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Friday Fun Thread for March 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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136 Nick Drake – Pink Moon (1972)

The latent potential that was evident in Drake’s previous two albums comes exploding to the surface here. The more conventional production of those albums is replaced with just guitar and vocals, and while such spare arrangements have the tendency to make songs sound like unfinished demos, here Drakes guitar playing, particular the use of nonstandard tunings, makes the accompaniment sufficiently interesting without distracting from his voice, which is much further to the forefront here than previously. Its conciseness is also an asset—eleven songs, none longer than four minutes, less than a half-hour total running time—as the record keeps moving and is over before it starts to drag; the sound is great but it’s not something that would be great for an hour. The troubled Drake never released another album and passed away within a few years of this release, which remains the truest expression of his artistic vision.

135 Cat Stevens – Teaser and the Fire Cat (1971)

Cat Stevens’s career can be described as a public spiritual quest, albeit one that culminated with his conversion to Islam and subsequent departure from the industry. This spirituality had started seeping in on the previous year’s Tea for the Tillerman and would become more profound on subsequent recordings, but here is where it reached its apex, being omnipresent without being dominating. Only Stevens could take a Protestant hymn like “Morning Has Broken” and incorporate it seamlessly within a secular work without irony, and giving it the reverence it’s due without coming across as preachy.

134 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972)

Country music is beyond the scope of this list, but this album is a special case. The country scene entered the 1970s in a state of crisis. Nashville had been moving toward a smoother sound since the mid-1950s and by 1970 it owed more to traditional pop than to its honky-tonk roots. The rest of the industry was at a loss for how to cope with the rise of rock, especially psychedelia, which captured most of the youth market and took it in directions that seemed diametrically opposed to country tradition (this made for some rather interesting recordings). The irony was psychedelic rock had a much stronger folk and country influence than most would have guessed, and country rock had been bubbling underground in California since at least 1968. Hence, it was a group of Bay Area hippies who got started as part of the jug band tradition who would bridge the divide, uniting with members of country’s first generation to create an album that would jumpstart an interest in roots music that still hasn’t died.

133 Commodores – Commodores (1977)

Some groups reach their pinnacle when the tendencies of their early years are balanced by the tendencies of their later years. The Commodores started out as a pedal to the metal funk band but gradually got smoother and more pop oriented until culminating in the lite R&B which was Lionel Ritchie’s solo career. This is the point where Ritchie’s songwriting chops were starting to develop more fully, getting beyond typical funk rhythms but still retaining enough of it to keep the music from feeling schlocky.

132 Tom Waits – Blue Valentine (1978)

Tom Waits albums of the 1970s show a gradual progression toward the Tom Waits of the 1980s and beyond that he is best know for today. He started off as a piano-based singer/songwriter with a heavier than usual jazz and blues influence, but his albums would become increasingly abstract until the first traces of his classic “junkyard sound” were heard on 1980’s Heartattack and Vine. Blue Valentine is his final album before this transition. His trademark growl was nearly perfected, and songwriting leans more heavily on the blues than previous efforts, but it’s a slick, jazzy blues with more piano and sax than guitar. This is probably the last Waits album that can be described as “accessible” by any stretch of the imagination.

131 Neil Young and Crazy Horse – Ragged Glory (1990)

The album that solidified Young’s reputation as the Godfather of Grunge. In 1977, punk rockers had felt that the contemporary rock scene had become too decadent and had fallen too far afield from its roots as aggressive, youth oriented music, so they sought to strip out all the unnecessary fluff while retaining its essence. Grunge largely arose from the same ethos, but with one crucial distinction—it wasn’t about to throw away 25 years of musical development to achieve this goal. Reform, not revolution. Neil Young provided the template on how this could be done. As a classic rocker himself he couldn’t deny the past without denying his own part in it, and seemingly had no interest in doing so anyway; he was merely trying to find his own way after a decade in the wilderness of horrid genre exercises. He could provide a sound that was stripped-down and grungy but capable of sophistication, not deliberately eschewing complicated song structures or solos, and it set the template for rock’s last major revolution.

130 Black Sabbath – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)

The early 1970s is normally viewed as a time of specialization in rock, when the music split from a somewhat unified mainstream into an array of distinct subgenres. While there is a great deal of truth to this, there was still a great deal of cross-pollination, if not full-on hybridization, and in the days before punk, the guiding spirit still led towards increasing sophistication. If progressive metal a la Dream Theater is now a recognized subgenre, this is one of its early prodromes, as Black Sabbath sought to maximize their sound by diversifying their song structures and instrumentation, and brough in Rick Wakeman of Yes to play synthesizers on one track. Sabbath couldn’t keep it up and would never come close to these heights until 1980’s Heaven and Hell, but by then Ozzy was out of the band, and metal was in an entirely different place.

129 Eric Clapton – Slowhand (1977)

While Eric Clapton may have spent the first part of his career as a blues rock guitar god, his solo material seems more interested in conforming with a lighter, mainstream sound than in inducing fits of unrestrained air guitar. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, though, as there’s a lot more to interesting guitar playing than shredding, and songwriting counts for as least as much as skill and inspiration. What we end up with is a record that works incredibly well as an album—“Cocaine” demonstrates that Clapton can’t go wrong when covering J.J. Cale, “Lay Down Sally” has a sneaky good guitar solo, “Mean Old Frisco” shows that he hasn’t lost his blues touch, and “The Core” may simply be the finest performance of his career.

