50 Albums I Really Want to Get Sometime
- Acid Drops, Spacedust, and Flying Saucers: Mojo Psychedelic Box Set
- Kevin Ayers/Joy of a Toy
- The Beatles/The White Album
- Chuck Berry/St. Louis to Liverpool
- Biosphere/Substrata
- Black Sabbath/Black Sabbath
- The Blues Magoos/Psychedelic Lollipop/Electric Comic Book (twofer)
- David Bowie/Hunky Dory
- The C.A. Quintet/Trip Thru Hell
- John Cale/Fear
- Caravan/Caravan
- The Clash/Give 'Em Enough Rope
- The Conet Project
- Country Joe and the Fish/I Feel Like I'm Fixin'-to-Die
- The Cramps/Stay Sick
- Daft Punk/Discovery
- The Damned/Machine Gun Etiquette
- The Doors/Waiting for the Sun
- The Electric Prunes/I Had Too Much to Dream
- Brian Eno/Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
- Jimi Hendrix/Live from Woodstock
- Buddy Holly/The Chirping Crickets
- The Human League/Dare!
- Kaleidoscope (UK)/Faintly Blowing
- Kaleidoscope (UK)/Tangerine Dream
- The La's/The La's
- The Millenium/Begin
- The Move/The Move
- The Move/Shazaam
- Nirvana (UK)/The Story of Simon Simopath
- Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond
- Os Mutantes/Os Mutantes
- Pavement/Wowee Zowee
- Pearls Before Swine/Balaklava
- Pearls Before Swine/One Nation Underground
- The Pixies/Trompe Le Monde
- Elvis Presley/Elvis Presley
- Sly and the Family Stone/Essential
- Soft Cell/Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret
- The Stone Roses/The Stone Roses
- Stevie Wonder/Songs in the Key of Life
Thanks to AJ for inspiring the list...
5/23/05: Ordered Soft Machine's Volumes One and Two and Status Quo's Picturesque Matchstickable. Replaced with The La's/The La's, Daft Punk/Discovery, and Kevin Ayers/Joy of a Toy, among others. Still not quite at fifty.
6/7/05: Got The Incredible String Band's 5000 Layers of the Onion/Hangman's Beautiful Daughter twofer.
6/20/05: Bought The Clash's Sandinista!. Replaced with The Clash's Combat Rock.
11/16/05: Need to update this list! I just ordered a twofer with both Eric Burdon and the Animals albums, Winds of Change and The Twian Shall Meet. Bought Suede's Suede a couple of weeks ago, and The Clash's Combat Rock was acquired over the summer. Oh yes, and throw The Descendents' Milo Goes to College in there too. Need to think about the replacements.
I love soft cell.......
Yeah, I've only heard the obvious single off the album, but seems like anyone who's heard the entire album loves it. When allmusic.com calls it "sleazy dance music," that's enough to get my interest...
Johnny Waco
Was Feel-like-I-m-fixin-to-die ever realeased on CD ? I can't seem to find any decent CD releases of Country Joe's here in Belgium... anyway it's nice to see included here some albums I personally like a lot.
Country Joe's first two albums (at least the first two--maybe more) are on CD on a label called Vanguard. I ordered Electric Music for the Mind and Body off Amazon (US) a couple years back, and hope to do the same with Fixin'-to-Die soon. The prevailing belief is that their music is nothing more than a relic of the late sixties, but I think it holds up surprisingly well.
I like your Fifty Top Albums list; since we're on the topic of psychedelic, I particularly noted with satisfaction Forever Changes and Notorious Byrd Brothers.
Johnny Waco
thanks for the info I guess I'll have to order them via internet... my belief, based on the feelings I have towards the music I have heard and listened to, is that rock music was at its creative best from 1966 to 1969.
I go back and forth on whether the late-sixties/early seventies is the golden age of rock. I think there is a lot of great music being made even today, but the major difference with the earlier time is that in the late sixties most of the great music was also what was popular, whereas now most of what is popular is crap, and you have to search around for the good stuff. Then again, even some of the unpopular stuff from the late sixties (like Forever Changes) was also great. So go figure.
If you take the birth of rock and roll to be roughly 1955 (give or take a year) than the late sixties really isn't too far past that, so it makes sense that so much creativity would flower, but later a lot of rock would become stagnant.
All that to say, I probably agree with you...
Johnny Waco
Yes, that's the kind of analysis I usually conduct... in the late sixties, rock was a "teenager" and therefore believing anything was possible and nothing was forbidden... in the 70's, rock became an "adult" taking things a little too seriously and starting to compromise more and more often (and so were born prog-rock, hard-rock, glam-rock and the lot of those silly subdivisions)... and that would make "punk" some kind of mid-life crisis as if rock realized what it had come to and tried to recapture the feelings of its teenage years...
Ha! I like that way of looking at it. Definitely after punk died down, we've only had periodic upheavals when the rock that had passion and a renewed sense of possibilities broke through into the mainstream. No wonder genres like hip-hop and dance have contributed to some of the fresher sounding albums of the last few years (and I'm not talking about Limp Bizkit), as they infused some new vitality into this lumbering genre. I'm far from declaring rock "dead," as it seems many are ready to do, but it definitely needs to keep looking for new influences and inspirations to keep it going.
Johnny Waco
The answer might come from a new "looking back" attitude as The White Stripes and The Strokes have been heavily mining in 50's-60's country roots and 70's glam-urban rock respectively in the US and The Libertines and Franz Ferdinand are doing in Europe... Rock is definitely not dead but we are not exactly in a period of freshness and original creation when the only basic choice you have is either U2 or Rammstein (and one of those two I enjoy a lot).
I'm praying that you mean U2;) I don't think their last couple of albums (the "throwback" albums) have been overwhelming, but I'm happy that 25 years into their career they haven't turned themselves into a parody the way the Stones were at this point (late-eighties).
Other than two songs on the Lost Highway soundtrack, Rammstein hasn't really caught my fancy.
And I do like a lot of what you referred to as the "looking back" bands; there is a vitality in their music that you don't hear from too many artists today.
Johnny Waco
sorry to disappoint you but I never eeeever (oops, closet jerichoholic) liked U2... On the other hand (that would be the left one, if you know what I mean, some kind of political innuendo) I enjoy Rammstein, have seen them live once, have bought a live DVD but probably couldn't sit through a whole album... it's, uh, a bit repetitive, you see... but at least their music has structure and soul which can't be said of any of the bands they usually get talked about in the same sentence...
You must own Sandinista.
Hopefully I'll get it soon. Thanks for the recommendation.
Johnny Waco