1001 Album Club

A wonderful album showcasing Green’s dynamic soul singer whispers, animated cries, and riffing to enhance his already stirring delivery.  Prior to this album, Al Green never had a number one song. The title track, “Let’s Stay Together,” achieved that status and held it for nine consecutive weeks.

War’s third album as an act separate from Eric Burdon was also far and away their most popular, the group’s only long-player to top the pop charts. The culmination of everything they’d been shooting for creatively on their two prior albums, it featured work in both succinct pop-accessible idioms as well as challenging extended pieces…

Described as a rock opera and also a loose concept album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is about Bowie’s titular alter ego Ziggy Stardust, a fictional androgynous bisexual rock star who acts as a messenger for extraterrestrial beings that would like to save the world but only have…

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School’s Out catapulted Alice Cooper into the hard rock stratosphere, largely due to its timeless, all-time classic title track. But while the song became Alice’s highest-charting single ever (reaching number seven on the U.S. charts) and recalled the brash, three-and-a-half-minute garage rock of yore, the majority of the album signaled a more complex compositional directional…

Falling halfway between musical primitivism and art rock ambition, Roxy Music’s eponymous debut remains a startling redefinition of rock’s boundaries. Simultaneously embracing kitschy glamour and avant-pop, Roxy Music shimmers with seductive style and pulsates with disturbing synthetic textures. – AllMusic Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

If any musical justification were needed for the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel, it could be found on this striking collection, Paul Simon’s post-split debut. From the opening cut, “Mother and Child Reunion” (a Top Ten hit), Simon, who had snuck several subtle musical explorations into the generally conservative S&G sound, broke free. -AllMusic Review…

By 1970, Nick Drake had lost his passion for life and music. Island Records decided to stop paying him and he turned to prescription drugs and pot. His management said Drake smoked “unbelievable amounts of marijuana” and by 1974, the singer was completely out of the public eye. The last song Nick Drake wrote was…

Buckley fans are split on this album but we aren’t. There are plenty of  soul/ funk albums that would seem to be more appropriate than another Tim Buckley album that want’s to be a Blaxploitation soundtrack. but that is what the book has.  “Tim Buckley: Greetings from L.A. (Warner Bros., 1972) Perverse as it may…

Balance is the key element of the Eagles’ self-titled debut album, a collection that contains elements of rock & roll, folk, and country, overlaid by vocal harmonies alternately suggestive of doo wop, the Beach Boys, and the Everly Brothers. – AllMusic Review by William Ruhlmann

The years have only been kind to the album considered David Ackles’s masterpiece when it was released. Ackles combined an early ’70s singer-songwriter sensibility with a theater music background that placed him as much in the tradition of Brecht-Weill and Jacques Brel as Bob Dylan. Not only are his songs fully realized, dramatic statements, but…

Buoyed by two U.K. number one singles in “Telegram Sam” and “Metal Guru,” The Slider became T. Rex’s most popular record on both sides of the Atlantic, despite the fact that it produced no hits in the U.S. The Slider essentially replicates all the virtues of Electric Warrior, crammed with effortless hooks and trashy fun.

From the Steven Stills website By 1972, what we call classic rock was pretty much peaking – though nobody at the time knew it. Except maybe Stephen Stills. The band and double-album he piloted and released that year—both named Manassas—now seem pivotal. Manassas brilliantly summed up the remarkable 1960s creative surge that revitalized rock’s roots…

After releasing two records during 1970-71, Stevie Wonder expanded his compositional palette with 1972’s Talking Book to include societal ills as well as tender love songs, and so recorded the first smash album of his career.

It took the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band until this album to come up with a merger of rock and country music that worked for both sides and everyone involved. Not only did this album result in exposure to a new and wider audience for the likes of Mother Maybelle Carter, Roy Acuff, Earl Scruggs, Merle…

After two albums, Todd Rundgren had one hit and a burgeoning cult following, plus growing respect as a hitmaking record producer. There’s no question he was busy, but as it turns out, all this work only scratched the surface of his ambition. He had decided to abandon the Runt pretense and recorded a full double…

1972 saw Brazil controlled by a repressive military regime, but it was also a watershed moment for Brazilian pop music, or as it’s often called, MPB. Tropicália heroes Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso had found success outside of Brazil and had already stirred the flames of inspiration for the corner music collective and people from…

Home is where the music is , marked a sharp detour from Hugh Masekela’s more pop-oriented jazz records of the ’60s. Masekela was chasing a different groove altogether. He was looking to create a very different kind of fusion, one that involved the rhythms and melodies of his native South Africa, and included the more…

Being Lou Reed in 1972 was a raw deal: two years after walking away from one of the greatest and most influential bands in rock history, he found himself a penniless, strung-out wreck, with a career suddenly and seriously on the wane. To make matters worse, his self-titled solo debut, released earlier that year, was…

Close to the Edge comprised just three tracks that represented the musical, lyrical, and sonic culmination of all that Yes had worked toward over the past five years. We are now in heavy prog.

Recorded over three nights in August 1972, Deep Purple’s Made in Japan was the record that brought the band to headliner status in the U.S. and elsewhere, and it remains a landmark in the history of heavy metal music.

Crank the volume up and the whole world will be going crazee all over again.  A very fun record that inspired everything from , hard rock, to glam to 80’s hair metal.

Mayfield, along with several other soul and funk musicians, spread messages of hope in the face of oppression, pride in being a member of the black race and gave courage to a generation of people who were demanding their human rights, without abandoning the struggle for equality. He has been compared to Martin Luther King,…

Graham Nash — of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young — has a story about his friend, Neil Young, that has been almost too perfect to believe for nearly three decades. As the myth goes, Nash was at Young’s ranch just south of San Francisco when Young asked him if he wanted to hear something. (That…