Essential Albums...

[Mningasimisonda]

These are not necessarily my favourites, but generally accepted classics I heard growing up, and a good start for these bands. I'll add more if I think of them... most gave been said already anyway...

Beatles - Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, White Album, Abbey Road
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall
David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust
Oasis - Morning Glory
The Who - Tommy, Who's Next
Radiohead - OK Computer, The Bends, Kid A

 

[Mningasimisonda]

The Eagles - Hotel California

The last song is my favourite on this.

 

[mianfei]

Greetings from L.A. by Tim Buckley, I heard it 20 years after it came out and certainly blew my hair back

Tim’s long been a huge critical favourite with no popular acclaim (only Happy, Sad of his albums dented the Billboard top 150), indeed if my memory serves me right ever since before he died of a heroin overdose. I haven’t heard all his work, though Lorca’s first side is impressive and much less difficult than critics like to make people think.

Joe S. Harrington listed Greetings from L.A. at #75 on his 2002 Top 100 Albums, which remains a historical touchstone for me and music:

#75. Greetings From LA – Tim Buckley (Warner Bros, 1972):

Buckley was always crazier than a loon and this may be his most demented opus. It is MUCH different from his Elektra-Reprise stuff (although “Get on Top” does rather sway to that same almost gypsy raga thing as “Gypsy Woman” on Happy Sad). One thing is for sure: whereas his older music was merely “sombre,” this album is downright depressing – and INSANE. By this point Buckley must have become severely depressed – convinced he was NEVER gonna be a hit (and hey, in the sixties, in light of the British Invasion and Dylan many inaccessible musicians though they would become a hit) he retreats into a kind of soulful self-loathing. Listen to him stutter like an absolute insomniac on “Get on Top” – I cannot tell if he is singing in Italian or doing Van Morrison one better with a melismatic sweep of mouth-utterings. The musicians here are a whole new cast as opposed to the usual band (i.e. Lee Underwood etc.) and we can hear Buckley already drifting towards the more soulful bent of Look at the Fool (his swan-song before he died).

However, what this album represents most of all, like a good deal of the albums on this list, is an artist coming to terms with his identity as far as the whole psychic chain of command from thought to emotion to motion. There was never a dishonest word on any Buckley album, the guy always strove for his own universe and placing it within the context of, I do not know – all of our universes. Therefore, in Tim Buckley’s eyes, this was his attempt at making a typical-for-the-time LA studio LP. “Nighthawking” for instance sounds rather like Randy Newman by way of the Doobie Brothers. The songs are short, no “Making Love From Room 109 of the San Pedro Hotel” – this is the closest Tim ever got to an ordinary “rock & roll” LP.

However, you have to understand it through the filter of lyrics like “I’ve gotta shoot me a gook before dawn” and two – possibly three – whole songs about S&M. On the inner sleeve he’s wearing a gas mask which some folks might have thought was some hippie-ecological commentary on the smog plague of LA but I suspect, given the evidence of the aforementioned songs, that it was more of a bondage get-up but I could of course be wrong). Once again, the guy was a self-loather on an almost Manson level. In addition, where his kind of hippie-dippie sixties albums placed him in the sensitive minstrel category, what this album makes clear is what a wise man he was. Wiser than Kari Maples. I remember talking to my friend Josh one day and telling him my reaction of a preview of Greetings: “Well, the guy was some kind of S&M freak.” What else can one make of songs like “Make it Right,” where he literally cries out “beat me, whip me, make it right again”?

Moreover, in “Move with Me” he volunteers to be a female’s “houseboy.” Just the title “Get on Top” alone makes it clear that he’s never been opposed to assuming a more sexual viewpoint. Every song on this album is about sex – but it does not sound happy and joyous like, say, Lisa Suckdog. It sounds painful and agonising by a man who was courting death already (although he would not die until June 28 1975). There used to be this guy around Portland, Maine named Opus Glen – he was one of the first real freaks there, the kind of guy who liked the Stooges in the seventies (we never knew ANY people who listened to the Stooges then except the critics in Creem – all the old Boomers in Portland then were hippies but, if you noticed, I made the distinction that good old Glendora, frog-faced bastard that he was, was a freak as opposed to smelly hippie). When I was growing up he worked in a record store (of course the ultimate job for the burgeoning hipster – as opposed to hippie – even now) but later on, he drifted into cocaine. Last time I ever saw Opus Glen it was in a Portland bar room circa early 1990s. The guy did NOT look good and he knew it. In fact, I distinctly remember him saying something chilling that night, something to the effect of “the way I’m going I’m probably going to be dead soon” (see Black Flag circa 1981: “If I keep on doing this I’m going to end up dead”). Anyway, the other thing I remember distinctly about that night is him telling me that Greetings From LA was “the greatest album ever” (a title he had previously reserved for Trout Mask Replica). Six months later he was dead, gone to join Tim Buckley in the great beyond.

This description is somewhat sanitised compared to the original in the old webzine Blastitude, but I hope it will give an at least relatively clearer idea of Harrington’s thoughts on the album. Other critics like Piero Scaruffi, Richie Unterberger and Mark Prindle have been critical of Greetings from L.A., viewing it a failed attempt to achieve some commercial success.

Great album and better than anything put out by his son Jeff.

I can only agree Tim had more talent than his son – Jeff’s posthumous album Sketches (for My Sweetheart The Drunk) topped the charts here in Australia but I was not at all impressed upon hearing it on the radio.

 

[Gough]

In a similar vein to the Buckley album, David Crosby's If Only I Could Remember My Name is a beauty.

 

[Eddie Dingle]

Has Spiritualized "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space" got a mention yet?

It's essential.

 

[crownie]

Has Spiritualized "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space" got a mention yet?

It's essential.

really have to be in one of those moods to digest it but the first few times i listened to this it blew me away.

 

[mellowyellow]

My essential 1970's albums

Steve Miller Band Book Of Dreams
Jackson Browne The Pretender/late for the sky
Pink Floyd The Dark Side Of The Moon
Fleetwood Mac Rumors
Neil Young Harvest
Van Morrison Moondance
Cosby Stills Nash And Young Deja Vu
Deep Purple Machine Head
Stevie Wonder Songs in The Key Of Life

80's to come

 

[chargers 09]

My essential 1970's albums

Steve Miller Band Book Of Dreams
Jackson Browne The Pretender/late for the sky
Pink Floyd The Dark Side Of The Moon
Fleetwood Mac Rumors
Neil Young Harvest
Van Morrison Moondance
Cosby Stills Nash And Young Deja Vu
Deep Purple Machine Head
Stevie Wonder Songs in The Key Of Life

80's to come

I thought Rumours was early 80's?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk[emoji18][emoji217]

 

[Eddie Dingle]

I thought Rumours was early 80's?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk[emoji18][emoji217]

Release date Feb 4 1977.

 

[mellowyellow]

The 80's....a rich vein to choose from but my essential would be...

Joy Division - Closer
The Clash-London Calling
The Police-Synchronicity
Robbie Robertson - Robbie Robertson
Tears For Fears - The Seeds Of Love
U2. War/Joshua Tree.
Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues
Sting - Nothing Like The Sun