The 200 Best Albums of the 1960s

When considering the whole sweep of 20th century music, the 1960s loom especially large. Some of the importance placed on the music of the decade can be traced to demographics (the massive baby boomer generation born after World War II reached prime music-listening age) and technology (the consumer electronics industry was creating new listening spaces in automobiles and on television, and advancements in sound reinforcement made large concerts possible). Still, there’s no getting around the fact that the music of the ’60s made a huge impact at the time and never really went away. In the 1950s, the album charts were dominated by easy listening singers like Bing Crosby and endless musicals, records that only have niche audiences now. But so many top LPs from the 1960s continue to enthrall old and new listeners, and they're still re-discovered and re-assessed.

This list is Pitchfork’s attempt to do just that. The key for us in assembling this list, which is based on votes from more than 50 full-time staffers and regularly contributing writers, is to make sure we opened up our look at the decade to incorporate all places where great music was happening in LP form. That means, in addition to a mix of rock and pop and R&B, our list is heavy on jazz and includes quite a bit of early electronic music alongside records from outside the English-speaking world. Inevitably, our list also reflects the realities of the marketplace in the ’60s—some brilliant singles artists never made a great album. But we hope this list represents the best of what the decade has to offer and reflects how people explore music now. In 2017, we’re not making the same divisions between, say, Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way and John Fahey’s The Legend of Blind Joe Death or Nico’s Chelsea Girl; they’re all gorgeous records that fill a room, records we stream and collect and share with our friends with a “you gotta hear this one.” Here are 197 more.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and our Apple Music playlist.

Ennio Morricone: Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (1966)

Composer Ennio Morricone and director Sergio Leone worked in tandem throughout the 1960s on Italian spaghetti westerns, and their masterpiece is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The entire three-hour epic is conjured fully in the first five notes of Morricone’s theme, that mythical coyote howl. Then comes the anachronistic kang of electric guitar, the strident trumpet, and wooden flute; you can feel the dirt from the graveyard and smell Clint Eastwood’s cigar.

Before the film was shot, Morricone and Leone worked out musical themes for the three main characters, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the greatest soundtracks in history because it feels like the movie was retrofitted to it. What should happen during “L’Estasi Dell’Oro (The Ecstasy of Gold)”? Let’s just have a guy run around in circles for a few minutes. What about “Il Triello (The Trio)”? How about three guys just stand there and stare at each other? These are thrilling moments in cinematic history, devoid of dialogue—just the tactile, otherworldly music of Morricone guiding the film into the sunset. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Ennio Morricone: “Il Triello”

Donovan: Sunshine Superman (1966)

Before the Summer of Love, there was the Season of the Witch. In it, Donovan Leitch transformed from the Scottish Bob Dylan into the Sunshine Superman, a paisley-clad and permed psychedelic who wrote fables about rotund angels, Arthurian queens, and Sunset Strip nightclubs where Fellini dream women danced with sequins in their hair.

Donovan drew his formula from Celtic mythology, hillbilly American folk, Indian sitar ragas, Beat poetry, and the occasional bongo solo. The 20-year-old gypsy also conscripted future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones as session men on the title track, which soared to No. 1 in the United States. In the process, Donovan hallucinated the modern archetype of the guitar-picking mystic, one that would be borrowed by Marc Bolan, pre–Hunky Dory David Bowie, and the Tolkien fanatics who’d just shared his studio. –Jeff Weiss

Listen: Donovan: “Sunshine Superman”

Andrew Hill: Point of Departure (1964)

The fifth album from the Chicago-born pianist Andrew Hill catapulted him to the top tier of forward-looking jazz composers of the ’60s. As Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane pioneered jazz’s “New Thing” movement, loosening the shackles of long-established chord progressions, Hill’s tight-knit pieces played within them, drawing on post-bop, avant-garde, and the blues. Point of Departure is at once abstract and dynamic, labyrinthine and lyrical, dizzying and dense with ideas. In this session, Hill found his perfect foil in the adventurous woodwind multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy (who would tragically die just three months later). Joined by several other talented collaborators, they soar to the furthest reaches of Hill’s ever-shifting compositions, offering a fearless moment in a tumultuous era for jazz. –Andy Beta

