[Sordel]

DavidMahler's personal list of 100 Greatest Albums of Pop/Rock/Soul got me wondering on what basis we could cut down the multiple appearances of Dylan, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Steely Dan, Bruce Springsteen etc. that this sort of list always throws up.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss an artist who you honestly believe might have a case for getting more than one album in a top 100 and say which one album you would choose for those purposes: whether the criterion is bestselling, best, most influential, most innovative or simply the one that you like most.

Obviously this is only going to become a healthy and popular thread if people are willing to debate the choices and their basis, which is why I've labelled this as a debate rather than purely a discussion.

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Here's my first suggestion:

[size=medium]The Who - Who's Next (1971)[/size]

Who's Next was a number one album in the U.K., number four in the U.S., and has always been regarded as one of The Who's best albums, but there is an equally strong claim for the inclusion of Tommy, Quadrophenia or Live at Leeds, and possibly weaker claims for The Who Sells Out.

In terms of songs, Who's Next is strong but not a clear winner. It's best-known tracks - "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" - see Pete Townshend anticipating the atmosphere of Punk and creating two of the enduring classics of what would become Stadium Rock. Moreover, "Behind Blue Eyes" (with its dark yet imploring lyric) and "The Song Is Over" are perfect examples of the rock ballad at which Townshend was especially well versed. Nevertheless, other Who albums boast strong rivals to these, and it's actually Quadrophenia that would be my personal favourite overall.

Unlike Tommy, Who's Next is comparatively short of influence on later rock. Tommy may not have been the first rock opera (that is usually taken to be S.F. Sorrow by The Pretty Things) but it is the one to which later artists (especially Roger Waters on The Wall) looked for a model.

Quadrophenia and Tommy are, however, albums where Townshend's excesses as a writer were given full rein. Every idea was indulged.

Who's Next is a lean album because events had conspired to prevent the completion of Townshend's near legendary "unfinished" Lifehouse project. For years, looking at the strength of the songs on Who's Next, critics wondered how great the rock opera Lifehouse could have been had it been released in its own right. Who's Next developed its reputation for greatness while at the same time having been labelled some sort of artistic compromise: an album of offcuts from a superior lost work.

The Millenial releases - the Deluxe version of Who's Next, Townshend's Live at Sadler's Wells 2000 and the six-CD boxed set of Lifehouse Chronicles - demonstrated, however, that the plot of the longer work was a folly even more undeveloped than Tommy had been. No longer do we need to think that Who's Next is the poor relation of a project that was developing mythic proportions.

Moreover, if the test is simply one of being a great rock album, then Who's Next is probably the purest and most satisfying example of what The Who did as a rock band. Angry, tender, grandiose (yet stripped back to the basics form of a rock band) it is the best argument for The Who's place in a top 100.

 

[Sordel]

Well, no one seems to know quite what to do with this thread (other than not reply to it, of course

) so I get the second bite of the cherry. If people are looking for someone to "do", I'd be interested in someone's idea of the one Dylan album, because that's an artist whom I couldn't cover if I wanted to.

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[size=medium]The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band[/size]

The Beatles furnish more “Top 100” candidates than any other band, and critical opinion has shifted from decade to decade. Whereas the initial claim for The Beatles’ surpassing greatness lay with their experimental albums – Sgt. Pepper, The White Album and Abbey Road – the last ten years or so has seen greater prominence given to the transitional albums: Revolver and Rubber Soul. These, it is claimed, represent the best of the group as songwriters. In particular, Paul seemed to peak as a balladeer with Revolver, producing several of his greatest songs for that album. That’s a compelling argument, except when you consider the significance of Sgt. Pepper as probably the most "important" single album in the history of popular music.

Looking back, it’s difficult to get a context for how different this album sounded, but the people who heard it back then always describe hearing it as revelatory. No other Beatles album had such pervasive cultural impact, especially on people who hadn’t been closely following the growth of psychedelia. It brought innovation into the mainstream, and launched songs that still retained mainstream appeal but could subtly change the drift of popular music.

