The Greatest Rock and Roll Album of All Time

Yahoo Music this week published a list of what they consider the top twenty albums of all time. The list is based on a formula that includes sales, plus critical acclaim, plus"staying power," plus Grammy awards (!!). Go read the whole thing to get the list and the reasoning behind the selections.

Back now? What'd ya think? Yeah, me too.

What garbage! Four Led Zeppelin records in the top twenty? Give me a break. No Elvis. No Stones. No Dylan. No Van Morrison. No Rod Stewart. No Clapton. The wrong Beatles. The wrong Bruce.

As they say in the IT field, garbage in, garbage out. The writer says he wants to approach the task as a science but his science is bad. The formula is complete nonsense. It uses sales as its initial criteria, which raises multiple problems. Besides the fact that sales often have nothing to do with a record's worth or importance, it also means different things in different eras. The record buying public in 1964 when The Beatles took America by storm was minuscule compared to the record buying public of ten, or twenty, or thirty years later. We were coming out of the age of radio; buying records was not a natural everyday part of people's lives. And we weren't as prosperous; their wasn't as much money to spend on luxuries, which record buying was certainly considered at the time. So, if you're going to use sales then those sales must be weighted by era or by year to take these facts into consideration. And if you do that the Yahoo list immediately becomes bogus. Give weight to the sales category and The Beatles probably take ten of the twenty spots. Without it, you get this list, heavily biased against the early days of rock and roll, i.e. the best days.

Next, they use a formula for "staying power" and while I agree that a record must last to be considered great I'm not sure this formula works either. They base staying power on the price one would pay in the secondary market for a record today but again, this would need to be tweaked based on supply and demand; not every record out there in available in the same supply. But this is a quibble - no big deal.

They then consider critical response to the record and here we have another problem - most critics are idiots. There have been many great rock and roll critics but the vast majority will be taken in by such leaden, pretentious tripe as Led Zeppelin, or barbershop rock like The Eagles, or worse. So it depends on who the critics are. If they're polling the guy from People magazine and your local daily, well, they're not likely to be fonts of critical wisdom.

Finally, they use total number of Grammy awards the record received. Grammy awards!! Who actually takes the Grammy awards seriously? To be fair, the Yahoo writer recognizes this and weights the Grammy criteria of such little importance to his total formula that it probably could have been thrown out all together, as it should.

That's the entire formula but it gets worse. They rule out best-of or greatest hits collections and here you have another bias against the early days of rock. Rock and roll in the 1950s and even up until the mid-sixties was a singles medium. 45s were what you bought, not LPs. Yes, albums were produced but there was little or no consideration given to recording an album as an entire cohesive entity, as a concept, as something that held together and made sense as a whole. That kind of thinking didn't evolve until the mid-60s and later. Albums released before this, for the most part, were simply collections of singles - another way for the record companies to make money once the 45s record sales had begun to wane. And they were expendable - no one gave a second thought to crafting an album as something made to last. So, over the years, the original albums that much of the great rock and roll initially appeared on faded away and were forgotten. But the singles remained. They were remembered and loved. And there was only one way for later generations to enjoy them: best-of or greatest hits collections. Ruling these formats out rules out Chuck Berry; Buddy Holly: Little Richard; Jerry Lee Lewis; The Drifters: The Coasters; The Five Satins and the rest of the great doowop music; Phil Spector's music; the music from The Brill Building; the girl groups. All of it gone. Combined with my previous point about not giving weight to sales, which leaves out much of the music from the 1960s, and the bulk of rock and roll history has been erased.

What you end up with is a list such as Yahoo's, with its Guns and Roses, its Van Halen, its Metallica, its Pink Floyd. If this is rock and roll then give me Benny Goodman. So, I say, fie on your formula. Take a stand, man.

You want the greatest records of all-time? Well, here they are. Of course, I have my own rules. To begin with I've actually listed over thirty records because you simply can't stop at twenty - you'd leave too much good stuff out. Also, because my list is weighted heavily towards the early days of rock and roll, there are lots of best-of collections. What I'm looking for here is the best rock and roll has to offer and that makes best-of collections vital, for reasons already stated. So if you're being exiled to a desert island, these are the records you need to have with you, loaded to an IPod with a battery that never runs out. The first twenty-eight records on the list can be ranked in any order you'd like. Saying that one of them is better than the other is impossible - it all depends on the day, your mood, etc. The final four records are a list of the contenders for THE GREATEST RECORD OF ALL TIME. In the end I'll make my choice. You may disagree with my final selection and that's okay but you must choose from among my final four. I shall allow no exceptions. So enjoy, be delighted, and be outraged.