Listen: Andrew Hill: “New Monastery”

Cecil Taylor: Unit Structures (1966)

Among the most intense of the early free jazz albums, pianist Cecil Taylor’s 1966 Blue Note debut, Unit Structures, still challenges notions of musical freedom. Recorded during the same season that the psychedelic ballroom scene was starting to bubble in San Francisco, Unit Structures did more to disassemble music than nearly all of the light-show-drenched psychedelia that followed. The album is by no means easy listening; the atonality is unrepentant. But Taylor’s septet finds numerous gorgeous spaces as they interpret “free jazz” not just as the freedom to improvise but the freedom to invent musical worlds and hidden syntaxes. The only way to tap into the “rhythm-sound energy found in the amplitude of each time unit,” as Taylor wrote in the liner notes, is to listen reverently. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Cecil Taylor: “Steps”

Wanda Jackson: Rockin’ With Wanda (1960)

To read most rock histories, you’d think women started picking up guitars sometime in the mid-1970s. The truth is, pioneering singer-guitarists like Wanda Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were as instrumental as any male musician in helping rock’n’roll coalesce out of rockabilly, country, R&B, and blues in the 1950s. Jackson, nicknamed “The Queen of Rockabilly,” even toured with—and dated—Elvis when she was a teenager.

The best introduction to Jackson’s early work is Rockin’ With Wanda!, an exhilarating compilation of two-minute masterpieces that showcase her remarkable range. There’s the plaintive country balladry of “Sinful Heart,” the proto-girl-group hearts and flowers of “A Date With Jerry,” and clap-along jump rope jams like “You’re the One for Me.” But her charisma really shines on her fastest, toughest, most boastful tracks. Along with her famous novelty single “Fujiyama Mama” (a big hit in Japan, despite its distasteful references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki), “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad” and “Don’a Wan’a” were the riot grrrl anthems of their day. –Judy Berman

Listen: Wanda Jackson: “Rock Your Baby”

Nilsson: Aerial Ballet (1968)

Harry Nilsson’s third LP, Aerial Ballet, is where his work shifts irrevocably, moving from the quirky psychedelic pop that was tapering off in the late 1960s into the more naturalistic singer-songwriter style of the looming ’70s.

By the time Aerial was released, Nilsson hadn’t scored a hit for himself, but he had written mind-bending, orchestral songs for the Shangri-Las, the Turtles, and the Monkees. But the more low-key aspects of Aerial Ballet reflect the soft rock that would become increasingly popular in the next few years. Ironically, the album’s two most famous tracks are a cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” and Nilsson’s own “One,” which the rock group Three Dog Night would turn into a major smash soon after. Both songs are the perfect encapsulations of Nilsson’s unusual yet direct approach to making music: embedding lyrical gut-punches into catchy folk-pop riffs and experimental production techniques. Even before Nilsson made his mark as one of the most coveted songwriters of his generation, Aerial Ballet served as a snapshot of the unconventional style that would make him a cult icon. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Nilsson: “One”

Donald Byrd: A New Perspective (1964)

In 1963, Donald Byrd, already a leading light of bebop as a trumpeter and bandleader, set out to make what he called “an entire album of spiritual-like pieces.” The result was A New Perspective, a sort of symphony in five movements that incorporated blues, doo-wop, and even opera into its more conspicuous hard bop and liturgical influences. Brought to life by an ensemble that included a young Herbie Hancock and a sizable choir, A New Perspective is often dominated by the haunting, otherworldly passages Byrd wrote for its fluid female voices. But unlike other bop compositions of the era, which drew on popular melodies and forms as grist for improvisation, A New Perspective incorporated its hard bop forays into an ambitious art-music framework closer in structure to a classical oratorio like Handel’s Messiah. It’s perhaps one of the purest embodiments of Nina Simone’s famous assertion that the innovative project categorized as “jazz” might better be characterized as “black classical music.” –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Donald Byrd: “Elijah”

The Beach Boys: Surfer Girl (1963)

After worshipping waves, babes, and automobiles for two records, the Beach Boys began to look inward on Surfer Girl. Thanks to the success of Surfin’ USA and “Surf City,” a No. 1 track written for their SoCal pop peers Jan and Dean, Capitol allowed Brian Wilson to produce an entire Beach Boys record for the first time; he pulled out all the stops, introducing string arrangements and more session players into the group’s sound.