Moreover – if you’re sick of that argument – just think about the release of Sgt. Pepper on CD, and the way that it turned overnight a rather niche medium into the dominant format of its era. Only two albums – Sgt. Pepper and The Dark Side of the Moon – have this characteristic of “authorising” the marketplace to embrace a new format. At the time that it launched, the card cover of the Pepper CD (it was the first CD that I can remember being packaged this way) was almost as iconic as the cover had originally been on a vinyl album.

It’s not necessary to rehearse the musical strengths of the album, and its weaknesses are also pretty well known. It’s not an album that I personally like as much as I do Abbey Road, and Magical Mystery Tour has a better claim to be included in a top 100 on the basis of pushing experimentation alone.

Nevertheless, when people think of the permanent influence of The Beatles on popular music, it’s always to Sgt. Pepper that they look.

 

[ssportclay]

One could easily make an argument that Please Please Me, Meet The Beatles, and The Beatles Second Album are the very best Beatles albums because these are the albums that made them famous in the USA along with Brian Epstein's promotional efforts. If the Beatles debuted with Sgt. Pepper in 1967 with no Brian Epstein,it probably would have charted no better than S.F. Sorrow and sold under the radar with a small cult following.People generally buy the music that they are exposed to.

 

[Sordel]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ssportclay /img/forum/go_quote.gif One could easily make an argument that Please Please Me, Meet The Beatles, and The Beatles Second Album are the very best Beatles albums

Well, the point is to choose one. If you want to make a case for one of those three, that would be great, but certainly the fact that an album constitutes a commercial breakthrough is one factor that might affect people's choice. For example - to choose a band who maybe wouldn't get an album into the top 100 - Oasis were broken big in the U.K. by Definitely Maybe, and I think that most people would choose that album as the band's most significant over What's The Story (Morning Glory), despite the fact that it was the latter that cemented their commercial pull.

 

[Coltrane]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ssportclay /img/forum/go_quote.gif One could easily make an argument that Please Please Me, Meet The Beatles, and The Beatles Second Album are the very best Beatles albums because these are the albums that made them famous in the USA along with Brian Epstein's promotional efforts.

What the hell does that have to do with the music on the records?

Greatness and popularity have NO correlation.

 

[ssportclay]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Coltrane /img/forum/go_quote.gif What the hell does that have to do with the music on the records? Greatness and popularity have NO correlation.

I can understand why some one would want to take the high road and say that greatness and popularity have no correlation but this is not reality.Is Sgt Pepper really the world's greatest rock album or just a little different sounding album by the world's most popular rock band? I suppose the true answer will reveal itself 2000 years from now to see if the music actually holds up.

 

[aaron313]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ssportclay /img/forum/go_quote.gif I can understand why some one would want to take the high road and say that greatness and popularity have no correlation but this is not reality.Is Sgt Pepper really the world's greatest rock album or just a little different sounding album by the world's most popular rock band? I suppose the true answer will reveal itself 2000 years from now to see if the music actually holds up.

As long as there is music, there will be The Beatles. It's difficult to predict because rock music is still so new, in comparison to centuries of acoustic music. I mean, as surely as Beethoven, Mozart and Bach are timeless, the same applies to the rock greats of the second half of the previous century.

 

[ssportclay]

Quote:

Originally Posted by aaron313 /img/forum/go_quote.gif As long as there is music, there will be The Beatles. It's difficult to predict because rock music is still so new, in comparison to centuries of acoustic music. I mean, as surely as Beethoven, Mozart and Bach are timeless, the same applies to the rock greats of the second half of the previous century.

The people who lived while Mozart and Bach were around are all dead yet the music still lives.On the other hand, most of the teenagers who were around while the Beatles were recording are mostly still alive. Who is to say that the entire Beatles catalog wont silently go out of print within the next 200 years for lack of interest within future generations?

 

[Sordel]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ssportclay /img/forum/go_quote.gif most of the teenagers who were around while the Beatles were recording are mostly still alive

What's interesting, of course, is that the biggest bands were those that were popular at the time that the biggest generation became conscious of music. Would the New Romantics be "bigger than the Beatles" had the Baby Boom taken place fifteen years later?

