One last great album for the troubled singer songwriter. This one cooks. She left $1500 in her will for a funeral party. It was held at The Lion’s Share in San Anselmo, California, on October 26, 1971. The Grateful Dead performed.

What a crazy funky album. As the story goes, George Clinton, the leader of Funkadelic, told guitarist Eddie Hazel to imagine he was told his mother died and later on learned it was not true, this all under the influence of LSD. Once Clinton realized how powerful the solo sounded he faded the bass played…

Joni Mitchell provides us with an amazing introspective album. The album employs sparse musical arrangements leaning heavily towards the folk genre, with Mitchell playing acoustic guitar, piano, or dulcimer as the primary instrument to accompany her vocals. Lyrically, each of the songs on Blue hone in on a specific feeling, situation or, in many cases,…

Songs of Love and Hate captured Cohen in one of his finest hours as a songwriter, and the best selections rank with the most satisfying work of his career. If Songs of Love and Hate isn’t Cohen’s best album, it comes close enough to be essential to anyone interested in his work. Brilliant.

One of the seminal documents of the progressive rock era, a record that made its way into the collections of millions of high-school kids who never heard of Modest Mussorgsky and knew nothing of Russia’s Nationalist “Five.” It does some violence to Mussorgsky, but Pictures at an Exhibition is also the most energetic and well-realized…

Rod Stewart perfected his blend of hard rock, folk, and blues on his masterpiece, Every Picture Tells a Story and it’s hard to deny the easy going rocker Maggie May.

Histoire de Melody Nelson is arguably Serge Gainsbourg’s most coherent and perfectly realized studio album, with the lush arrangements which characterize the majority of his work often mixed here with funky rhythm lines which underscore the musky allure of the music.

This album is sheer perfection. The album was a commercial and critical success and is Led Zeppelin’s best-selling, shipping over 37 million copies worldwide. It is one of the best-selling albums in the US, while critics have regularly placed it highly on lists of the greatest albums of all time.

Prog is here. “Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s 1970 eponymous LP was only a rehearsal. It hit hard because of the novelty of the act (allegedly the first supergroup in rock history), but felt more like a collection of individual efforts and ideas than a collective work. All doubts were dissipated by the release of Tarkus…

“Don McLean’s second album, American Pie is dominated by its title track, a lengthy, allegorical history of rock & roll that topped the singles chart putting the LP at number one. “American Pie” has remained as much a cultural touchstone as a song, sung by everyone from Garth Brooks to Madonna while the record itself…

The title song, “Coat of many colors” about Dolly growing up poor is good enough to make this record part of the 1001 albums you must hear, but then she proceeds to craft smart and insightful collection of songs that has all the making of a classic album.  Rob and Ben talk about the time…

Trading the cinematic aspirations of Tumbleweed Connection for a tentative stab at prog rock, Elton John and Bernie Taupin delivered another excellent collection of songs with Madman Across the Water. Like its two predecessors, Madman Across the Water is driven by the sweeping string arrangements of Paul Buckmaster, who gives the songs here a richly…

We get some first time listeners of this album and they are very very happy. Can might be the most underrated band from the 70’s and this album is not merely one of the best Krautrock albums of all time, but is probably one of the best albums ever, period.

The final album with Jim Morrison in the lineup is by far their most blues-oriented, and the singer’s poetic ardor is undiminished, though his voice sounds increasingly worn and craggy on some numbers.  The seven-minute title track was a car-cruising classic that celebrated both the glamour and seediness of Los Angeles; the other long cut,…

Following the success of their tour to support their previous album, The Yes Album (1971), the band regrouped in London to work on a follow-up. Early into the sessions, keyboardist Tony Kaye was fired over his reluctance to learn more synthesizers and was replaced with Rick Wakeman of the Strawbs, whose experience with a wider…

Wrapped up in a mess of contradictions, Surf’s Up defined the Beach Boys’ tumultuous career better than any other album.

Lennon is back for another great album with it’s iconic song for all the dreamers. Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today… Aha-ah… Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for…

With its offhand mixture of decadence, roots music, and outright malevolence, Sticky Fingers set the tone for the rest of the decade for the Stones.

Forty-five years ago, on March 11th, 1971, the Allman Brothers Band took the stage at Bill Graham’s vaunted Fillmore East Theater in New York for the first of a series of shows that are among the most celebrated in rock history. The Allmans weren’t even supposed to be the headliners.

Of the many wonderful blaxpoitation soundtracks to emerge during the early ’70s, Shaft certainly deserves mention as not only one of the most lasting but also one of the most successful. We can dig it!  At the 1972 Grammy Awards, “Theme from Shaft” won the awards for Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical and Best Instrumental Arrangement…

This album will give you chills. Amazing!  It is one of the best-selling albums of all time, with over 25 million copies sold worldwide. In the United States, it has been certified Diamond by the RIAA with more than 10 million copies sold.[3] It received four Grammy Awards in 1972, including Album of the Year

By 1970, the Who had obtained significant critical and commercial success branching out to one of the first rock opera’s Tommy but they had started to become detached from their original youthful mod/rocker audience with their heady ambitions projects. The group had also started to drift apart from manager Kit Lambert, owing to his preoccupation…

Despite the hit single, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” the album showed the limits of the Bee Gees’ talents as songwriters and of their appeal as album artists. We also figure out which one of the brothers we really have a problem with.

Their third time out proved the charm — The Yes Album constituted a de facto second debut, introducing the sound that would carry them forward across the next decade or more. Prog is here. Prog is real.