Though Surfer Girl contains “Catch a Wave,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” and other songs about the Californian myth, two moments emerge as more searching masterpieces. One is the title track, a sleepy love ballad and a sincere expression of longing that portrays the ocean as a delicate place where “love could grow.” And “In My Room” moves even deeper into Wilson’s vulnerability, with nary a mention of romance. Instead, it pays tribute to the sanctuary of the childhood bedroom, a place where Brian and his brothers could escape their abusive father/manager, Murry Wilson, and sing together in peace. In these breaks from the Beach Boys’ pop gaiety, Wilson began to probe the wistfulness at his core, hinting at further genius to come. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: The Beach Boys: “In My Room”

Link Wray & the Wraymen: Link Wray & the Wraymen (1960)

You can’t quite call Link Wray’s debut album his signature effort, since his first and most famous garage-rock single, “Rumble,” isn’t on it. But his next three subsequent, equally great singles are, as well as a tune called “Ramble” that’s basically a self rip-off of “Rumble.” Add a ripping rockabilly jam called “Raw-Hide,” a few homecoming-dance-worthy rock numbers complete with swinging horns, and some more solid originals, and what could’ve sounded like a hodgepodge turns out to be a dead-spot-free display of Wray’s talents.

Most of Link Wray & the Wraymen bears a distinct sonic style that’s still influential today—especially Wray’s high-octane riffs, which basically invented the power chord. The album is also a charming family affair—brothers Vernon (rhythm guitar) and Doug (drums) were Wraymen—though Link’s the clear sonic leader, making the case for a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction that somehow still hasn’t happened. But the list of Hall-of-Famers who worship him—Dylan, Townshend, Page, Springsteen—is testament enough to his power. –Marc Masters

Listen: Link Wray and the Wraymen: “Raw-Hide”

Amon Düül II: Phallus Dei (1969)

Amon Düül began as a radical art commune in Munich, one whose extended jam sessions were open to all. Soon, the most musically adept members went their own way, and this splinter group made their debut with Phallus Dei. In Latin, the title means “God’s Penis”—as statements of intent go, this is certainly up there. Krautrock didn’t exist yet, but 1969 was the year when the political, musical, and social currents running through the German counterculture began to coalesce into actual recorded music.

Pink Floyd and Hawkwind are obvious touchstones, though Amon Düül II felt distinct from much of the prog in the UK or U.S., their music unprissy and shot through with a primal weirdness. “Kanaan” weaves together Eastern scales, rolling hand percussion, and the operatic keening of Renate Knaup into something mystic and heavy, while “Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren” is a hallucinogenic nightmare of delirious falsetto vocals, curdled acid-folk, and beer-hall chanting. And the title track is 20 minutes of gale-force psych and mangled violin that resembles a Germanic Velvet Underground. –Louis Pattison

Listen: Amon Düül II: “Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren”

Judy Collins: Wildflowers (1967)

Wildflowers sets three of Judy Collins’ songs alongside covers of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, and her take on Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” turned into the hit that launched this album up the charts. Though a product of the acoustic guitar-favoring Greenwich Village folk scene, Collins was by this point singing over lush orchestral arrangements, with sweet choruses of clarinet and flute complementing the effortless formality of her own voice. It’s that formality that can be a stumbling block to enjoying an album like this some half a century later, but Collins’ powdery femininity is ultimately an impeccable match for the tender naturalism that fills the lyrics of her songs, where love stories play out amid images of “lilies and lace” and “amethyst fountains.” –Thea Ballard

Listen: Judy Collins: “Sky Fell”