1. The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed
2. Phil Spector's Greatest Hits
3. Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run
4. The Beatles - Rubber Soul
5. Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde
6. Fleetwood Mac - Rumours/Fleetwood Mac
7. Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells a Story
8. Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
9. Carole King - Tapestry
10. Graham Parker and The Rumour - Heat Treatment
11. Al Green - Greatest Hits
12. Van Morrison - Moondance
13. Chuck Berry's Greatest Hits
14. Buddy Holly's Greatest Hits
15. Doo Wop's Greatest Hits
16. Dion and the Belmont's Greatest Hits/Cigar, Acapella, Candy
17. Elvis Costello - This Year's Model
18. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Green River
19. Marvin Gaye- What's Going On
20. The Birth of Soul: The Complete Atlantic R&B - Ray Charles
21. Sly and the Family Stone's Greatest Hits
22. Motown's Greatest Hits - Smokey, the Temps, the 4 Tops, Gladys Knight, Jackson 5
23. Atlantic Rhythm & Blues 1947-1974
24. Elton John's Greatest Hits
25. Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
26. Roy Orbison's Greatest Hits
27. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs - Derek & The Dominoes
28. The Drifters - Greatest Hits

Okay, a few comments. The Beatles made the Yahoo list with The White Album and Abbey Road. Now these are both terrific records but they are not their best. But I want to address The Beatles' record one normally sees in these greatest album lists - "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". Let's get something straight. Sgt. Pepper is not only not their best album it is among their worst. Now, it's still a fine record - The Beatles made little music that could be considered bad. But the record derives its reputation from the era in which it was recorded, the psychedelic era, and because of the battle of the bands that was going on at the time; Dylan, The Stones, The Beach Boys, The Who, and a few other bands were at the time consciously trying to top one another with each release. One of the ways they were doing so was with new recording techniques, the type of which are all over Sgt. Pepper, most noticeably on "A Day In the Life". Whether these techniques work for you I don't know. They don't for me. The bottom line is that the songs on Sgt. Pepper can't measure up to the songs from the very early days nor songs from a record such as "Rubber Soul", which I've included in my list above and which is the first record The Beatles went into the studio to record as a record rather than a collection of singles. Even post-Sgt. Pepper records like The White Album or Abbey Road have better songs than Sgt. Pepper. It's a good record but its reputation is inflated.

I'm a little light on The Stones in my list. I could have included "Sticky Fingers" or "Exile on Main Street" very easily. I decided on "Let It Bleed" because it includes what may be the best song ever recorded in rock and roll history - "Gimme Shelter". There are a few other contenders but I'll cover the best songs of rock and roll in another post at another time. Let's continue with the best albums.

There is no way that Bruce's "Born in the U.S.A", included on the Yahoo list, is a better record than "Born to Run", which I include on my own. Even "Darkness On the Edge of Town" and "The River" and possibly "Tunnel of Love" is better than "U.S.A".

I include two of Fleetwood Mac's records as a single entry because they are of a piece, and also because it's my list and I'll do what I want. You got a problem with that, make your own list. "Rumours" pushes further than "Fleetwood Mac" but the sound and the style are the same. I'd go with "Rumours" if forced to make a choice because it contains what is possibly the greatest pop-rock single of the 1970's, "Go Your Own Way". These records defined an era for many of us and to this day I still cannot hear a song from either of them without thinking of camping out at Virginia Beach in the late 1970s, tanned, clad only in cutoff jeans, beer in hand, burger on the grill, the van door open with these songs blasting out of it at full volume; sweet, drunken, happy times.

I've got lots more to say about all of these records but this post is getting long. This will happen when I address the subject of rock and roll because it's the subject I know best, along with the game of baseball. I'll come back to the above records in due time in other posts but for now I'll stop my comments on the initial list here so I can address the subject of THE GREATEST RECORD OF ALL TIME. Ready? Here are the contenders:

1. Van Morrison - Astral Weeks
2. The Beatles - With The Beatles
3. Elvis Presley - The Sun Sessions
4. Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited

I've address "Astral Weeks" previously in my Van Morrison post back in April. I hope I did it justice there. I will concede that, while this record means the world to me, it is not everyone's cup of tea. As such, while it certainly may be the best record ever made, it can't be considered as the greatest due to its limited appeal. Rock and roll is, after all, a popular medium and accessibility must figure in somewhere. Furthermore, if it had influence it was only within the music world itself; it had no influence on the society at large as the other three records did. So as much as I hate to do it, I must drop "Astral Weeks" from my list.

So we're down to three. "Highway 61" is clearly Dylan at the height of his powers. The wit, the imagination, the force of his personality, the quality of the songs, combine here to create something brand new, something no one had ever heard before, something no one else could do. Plus it has "Like a Rolling Stone", his finest song, one of such brilliance that it still shines brightly to this day. I know every drum beat, bass line, organ riff, and vocal nuance in this song - I've listened to it many thousands of times and I will never tire of listening to it. "Highway 61" was hugely influential within the music world at the time and much of what came later would never have been made without it. Still, while it changed the music world, it didn't change the world at large, at least not as much as the final two records and not as directly. It's social implications simply don't match up to the final two contenders. So, again, this record which I adore, must be left behind.

So we're down to two: Elvis vs. The Beatles, which is appropriate for they are the two titans of rock. No one else comes close. They both changed the world of music and the world at large. Had they not existed things would be different than they are now, and not just musically. How it would be different I can't say - I'll leave that to the social scientists to speculate on - but that they both took the lead in what became significant social transformations is pretty undeniable. Whether the social disruptions caused by Elvis were more significant than those caused by The Beatles I won't get into. One could claim that The Beatles were just extending what Elvis started, but one could also claim it took The Beatles to complete the revolution; there was no going back after they were through. So I am agnostic on this point.

Which leaves the music. Which leaves me wondering why I've put myself in this position. To choose between these two records musically is foolish; one cannot say the one is better than the other. It depends. But like I told the Yahoo guy, take a stand. So here's my stand, based purely one which record I honestly can say I enjoy more than the other, at least most of the time.

This is THE GREATEST ROCK AND ROLL ALBUM OF ALL TIME.