Rolling Stone's "50 Coolest Albums of All Time"

Rolling Stone Magazine ^ | 03/19/02

[socal_parrot]

Top 50 Coolest Albums of All Time

1. Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat
2. Rolling Stones - Aftermath
3. James Brown - Live at the Apollo
4. Chuck Berry - The Great Twenty-Eight
5. Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique
6. Blondie - Parallel Lines
7. Aretha Franklin - Spirit in the Dark
8. Massive Attack - Protection
9. Dusty Springfield - Dusty in Memphis
10. The Beatles - Revolver
11. Sly & the Family Stone - Fresh
12. Pavement - Wowee Zowee!
13. Steely Dan - Countdown to Ecstasy
14. Prince - 1999
15. Bob Dylan - John Wesley Harding
16. Bjork - Vespertine
17. Various - Heavyweight Sound: Blood and Fire Sampler
18. Otis Redding - The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul
19. Eric B. & Rakim - Paid in Full
20. Chic - Real People
21. David Bowie - Station to Station
22. Jorge Ben - Africa Brasil
23. Frank Sinatra - Songs for Swingin' Lovers!
24. Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
25. Culture - Two Sevens Clash
26. Brides of Funkenstein - Never Buy Texas from a Cowboy
27. Beck - Odelay
28. The Ronettes - Best of the Ronettes
29. Miles Davis - In A Silent Way
30. Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure
31. Michael Jackson - Off the Wall
32. Chemical Brothers - Dig Your Own Hole
33. Howlin' Wolf - Howlin' Wolf
34. White Stripes - De Stijl
35. Various - Super Bad is Back
36. Joan Jett - Bad Reputation
37. Jungle Brothers - Done by the Forces of Nature
38. Alexander Spence - Oar
39. Cheap Trick - Heaven Tonight
40. Bikini Kill - Reject All American
41. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles - Anthology
42. Merle Haggard - Songs I'll Always Sing
43. Roxanne Shante - Bad Sister
44. Quicksilver Messenger Service - Happy Trails
45. Serge Gainsbourg - Comic Strip
46. Isaac Hayes - Hot Buttered Soul
47. Blue Oyster Cult - Secret Treaties
48. Aphex Twin - Classics
49. The Strokes - Is This It
50. Madonna - You Can Dance

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[gracie1]

Montrose's first album. The ultimate rock and roll album

I thought I was the only one who remembered that albumn! My best friend partied with Bob Chuch & Ronnie Montrose back in the day. Rock Candy definately Rocks!

[aomagrat]

J.J. Cale (who I saw a week ago) super cool.

I would give my first born to see J.J. Cale.

[gracie1]

Several years ago I was The Chambers Brothers tune "Time" used for a financial commercial. Oooohhh, the humanity! Now that was a cool song!

[aomagrat]

I had "Montrose" on vinyl when I was in high school back in the '70's. Now I have it on CD. Still the ultimate Rock album.

[gracie1]

No Zeppelin, no Exiles on Main Street, no Pet Sounds, No Sgt Pepper, no Talking Heads '77, gee what an uncool list.

And the picks on the list, Madonna, Michael Jackson, whats up with that?

[Cyber Liberty]

I picked up the lack of the album that was in Billboard's top 200 albums for over a decade.

[buccaneer81]

No Todd Rundgren or Kate Bush? (And Dream Police was a better Cheap Trick album than Heaven Tonight.

[RangeRatt]

you have no idea...imagine having the name of a song on your mind, and being able to find it in a card catalog, and then go to the corresponding stack & pull out the wax. AFRTS pressed their own vinyl for several decades, and that's where this library came from.

The lost includes a nearly complete collection of "The King Biscuit Flour Hour", all of those great live shows that the FM stations had late at night, when the DJ's were "out of the studio", and thousands more...still makes me sad when I think about it.

[L.N. Smithee]

No, I am serious...how do they define "cool?" Remember, at one time lots of stuff was "cool" that isn't now. Donna Summer, the Village People, and The Knack were once cool.

[socal_parrot]

Actually, I don't know the guidlines. I read the article announcing the list on Yahoo! News. I got the list from an internet search. There was nothing on the website explaining it. Maybe, I'll stop by my local newstand and buy this issue. After all it does have Shakira on the cover.

[Bella_Bru]

A decent list, but it is way too broad a category to have only 50 possibilities.

[Hacksaw]

The best Rock album ever released was Def Leppard's Pyromania. I have never heard another album which was put together so straight.

[Fintan]

No Homer & Jethro??????????????????????????????

[BluesDuke]

I suppose one person's cool is another person's frigid, but I'd have to say Al Green and Ann Peebles were the essence of cool so far as 1970s soul was concerned.

[BluesDuke]

CHICAGO TRANSIT AUTHORITY

Good heavens. What is the matter with you people??

You ever stop to consider that some of us have taste? (Chicago was many things. Cool was not - is not - one of them.)

[BluesDuke]

I picked up the lack of the album that was in Billboard's top 200 albums for over a decade.

So did I, and I still think I'd have preferred to put A Saucerful of Secrets or The Piper at the Gates of Dawn on the list in its place.

[BluesDuke]

I seem to recall that the urban legend of that time was, that they were so loud that the drummer became deaf and he had to play by the vibrations of the music.

That urban legend, not so. But one rumour about the original Blue Cheer that was true was that, opening a Fillmore show for Iron Butterfly, their amplifiers so completely obstructed the light show that Bill Graham refused to permit the band to play in his Fillmore venues again. And they never did, not even after they shifted gears entirely, halfway through the making of New! Improved! Blue Cheer toward a more conventional mixture of hard rock and soul built around an entirely different basic quartet setting. (New! Improved! began as the heavy trio, with Randy Holden replacing Leigh Stephens, but this lineup fell apart when the album was half finished, and bassist Dickie Peterson used a couple of studio players who'd appeared on their Outsideinside album to finish the set off, in a style which pretty much set the Cheer's future, what was left of it: melding hard rock and white soul. The album was released to indifferent acclaim, if you can call it that, but Peterson liked the new sound enough that he forged a set lineup - himself, keyboardsman Gary Yoder, drummer Norman Mayell, and guitarist Bruce Stephens - for Blue Cheer, the best complete set in the new style; the highlight was a bristling bluesrocker, "Saturday Freedom," and the entire set was very good stuff, though the band's original fans were screaming sellout now that the loud and heavy stuff was history. They had two more albums in them, The Original Human Being and Oh! Pleasant Hope, the latter a little more experimental - with the problem being, they were experimenting with sounds and impulses that had already been beaten into the ground by the psychedelic era they had initially been an arch part of, not to mention Peterson appearing on only two cuts though he's listed as the leader and bassist in the credits...the band by now was a hodgepodge of rotating members. They split for keeps in 1974.)

[RangeRatt]

I would name the soundtracks from Vanishing PointandRancho Deluxe, but both are so obscure in this day & age, I doubt anyone has heard them, besides myself, and maybe a few others....

[RangeRatt]

I would name the soundtracks from Vanishing Point and Rancho Deluxe, but both are so obscure in this day & age, I doubt anyone has heard them, besides myself, and maybe a few others....

[BibChr]

My most charitable guess is that you've never heard the album.

You tell me the instrumental progressions in Introduction isn't cool? That the entire opening of Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? isn't cool? That the Latin-spiced end of Beginnings isn't cool? That the slowly-intensifying intro to I'm a Man isn't cool? That the entire, tight, red-hot progression of Poem 58 isn't cool?

If so, then you need a mechanic, son. Your refrigerant's all tapped out.

Dan