The Cannonball Adderley Quintet: Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at “The Club” (1966)

While Cannonball Adderley may be the bandleader on Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at “The Club,” the record is arguably as much a showcase for his brother’s songwriting and playing. Nat Adderley wrote the two opening numbers, “Fun” and “Games,” which are hard bop at its most enthusiastic and mercurial; his playing is appropriately ecstatic, buoyed by joy into gymnastic flights and contortions. The focus also inevitably drifts to pianist Joe Zawinul, three years before he played the sustained organ notes that opened the title track of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way; here, his composition “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” merges soul and jazz in the hybrid timbre of his electric piano. But it’s the polyphonic sense of play in the group’s improvisations, particularly in Cannonball’s solos, that lends the session its aura of excitability and invention. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t actually recorded at a club but in a Los Angeles studio, to which they invited a small crowd: It only contributes to the feeling that this record, from start to finish, was produced in a totally imaginative space. –Brad Nelson

Listen: The Cannonball Adderley Quintet: “Introduction/Fun”

Dave Van Ronk: Folksinger (1963)

Dave Van Ronk was a ubiquitous figure of Greenwich Village folk culture, one so essential and deeply rooted that he struggled to attract ears beyond it. Ironically, it was a scene he never quite fit into, literally or figuratively: A 6-foot-5 Swede and early mentor to Bob Dylan, the dive-bar philosopher cast a keen ear to blues traditions instead of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s acoustic, Americana strums.

On Folksinger, Van Ronk’s somber masterstroke, he filters plaintive 12-bar traditionals through jazzy folk paces and a mournful yet bristling growl. His crawl through the standard “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” is almost oppressively intimate, its spare fingerpicked guitar and slow-pooling croon as stifling as the solitude he’s succumbing to. His soulful yet chatty pass through “Cocaine Blues” brings a modern sheen to the addict’s tale, rivaling Dylan’s reedier, less convincing turn. For such troubles, Joan Baez called him “the closest living offshoot of Leadbelly,” while the Coen brothers loosely based Inside Llewyn Davis on him, finally giving this perennial outsider his due. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Dave Van Ronk: “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me”

Jefferson Airplane: Surrealistic Pillow (1967)

Surrealistic Pillow is to San Francisco what The Velvet Underground & Nico is to New York: an iconic album that captures a city’s sound circa the Summer of Love. Surrealistic Pillow finds the band compiling their cornerstones of crunchy psychedelia, languid blues, and freewheeling jamming—but this time, they have Grace Slick, a femme fatale alto with the fury of a valkyrie. Coupled with Rick Jarrard’s Spectorian production, melodically top-heavy and immediate, Slick’s jagged hooks on “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” earned Jefferson Airplane their reputation as the first big San Francisco band. Surrealistic Pillow is high-definition psychedelia that’s both exotic and approachable. –Zoe Camp

Listen: Jefferson Airplane: “Today”

The Kinks: Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969)

Arthur could’ve been the Kinks’ Tommy. Commissioned to accompany a teleplay co-written by frontman Ray Davies, it was forced to stand on its own after the TV movie was scrapped. So instead of a zeitgeist multimedia experience, this follow-up to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society became the band’s second great, quintessentially English concept album in as many years.

In a 1970 interview, Davies joked that Arthur was “about the rise and fall of the British Empire, which people tend to associate me with,” and he told that story through the eyes of a character based on his brother-in-law, Arthur Anning. After opening with the soaring “Victoria,” a rock monument to the Queen’s bygone Britain, the carpetlayer’s tale descends into the horrors of the World Wars on “Some Mother’s Son” and “Mr. Churchill Says.” Its centerpiece is a one-two punch of sarcasm on “Australia,” a sing-along escape anthem, and “Shangri-La,” a folk hymn to suburban consumerism. But while Davies is barbed, he still shows a grudging empathy for his countrymen, lending an undertone of sweetness to a history lesson that could have come off as merely bitter. –Judy Berman

Listen: The Kinks: “Brainwashed”

Charles Mingus: Mingus Plays Piano (1963)

Few humans were ever able to wrestle melody out of an upright bass or command a cacophonous jazz band like Charles Mingus—though all that is basically irrelevant on this album of solo piano works. The idea seems a bit incongruous, like if Eddie Van Halen decided to release an oboe-only record in his prime, but Mingus was no dilettante on the keys. At a young age, he was mentored on the instrument by the quick-fingered jazz titan Art Tatum, and this album of originals, reinterpretations, and spontaneous performances adds another dimension to his staggering talent.

