1969: Your Favourite Album

Voted Stones, but could have been these too;

Kinks
Burrito's
Neil Young
Dusty

 

Dedicated my Track 1, Side 1 radio programme to albums released throughout this year just last week. It's the 45th anniversary of the greatest year of recorded music. Dusty for me but what quality .

 

Arthur by the Kinks

 

+1

 

Zep2 followed by abbey

 

I want them all !!
What a year.
I made my pick based on what title
I play most often in 2014.
So I picked Crosby Stills And Nash.
You could make an argument for most of those titles as album of the decade.
Glen

 

Let it Bleed

 

Abbey Road for me, but what a year!

 

Abbey Road by a pretty wide margin. A truly amazing year for music though.

http://www.abbeyroad.com/crossing

 

It is Tommy for me. Wow! What an impressive list.

 

Blood, Sweat & Tears - s/t

 

This is the hardest one for me. I can't pick just one!

 

My goal is to collect every rock, folk, pop and psychedelic album that was released in 1969. Until then, I have a lot listening to do before I can render any opinion

 

How could the average working schmoe afford to buy all these great rekkids when they were released during that year?

 

Most didn't!

 

So true. I was 15 in 1969 and of the records on that list, the only one I bought that year was Abbey Road. I bought other records that year, and in succeeding years I've bought several of the others on the list. But when you were 15 years old, it took some time to save up the price of an Lp, and I was always trying to catch up with records from previous years. My copy of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was bought that year, as was Tommy James & the Shondells Crimson & Clover (which was released in the fall of '68, IIRC.)

 

why try!!!

 

Funny how you can look at the magnitude of the releases of this year and then look at the 1982 poll.
Wow, how things change.

 

It's between Ticket to Ride by Carpenters and Dusty in Memphis by Dusty Springfield.

 

video killed the radio star

 

Let It Bleed. I still listen to it more than any of the other albums listed.

 

Not that I would vote it #1, but I love Elton's Empty Sky album.

 

Hot Rats is the only Zappa I own and it's one of my favorites. I don't know why I don't know more about him. I too found my way to Trout Mask Replica from it. I've listened to it a couple of times, and it just seems like madness. Maybe if I force myself to listen to Harrison's Electronic Sound a few more times everything will start to click.

 

Re: Trout Mask
DO NOT FORCE IT!
Egads. Maybe someday you'll like it (or love it ) or maybe not.
One thing for certain, struggling through it as an unpleasant duty sure isn't the way in.
As HUGE fan. Let me give you some suggestions. They really apply to all new art discovery and it's
only my personal experience, but then what else would I have to offer?
So

This stuff is dense. Each cut is not only unlike any other music you've heard (most likely) each cut is also
unlike most of the other tracks on Trout Mask! So it's quite understandable that initially it would sound like
UTTER CHAOS.

Suggestions:

1. My own introduction to Trout Mask was via two-count'm-two tracks. I must have listened to those two tracks dozens of times
before I got around to buying Trout Mask. In those ancient days, Warner Brothers in the late 60's was THE hip record label.
Since lots of their stuff was cutting edge for the time, forging new directions, it was decided to be forward thinking in their promotion.
They put out a series of two-record sets. They were loss leaders. They sold for something like 4 dollars for a two record set!!
Each comprised maybe 3 dozen tracks by maybe 20 different artists they were trying to give wider exposure to. One of these
(I believe is was Big Red Ball) had one of the four sides focused on the most adventurous of the artists/tracks. two of them were
from Trout Mask. Ella Guru and The Blimp. I was ........ hypnotised!! I listened to those tracks over and over. My point is that
maybe if I'd heard a dozen tracks at once I'd have been as puzzled/repelled as you.
Even when I finally got the album, Trout Mask, it was, remember, a two record set. I.e. it consisted of four sides. Each one had 6-8 tracks on it. Trying to initially listen to the entire thing, as A CD, all 30 or so tracks, at one sitting is marginally insane! (I still don't do that, and I've been listening to this thing for over 40 years. I eventually built up to listening to an entire side at a sitting, but I never did more. When I wanted to do the whole thing, I would treat it like a four act play and take a break between sides, a snack, a walk around the block. And I know this stuff intimately and find it humane, funny, enlightened and compassionate. I also find it coheres, holds together, better than most so-called "concept albums". But for all that I just get tired. So I take a break.
So take your time. Don't make exploring this mother a chore. Pick a track or two. Listen to just them a number of times
over a number of days. If you start to connect and want to listen to them some more, then by all means DO NO move on,
follow your interest and just keep listening to those two, or just the one that has become interesting to you.
Maybe you end up loveing one and repelled by the other. Fine, when you've got a hankering to, pick a couple more and do the same.
maybe after a couple days you still make no connection with either one but you are bored/frustrated/apathetic about them.
Fine. Move on. After maybe 30 days or more, you'll have gone through a big hunk of it, loving some of it, dismissing some of it
as not for you, and on the fence about others (subjects for further research?) You may spend a week or so doing this and
are pooped with the whole thing. Fine! Drop it and come back a month or two later, again picking a couple of tracks and playing with them. Keep it casual, keep it fun. It's not supposed to be work!!!! It's the most fun listening I know. If you make it work
when you first get to know it, it will always be work. Ugh!!!
Now IF, I say IF you want some outside help/insight, this is one of the few pop records where there is something I can actually recommend to you. There is a book written, I don't know, 1975, something like that, by Greil Marcus, called stranded.
He invited each of the best record reviewers of the day (his opinion) to pick one-only-one record to write about. They could
say anything they wanted, but it had to be something they really, really loved, a "desert island disc". Langdon Winner picked
Trout Mask Replica. I have found this to be just about the only truly useful (to me, of course) "pop" record review I've ever read.
You may find it the same. He doesn't waist time trying to tell you to like it, that's up to you. He does however, spend many pages
making sense of it. Think of it as a leisurely, informal guided tour of this weird landscape. You may want to check it out. I think
there are still libraries out there.

I've mentioned one problem with the cd issue of this thing. Namely that it is physically a single thing so you tend to try to listen to it that way, try to make your way through the whole 90 minutes at a go. Yikes. You may eventually end up doing this (I don't) but it's CERTAINLY no way to get to know this stuff initiallay, as I've tried to point out.

Well, another problem with the cd issue is that the lyric booklet is simply unreadable in it's
cd size. So the tendency is to simply not bother with reading the lyrics, and indeed that is certainly your choice. But..... the lyrics are as dense as the music in this case! It in no way
de-mystifies the lyrics to just read them on the page. They in fact reward attention. He is most certainly not a dealer in the fantastic or the non-sensical. He is more of a magic realist.
That is he finds transcendance in the ordinary. He is always writing about THIS world,
the one you and I see every day. We just get to see it through his eyes this time.
For example. For me, The Blimp (one of my two introductions into the guy) is utterly transcendant (and funny as ****). But it's really just the ravings of one wino to another sitting on Redondo Beach at mid day, drunk of his ass, when the Goodyear blimp passes over head, and in his
alcohol induced fervor he is moved to wax poetic at the sight of it.
So
suggestion?
Go to Kinkos and blow the pages of the lyrics booklet up so that you can read the sucker.
It's a trip.

 

Ten Years After, Ssssh