Going back to Coltrane's comment above, greatness and popularity obviously are connected, because there are albums that I would consider to be musically outstanding but that I wouldn't normally consider for a "100 Greatest" list simply because they never sold in sufficient volume to claim greatness. Torment and Toreros by Marc (Almond) and The Mambas (#21 in my own favourite album list) is a simply stunning, but there would be a lot of head-scratching if I put it forward as one of the greatest albums of all time.

 

[Sordel]

[size=medium]Grateful Dead - Blues For Allah[/size]

Choosing one greatest album from The Grateful Dead's catalogue is made difficult by the fact that although their two most influential phases - Psychedelic and Americana - adjoin one another, they do not overlap very well. Live/Dead is an obvious psychedelic pick, but it was recorded before many of the greatest Garcia/Hunter songs were written. American Beauty or Workingman's Dead are obvious Americana picks, but they have no exploratory improvisations on them.

The task of picking one album sends me to the later albums. Among studio albums, Wake of the Flood and Terrapin Station are both very good, but neither fits the bill. Europe '72 is a popular choice due to its strong portrait of a key period, but its longest jam - "Truckin'" - is indicative of the band's forward direction and not of its influential past. Winterland '73 or The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack would fit the bill, but massive, multi-disc boxed sets released late in the day are hardly the stuff that historic greatness is made of.

So ... Blues For Allah: the compromise candidate. It's certainly not the best Dead album, but it showed the band's willingness to build on the psychedelic tradition and take it forward into new experimental areas. Its world music aspirations anticipated trends in popular music that only became engrained much later. It's also the last album on which the Dead seemed to resist the inexorable pull of mainstream fashion.

True, the absence of a great ballad is a troubling aspect of this selection, but the influence of the Americana period is definitely there in "Sage & Spirit" or "The Music Never Stopped" and there is an argument for saying that the purest Americana albums were produced not by The Dead but by The Band. Blues For Allah - even to its title - shows that folk forms were only a route to another place for this band. In a sense they never quite got there (musically they became more conservative directly after this album) but if you want one Grateful Dead album to illustrate why they would have an album in the 100, this could well be it.

 

[aaron313]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ssportclay /img/forum/go_quote.gif The people who lived while Mozart and Bach were around are all dead yet the music still lives.On the other hand, most of the teenagers who were around while the Beatles were recording are mostly still alive. Who is to say that the entire Beatles catalog wont silently go out of print within the next 200 years for lack of interest within future generations?

Because young people all over the world listen to the Beatles?

 

[andyalfa]

I’d have thought something by Miles Davis should get a mention. There was a man who made significant (sometimes groundbreaking) records in more than one jazz style over a 40 year career. Records that regularly make top 10 lists include Birth of the Cool, which marked a shift away from big band jazz in the 40’s; In a Silent Way; Kind of Blue, reputedly the biggest selling jazz album of all time; Bitches Brew, electric jazz defined; Tutu, a cracker from the 80’s with Marcus Miller on Bass and his final offering, a hip hop/jazz trumpet fusion called Doo Bop. Surely one of the greatest musicians of all time.

If I was to pick one, I’d go for the obvious Kind of Blue, because it’s the first jazz record I ever bought, and still my most played.

 

[tru blu]

$.02…for what it's worth…

Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited - Rock & roll had been kids music almost exclusively until Robert Zimmerman went electric. No one had ever written songs with this sweep before, but suddenly it was something for everyone (the Beatles, the Stones, Sly Stone, Van Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder) not just to aspire to, but to try to get on the radio. At the time, that was huge.

Miles Davis: Good luck finding one record, but come on, everyone knows this is a no-brainer.

Duke Ellington: The Far East Suite - Made in the mid-'60s, near the tail-end of a pretty extraordinary career; proof that he was still writing ambitiously (tunes were both local and global) decades after he helped make the world safe for blues-inflected popular music. His work made Miles possible.

Hank Williams: Choose your own best-of…he recorded before the album era, but those songs are still with us, still vital.