Unlike Mingus’ full-band albums and shows, which could be rambunctious affairs that teetered on the precipice of chaos, Mingus Plays Piano is gorgeously spare, incorporating elements of jazz, blues, and his beloved classical music. Opener “Myself When I Am Real” was largely made up on the spot, a shapeshifting ballad that doubles as a spiritual portrait of Mingus’ own creativity. Elsewhere, there are skewed standards, quiet confessionals, and an eight-and-a-half minute ode to Mingus’ America, a complex and troubling place where black men like him were often left out. The record’s haunted soul still speaks to artists like Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, who sampled “Myself When I Am Real” to introduce his own profound and personal treatise on being black in America, Freetown Sound. Truth, beauty, liberty—it’s all here. Unadorned. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Charles Mingus: “I Can’t Get Started”

BBC Radiophonic Workshop: BBC Radiophonic Music (1968)

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was founded in 1958 as a space in which composers, musicians, and engineers experimented with techniques for producing sound under the auspices of soundtracking BBC programming. Released a decade into the Workshop’s tenure, this compilation collects 31 short works by Delia Derbyshire, David Cain, and John Baker. Though these pieces were designed for functional use in broadcast programming, taken together, they present a view of the strange, brilliant sonic terrain being forged at the Workshop.

Many of these pieces are essentially jingles, driven by lilting melodies, but even the most cloying of tunes are uncanny in their construction, featuring experimental techniques ranging from musique concrète tape-collage to recording and sampling odd everyday sounds. Derbyshire dips into the weird, particularly, and her work would prove invaluable to generations of electronic experimentalists who followed her, including Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers. She relishes in new sounds and unsettling melodic forms; the metallic clatter and modulated vocals of a track like her “Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO” anticipates the twists that pop would soon take. –Thea Ballard

Listen: John Baker: “Milky Way”

Mickey Newbury: Looks Like Rain (1969)

According to the chorus of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jenning’s song “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),” the Holy Trinity of country music includes Willie himself, Hank Williams, and the somewhat lesser-known Mickey Newbury. The latter’s 1969 album Looks Like Rain might get chalked up as a record by a songwriter’s songwriter, but his music served as an offering to pop, soul, and country singers alike: Jennings, Kenny Rogers, Solomon Burke, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis all covered his songs. He became the spiritual forefather for the outlaw country movement, and later for indie singers like Bill Callahan and Will Oldham. Here, Newbury accompanies his songs of unbearable heartbreak with acoustic guitar, but he also couches them in church choirs and sitar, as well as the sounds of chimes, rain, and distant trains, creating a singular album that might best be described as ambient country. –Andy Beta

Listen: Mickey Newbury: “San Francisco Mabel Joy”

The Soft Machine: The Soft Machine (1968)

Soft Machine’s self-titled debut album is a Rosetta Stone for adventurous rock music. The British band’s founding lineup—bassist and baritone vocalist Kevin Ayers, shirtless drummer and devastating high tenor singer Robert Wyatt, organist Mike Ratledge, and Australian guitarist Daevid Allen—ranked alongside Pink Floyd in London’s psychedelic underground. After visa issues forced Allen out, the remaining trio toured with the Jimi Hendrix Experience and finally cut an LP with Hendrix’s producer.