128 Alice in Chains – Jar of Flies (1994)

Grunge wasn’t exactly known for being happy, positive music, but Alice in Chains was excessively dark and aggressive even when grading on a curve. This album demonstrates that loud guitars and pounding drums aren’t necessary to achieve this effect; it’s as dark and aggressive as anything in their career but is based largely around acoustic instruments. It’s also a testament to the Achilles Heel of the ‘90s, the CD. They had better sound, but they also held 74 minutes of music, and many albums from the decade suffer due to the temptation to fill as much of this space as possible. At 7 songs and 30 minutes this was technically an EP, but it’s longer than a lot of albums from the 60s, and its brevity means the quality never suffers.

127 Jimi Hendrix – Axis: Bold as Love (1968)

Hendrix’s status as a Guitar God meant that he often substituted instrumental talent for songwriting talent. His albums are uniformly excellent, but most suffer from enough bits of self-indulgence that it detracts from the whole. This is the exception. Despite including the fewest stone classics of any of his albums (“Little Wing” is the only song on here that’s reasonably well-known), it manages to stay engaging from top to bottom.

126 Bob Marley and the Wailers – Live! (1975)

Bob Marley’s 1970s material is Marley qua Marley, the Bob Marley that’s played on the radio and that college kids have posted on their dorm room walls. But he had a prehistory recording low-budget records in Jamaica, and some fans feel that the slickness of his ‘70s albums detracts from his Jamaican essence. But it nonetheless can’t be denied that he wrote his best material in the ‘70s. Being outside the confines of the recording studio limits the slickness of the production and shows what the songs can be when the band just plays. And the compilers had an ear for quality because the selections are among the best Bob had released so far, including the definitive version of “No Woman, No Cry”.

125 Little Feat – Dixie Chicken (1973)

Little Feat was an atypical southern rock band. They started off as a roots band in the style of Ry Cooder, but for this album they added a healthy dose of New Orleans funk in the style of the Meters or Dr. John. The title cut and “Fat Man in the Bathtub” are classics, and the sound of this record set the template for the rest of the band’s career.

124 Donald Fagen – The Nightfly (1982)

Steely Dan broke up after 1980’s Gaucho and Donald Becker’s first solo album continues in much the same vein. But there’s one crucial difference: While Steely Dan, even at its most upbeat, was always dark and cynical, this record, a loose concept album based on the Kennedy Era, is unabashedly optimistic. The traditional Dan elements still remain, though. The songwriting exhibits a heavy jazz and R&B influence, the production is slick and nearly flawless, and the ironic (or is it sardonic?) sense of humor is intact, complete with lines like “Hello Baton Rouge—would you turn your radio down?”

Addendum concerning the scope of this list:

This list is limited to rock albums. The greatest album of all time is Miles Ahead by Miles Davis, but that won't be appearing on here. Neither will any other jazz, country, bluegrass, blues, new age, world music, gospel, polka, traditional pop, or classical, to the extent that classical even has albums. That being said, the definition of rock I'm using is expansive, and covers most of what could be considered pop music that's been released since the early 1960s. To elaborate, R&B is included because the early histories of rock and R&B are so intertwined that it's impossible to separate them. This accordingly goes the same for any genre that primarily grew out of rock or R&B, so things like rap and electronica are included as well. The exceptions to this general rule are for reggae and Afrobeat. Reggae grew out of traditional Jamaican music, and while the heavy influence from rock and R&B makes me lean towards including it, what really does it is the fact that reggae outside of Jamaica was primarily directed at rock and R&B audiences and not at cult weirdos who like traditional Jamaican music. Bob Marley has become as much a part of the fabric of rock music as anyone. Afrobeat, while less well known and while having more of a jazz influence, follows a similar pattern; Western audiences primarily became acquainted with it through former Cream drummer Ginger Baker's work with Fela Kuti and Africa '70.

Additionally, this list is limited to regular studio albums and regular live albums. The Rolling Stone greatest albums lists include compilations and greatest hits albums on the basis that:

a well-made compilation can be just as coherent and significant as an LP, because compilations helped shaped music history, and because many hugely important artists recorded their best work before the album had arrived as a prominent format.

To that last point, some bands were singles bands, and that's okay. But prior to the album revolution, most artists were focusing on singles while albums were tossed-off afterthoughts replete with filler. The strength of these compilations is more a testament to the artist's strength recording singles and the compiler's ability to select and sequence tracks rather than the artist's ability to record albums. I'm not trying to represent every artist I like or think is important but to discuss the greatest albums of all time. Furthermore, if I were to admit compilations things get a bit dicey. Most major artists have had several compilations released over the years, and by this point a lot of them have had either their entire output or representative samples of it released in great big boxed sets with informative booklets and all kinds of other goodies. What's better, a good single album, or a box that has all of them? It would be a little too convenient to say the box, but at that point you're just ranking artists and not albums. Finally, this also does not include archive material, whether it consist of previously unreleased studio outtakes or live shows. While some of this is undeniably great, it's not really in the spirit of the album. This also doesn't include "live series" releases of entire shows that are commonly released from groups like Pearl Jam, Phish, and the Grateful Dead. The purpose of these releases is to include an entire concert, not to make a coherent album. While many are great and some have gotten get five stars, they aren't really in the spirit of the thing. There are also a ton of them, and including them would suggest that I've heard a representative sample. Luckily, the best material from these is included on regular live albums, by which I mean live albums that were part of a normal release schedule and include relatively recent performances. And of course, we won't mention bootlegs.

Does Iron Maiden make it in somewhere, and if not: wrong category or insufficient quality?

They do not. But the reason is more anodyne than either of your suggestions—I just haven't listened to any of their albums yet. I do like them though. Everything comes from a spreadsheet I finally compiled of listening lists that I've had in various forms since at least 2009 and Iron Maiden just never made it on there for some reason. Same with Judas Priest and Motorhead. I should probably get around to that soon, though, because it's a pretty big omission.