Ah, the Beatles’ finest (half) hour. I can’t count how many times I’ve had the “Which Beatles album was the best?” conversation with friends, family and sometimes total strangers. My answer has been the same ever since I first heard Revolver in high school, and most I...
Learning the ins and outs of Miles Davis’ extensive discography has been a very long and, it should be noted, still ongoing process, particularly since his career has spanned several phases of modern jazz: bop, cool, modal music, and fusion, the latter of which In a...
Even though my favorite Rolling Stones songs are Let It Bleed‘s “Gimme Shelter” and “Midnight Rambler,” my favorite Stones album has always been Sticky Fingers. Aside from being loaded with great songs that rank among the Stones’ best (“Brown Sugar,” “Wild Horses”),...
Although no one knew it at the time, Superunknown was released a month before Kurt Cobain took his own life, and it’s really the last grunge album that sounds fully whole as a result. I still consider Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy and the Foo Fighters’ debut, which were...
A vitally important band in the history of rock & roll was the Yardbirds, which at different points in its history featured three of the greatest guitarists ever: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Clapton quit the Yardbirds in 1965 over creative differences,...
Like most people my age, I was introduced to reggae through Bob Marley’s outstanding 1984 compilation Legend, which was released shortly after his death in 1981. Legend has become one of the most important compilation albums in the history of popular music, serving as...
When I was in high school, I bought the 1997 CD reissue of Are You Experienced with six extra tracks — some from the UK version — added to pad out the album. I had no idea the original album was only eleven tracks long, a fact I remained ignorant of for several years....
The final fourteen months of Duane Allman’s life were filled with events worthy of rock & roll lore, starting with him befriending Eric Clapton while they were both in Miami in the summer of 1970. Clapton was recording the great Layla album with Derek and the...
I started to take a deeper interest in hip-hop when I got to college, since the library at the music school had a whole bunch of classic rap albums that the local public libraries where I grew up in Maryland deemed too explicit to carry. You didn’t even have to be a...
Pink Floyd really have six albums of note, although they have made many more than that: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), Meddle (1971), The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979). The first of those, which is...