The Soft Machine unites psych-rock frenzy with modern-jazz improvisation, a refreshingly new idea at the time, and the joyful medley kicked off by opener “Hope for Happiness” still breathes with discovery. Better yet is the Ayers-led “We Did It Again,” a brutishly minimalist link between the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and krautrock’s motorik that could stretch out to a trance-inducing 40 minutes live. Today, the Soft Machine are known as pioneers of prog-rock, jazz fusion, and the Canterbury scene, and their members have enjoyed fruitful avant-garde careers. This debut captures a pregnant moment when all paths remained open. –Marc Hogan

Listen: The Soft Machine: “Hope for Happiness”

Lesley Gore: I’ll Cry If I Want To (1963)

Lesley Gore’s debut album, which she began recording when she was just 16, follows a party attended by a teenage love triangle: herself, her beau Johnny, and that interloper Judy. For a record that kicks off with seven songs about sobbing, I’ll Cry If I Want To maintains an impressively consistent, candied sweetness throughout; produced by Quincy Jones, the album epitomizes the sound of early-1960s girl-group pop, airtight in structure as it soars, dreamy-eyed, through tales of young love and loss. Gore eases through shimmery choruses and lovelorn ballads, but she also embraces despair, spite, and other less lovely parts of being a young woman. Before she released the second-wave feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me,” Gore was, in a way, already carving out room for women within the narrow parameters of girl-group femininity. –Thea Ballard

Listen: Lesley Gore: “Cry Me a River”

Wilson Pickett: The Exciting Wilson Pickett (1966)

Despite his charismatically gruff vocals and emphatic style, Wilson Pickett was just one more struggling R&B singer until Atlantic Records sent him down to Stax studios in 1965. There, he recorded his career-making “In the Midnight Hour” and “634-5789 (Soulsville U.S.A.),” among other hits. But Pickett alienated his fellow musicians in Memphis, to the point where Stax president Jim Stewart nixed further recording there. So the singer trekked even further south to Muscle Shoals, Ala., where he recorded at the legendary FAME Studio.

Pickett’s third album chronicles that journey, playing like a battle between the Stax house band and the FAME crew. The edge may go to the Alabamans, mostly for Roger Hawkins’ relentless drums on “Land of 1,000 Dances,” but as a whole The Exciting Wilson Pickett helped distinguish Southern soul as grittier, rawer, and more immediate than its northern and Midwestern counterparts. The album established Pickett as a major star, a compelling bandleader who could mold these dynamic groups into his own vision. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: Wilson Pickett: “You’re So Fine”

Art Ensemble of Chicago: Message to Our Folks (1969)

In the spring of 1969, Lester Bowie moved his band, the Art Ensemble, to Paris. To afford the tickets, the Chicago trumpeter sold his furniture. “He put an ad in the [Chicago] Defender,” collaborator Roscoe Mitchell recalled in 2015. “‘Musician sells out.’” By July, the group found itself at the Pan African Cultural Festival, where they rubbed elbows with other avant-garde jazz composers, Nina Simone, and the Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver. Message to Our Folks was compiled during an intense week of recording sessions in the French capital with musicians the Art Ensemble met at the festival. Equal parts gospel, bebop, and abstract dissonance, Message pays homage to jazz music’s foundation while reaching for outer space, offering a shining example of unfiltered black art and compelling Afrofuturist music in the vein of Sun Ra. The Art Ensemble’s music remains difficult to grasp, but the spirit of it—the complex sonic arrangements, the “all for one” ethos—can be heard in modern-day jazz leaders like Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings. –Marcus J. Moore

Listen: The Art Ensemble of Chicago: “Old Time Religion”

Wendy Carlos: Switched-On Bach (1968)

The earliest electronic music was equal parts experimental art and temperamental science project. When Wendy Carlos recorded this suite of Bach pieces, she could only play around one measure at a time before her delicate synthesizer fell out of tune. She worked with inventor Robert Moog himself to build her prototype, a decade before touch-sensitive keyboards became standard.

