The Doors * Waiting For The Sun (Elektra)
Simon & Garfunkel * Bookends (Columbia)
Can * Delay (Spoon/Mute)
Steve Miller Band * Children Of The Future (Capitol)
Cream * Wheels Of Fire (Polydor)
Free * Tons Of Sobs (A&M)
The Beatles - The Beatles
Quote:
Each song on the sprawling double album The Beatles is an entity to itself, as the band touches on anything and everything it can. This makes for a frustratingly scattershot record or a singularly gripping musical experience, depending on your view, but what makes the so-called White Album interesting is its mess. Never before had a rock record been so self-reflective, or so ironic; the Beach Boys send-up "Back in the U.S.S.R." and the British blooze parody "Yer Blues" are delivered straight-faced, so it's never clear if these are affectionate tributes or wicked satires. Lennon turns in two of his best ballads with "Dear Prudence" and "Julia"; scours the Abbey Road vaults for the musique concrète collage "Revolution 9"; pours on the schmaltz for Ringo's closing number, "Good Night"; celebrates the Beatles cult with "Glass Onion"; and, with "Cry Baby Cry," rivals Syd Barrett. McCartney doesn't reach quite as far, yet his songs are stunning — the music hall romp "Honey Pie," the mock country of "Rocky Raccoon," the ska-inflected "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," and the proto-metal roar of "Helter Skelter." Clearly, the Beatles' two main songwriting forces were no longer on the same page, but neither were George and Ringo. Harrison still had just two songs per LP, but it's clear from "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," the canned soul of "Savoy Truffle," the haunting "Long, Long, Long," and even the silly "Piggies" that he had developed into a songwriter who deserved wider exposure. And Ringo turns in a delight with his first original, the lumbering country-carnival stomp "Don't Pass Me By." None of it sounds like it was meant to share album space together, but somehow The Beatles creates its own style and sound through its mess.
Johnny Cash - At Folsom PrisonQuote:
At Folsom Prison was one of two legendary live albums Johnny Cash recorded in front of a prison audience in the late '60s. Part of the appeal of the records is the way Cash plays to the audience, selecting a set of songs that are all about prison, crime, murder, regret, loss, mother, God, and loneliness. Cash stimulates the audience's emotions, which in turn stimulates his performance, especially since he delivers the songs with the conviction of someone who has lived through it. There aren't many hits on the record — "Folsom Prison Blues," "I Still Miss Someone," "Jackson," "Give My Love to Rose," and "I Got Stripes" are the familiar items — but few albums come as close to capturing the darkness and rage that lays deep in Cash's music, as well as the depth of his talent.
The Rolling Stones - Beggars BanquetQuote:
The Stones forsook psychedelic experimentation to return to their blues roots on this celebrated album, which was immediately acclaimed as one of their landmark achievements. A strong acoustic Delta blues flavor colors much of the material, particularly "Salt of the Earth" and "No Expectations," which features some beautiful slide guitar work. Basic rock & roll was not forgotten, however: "Street Fighting Man," a reflection of the political turbulence of 1968, was one of their most innovative singles, and "Sympathy for the Devil," with its fire-dancing guitar licks, leering Jagger vocals, African rhythms, and explicitly satanic lyrics, was an image-defining epic. On "Stray Cat Blues," Jagger and crew began to explore the kind of decadent sexual sleaze that they would take to the point of self-parody by the mid-'70s. At the time, though, the approach was still fresh, and the lyrical bite of most of the material ensured Beggars Banquet's place as one of the top blues-based rock records of all time.
The Byrds - Sweetheart of the RodeoQuote:
The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo was not the first important country-rock album (Gram Parsons managed that feat with The International Submarine Band's debut Safe at Home), and The Byrds were hardly strangers to country music, dipping their toes in the twangy stuff as early as their second album. But no major band had gone so deep into the sound and feeling of classic country (without parody or condescension) as the Byrds did on Sweetheart; at a time when most rock fans viewed country as a musical "L'il Abner" routine, the Byrds dared to declare that C&W could be hip, cool, and heartfelt. Though Gram Parsons had joined the band as a pianist and lead guitarist, his deep love of C&W soon took hold, and Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman followed his lead; significantly, the only two original songs on the album were both written by Parsons (the achingly beautiful "Hickory Wind" and "One Hundred Years from Now"), while on the rest of the set classic tunes by Merle Haggard, the Louvin Brothers, and Woody Guthrie were sandwiched between a pair of twanged-up Bob Dylan compositions. While many cite this as more of a Gram Parsons album than a Byrds set, given the strong country influence of McGuinn and Hillman's later work, it's obvious Parsons didn't impose a style upon this band so much as he tapped into a sound that was already there, waiting to be released. If the Byrds didn't do country-rock first, they did it brilliantly, and few albums in the style are as beautiful and emotionally affecting as this.