The nuance of Carlos’ playing here feels miraculous: “Prelude and Fugue No. 7” manages to segue from crystallized harmony to dainty counterpoint, while “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” sheds its usual stately ceremony, trilling the melody like a bird. Switched-On Bach sold more copies than any previous classical album, bringing a mass audience to an alien medium. Her choice of material had its strange logic: Writing to glorify God, Bach often composed with no particular instrument in mind. He never heard a synth’s unearthly tones, or a drum machine’s divine precision, but his notes reveal the beauty of every device. Long before music melted into data, Carlos presided over a kind of transcendence. –Chris Randle

Herbie Hancock: Empyrean Isles (1964)

Pianist Herbie Hancock was already an elite jazz session player when he led this set for Blue Note. Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard had likewise distinguished himself as a post-bop player with an edge by working with drummer Art Blakey and avant-garde reed player Eric Dolphy. Here, joined by some of Hancock’s rhythm section colleagues from Miles Davis’ quintet, they could have turned any group of tunes into one hell of an album.

But Hancock was also hard at work on his compositional craft. His four original pieces on Empyrean Isles prompt motifs based on brisk chord changes as well as scale-based improvisation. Nearly two decades before his embrace of turntablism on “Rockit,” Hancock was already signaling his intention to swing between radically different formal designs. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Herbie Hancock: “One Finger Snap”

Townes Van Zandt: Townes Van Zandt (1969)

In the late 1960s, when he was a hard-luck troubadour gigging around Texas and Tennessee, Townes Van Zandt was something of a cult figure: a songwriter already being likened to the great Hank Williams by admirers like Emmylou Harris. Such a comparison cuts both ways, emphasizing the graceful economy of his lyrics and the Hill Country lonesomeness in his vocals, but also acknowledging the self-destructive tendencies that ultimately undermined his career.

On Van Zandt’s third record, he was still figuring himself out, so he took another go at “For the Sake of the Song,” the title track from his 1968 album about a woman who won’t stop singing sad songs to her old man. He similarly recut “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” and “Waiting Around to Die,” the latter arguably the saddest outlaw defense country music has devised. He largely dispenses with the florid arrangements of his previous albums, stripping every song down to its essentials: his dexterous picking, that glorious Lone Star warble, and the occasional flourish of flute or pedal steel. Like all of his records, this one failed to find anything resembling a mainstream audience, but so many years later, it has become the bedrock of his legacy. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: Townes Van Zandt: “Columbine”

Ella Fitzgerald / Count Basie: Ella and Basie! (1963)

Truly, the album should be called Ella and Basie and Quincy. Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald had been winding around each other in elegant, wayward jazz-royalty circles for a few years, but it took a young Quincy Jones, then under Basie’s wing, to pull these two forces into the same orbit for a full album. Together, they cut one of the most enduring and beloved records to bear either Fitzgerald’s or Basie’s name. Jones’ arrangements make the off-kilter chemistry between Fitzgerald and Basie’s band crackle to life: As musicians, they had almost too much in common. The horns in his band punched with a lead singer’s brio, while she sang like a horn, winding and unpredictable, the words mere containers for the sounds she made.

Fitzgerald’s trail of records is long and studded with forgettables, but on Ella and Basie!, she is at her peak—mercurial, tart, apple-wry. She worms her way into the deep pockets of space that Basie’s band leaves for her on “Them There Eyes” and wails her way into the stratosphere, sounding drunk on the possibilities open before them. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Ella Fitzgerald & Count Basie: “Tea for Two”

Patty Waters: Sings (1965)

The first side of Patty Waters’ debut album offers seven short, subdued tunes intoned solemnly over hushed piano playing—masterful but easy to miss, given what happens on the other side. As Burton Greene, the pianist who accompanied Waters, put it, “Patty kept going on with the ballad routine. I thought, this chick is sitting on a big egg; this egg is going to be some kind of monster, and I’ve got to help her hatch that egg.”