Os Mutantes - Os MutantesQuote:
The band's debut album, Os Mutantes, is far and away their best — a wildly inventive trip that assimilates orchestral-pop, whimsical psychedelia, musique concrète, found-sound environments — and that's just the first song! Elsewhere there are nods to Carnaval, albeit with distinct hippie sensibilities, incorporating fuzz-tone guitars and go-go basslines. Two tracks, "O Relogio" and "Le Premier Bonheur du Jour," work through pastoral French pop, sounding closer to the Swingle Singers than Gilberto Gil. Though not all of the experimentation succeeds — the languid Brazilian blues of "Baby" is rather cumbersome — and pop/rock listeners may have a hard time finding the hooks, Os Mutantes' first album is an astonishing listen. It's far more experimental than any of the albums produced by the era's first-rate psychedelic bands of Britain or America.
Van Morrison - Astral WeeksQuote:
Astral Weeks is generally considered one of the best albums in pop music history. For all that renown, Astral Weeks is anything but an archetypal rock & roll album: in fact, it isn't a rock & roll album at all. Employing a mixture of folk, blues, jazz, and classical music, Van Morrison spins out a series of extended ruminations on his Belfast upbringing, including the remarkable character "Madame George" and the climactic epiphany experienced on "Cyprus Avenue." Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, Morrison sings in his elastic, bluesy voice, accompanied by a jazz rhythm section (Jay Berliner, guitar, Richard Davis, bass, Connie Kay, drums), plus reeds (John Payne) and vibes (Warren Smith, Jr.), with a string quartet overdubbed. An emotional outpouring cast in delicate musical structures, Astral Weeks has a unique musical power. Unlike any record before or since, it nevertheless encompasses the passion and tenderness that have always mixed in the best postwar popular music, easily justifying the critics' raves.
The Zombies - Odyssey and OracleQuote:
Odessey and Oracle was one of the flukiest (and best) albums of the 1960s, and one of the most enduring long-players to come out of the entire British psychedelic boom, mixing trippy melodies, ornate choruses, and lush Mellotron sounds with a solid hard rock base. But it was overlooked completely in England and barely got out in America (with a big push by Al Kooper, who was then a Columbia Records producer); and it was neglected in the U.S. until the single "Time of the Season," culled from the album, topped the charts nearly two years after it was recorded, by which time the group was long disbanded. Ironically, at the time of its recording in the summer of 1967, permanency was not much on the minds of the bandmembers. Odessey and Oracle was intended as a final statement, a bold last hurrah, having worked hard for three years only to see the quality of their gigs decline as the hits stopped coming. The results are consistently pleasing, surprising, and challenging: "Hung Up on a Dream" and "Changes" are some of the most powerful psychedelic pop/rock ever heard out of England, with a solid rhythm section, a hot Mellotron sound, and chiming, hard guitar, as well as highly melodic piano. "Changes" also benefits from radiant singing. "This Will Be Our Year" makes use of trumpets (one of the very few instances of real overdubbing) in a manner reminiscent of "Penny Lane"; and then there's "Time of the Season," the most well-known song in their output and a white soul classic. Not all of the album is that inspired, but it's all consistently interesting and very good listening, and superior to most other psychedelic albums this side of the Beatles' best and Pink Floyd's early work. Indeed, the only complaint one might have about the original LP is its relatively short running time, barely over 30 minutes, but even that's refreshing in an era where most musicians took their time making their point, and most of the CD reissues have bonus tracks to fill out the space available.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric LadylandQuote:
Jimi Hendrix's third and final album with the original Experience found him taking his funk and psychedelic sounds to the absolute limit. The result was not only one of the best rock albums of the era, but also Hendrix's original musical vision at its absolute apex. When revisionist rock critics refer to him as the maker of a generation's mightiest dope music, this is the album they're referring to.
But Electric Ladyland is so much more than just background music for chemical intake. Kudos to engineer Eddie Kramer (who supervised the remastering of the original two-track stereo masters for this 1997 reissue on MCA) for taking Hendrix's visions of a soundscape behind his music and giving it all context, experimenting with odd mic techniques, echo, backward tape, flanging, and chorusing, all new techniques at the time, at least the way they're used here. What Hendrix sonically achieved on this record expanded the concept of what could be gotten out of a modern recording studio in much the same manner as Phil Spector had done a decade before with his Wall of Sound. As an album this influential (and as far as influencing a generation of players and beyond, this was his ultimate statement for many), the highlights speak for themselves: "Crosstown Traffic," his reinterpretation of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower," "Burning of the Midnight Lamp," the spacy "1983...(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)," and "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)," a landmark in Hendrix's playing. With this double set (now on one compact disc), Hendrix once again pushed the concept album to new horizons.