That egg turns out to be a 14-minute interpretation of the traditional song “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” and Waters cracks it wide open. After a few minutes spent meditating on the melody, accompanied by Greene’s trio, she unleashes every tone and noise her voice can conjure. Her burning strangulations of the word “black” are so direct and bracing, she seems predict the fury soon to erupt in anti-war protests and riots around America. But she also taps into something universal: the extreme energy and emotions that only artistic freedom can access. –Marc Masters

Listen: Patty Waters: “Why Can’t I Come to You”

Duke Ellington: Far East Suite (1967)

Is this a linked “suite,” or just a bunch of songs? Does it really carry a significant “far east” influence? These questions are fun to ponder, though the answers aren’t hugely consequential. Because what Far East Suite does offer is one of the pianist’s large ensembles in a set of music co-composed with the Duke’s longtime collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. Which means it is automatically part of one of the most exalted catalogs in American music. During “Bluebird of Delhi (Mynha),” a clarinet theme that may seem slight at first ends up taking majestic flight over the ensemble’s delirious riffs. And the ballad “Isfahan,” a feature tailored by Ellington and Strayhorn for the altoist Johnny Hodges, has long been recognized as a tour de force saxophone performance. Ellington created some essential music after Strayhorn died later that year, but this final moment in their long collaboration is a pinnacle of their poetically swinging genius. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Duke Ellington: “Isfahan”

Eddie Palmieri: Justicia (1969)

The montuno—the interlocked bass and percussion groove of Cuban son music—has been convincingly ID’ed as the sonic godfather of the drum-and-bass breaks that characterize American funk. Eddie Palmieri’s 1960s releases reunited these divided streams. Justicia represents the peak of this period, combining the latest Cuban dance craze (a rhythm known simply as “Mozambique”) with elements of blues, soul, and psychedelic rock: the ahead-of-its-time “My Spiritual Indian” wanders around a hypnotic, bluesy chord before descending into a sublime Afro-funk groove augmented by Thelonious Monk-inspired piano work. “Verdict on Judge Street” pushes Palmieri’s jazz conceits even further, building up plonky, dissonant ghost notes that trip over each other in contradictory rhythms yet still remain danceable.

Tying these elements together is Justicia’s unapologetically activist vision and the soulcat slang of late ’60s pro-black, anti-colonial street protests; it peppers the English portions of the LP’s mostly Spanish lyrics. There are clunky moments, like Palmieri’s somewhat wooden vocal cadence on the spoken-word “Everything Is Everything,” a sort of English-language key to both the album’s politics and its kitchen-sink genre fusion. Yet Justicia remains a formidable testament to Palmieri’s inventive powers. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Eddie Palmieri: “My Spiritual Indian”

Various Artists: Golden Rain (1969)

Kecak (pronounced “ket-chak”) is a percussive Balinese chant performed by some 100 men squatting in concentric circles, all hooting and hollering in simian syncopation. Although rooted in an exorcism ritual that dramatizes a monkey-filled tale from the ancient Hindu epic The Ramayana, the music and dance performance is a relatively modern phenomenon dating to the 1930s. Self-described “musical tourist” David Lewiston included a kecak track on all three albums of Balinese field recordings he released on Nonesuch, but the 22-minute side B of 1969’s Golden Rain is the iconic example.

Lewiston taped performances in all their messy vitality, achieving an in-the-moment energy more reminiscent of jazz or punk than lab-coated ethnomusicology. Golden Rain’s “The Ramayana Monkey Dance” remains as astounding now as it must have been for late-night FM audiences. The first side of the compilation is given over to two luminously chiming tracks of gamelan, the trance-like Indonesian traditional music played on marimba-like gongs. The Paris Exposition of 1889, when Claude Debussy encountered Javanese gamelan, has long been considered a turning point for modern music. For the vinyl era, Golden Rain stands as a similar epiphany. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Gamelan Gong Kebjar: “Oleg Tumililingan” (“Bumblebee”)

Roland Kirk: The Inflated Tear (1967)

He was a showman, an eccentric, an advocate, and a scholar—but at the core of Roland Kirk’s appeal, there’s the staggering fact that his performance is the sound of one man harmonizing, thanks to his striking ability to play multiple horns at the same time. One of his earliest records for Atlantic, The Inflated Tear inaugurates his idea of jazz as what he, like Nina Simone, called “black classical music,” a wide-ranging tradition that included everything from the cutting-edge avant-garde to generations-old musical traditions to contemporary pop styles. He could start with a melodic and thematic premise as simple as the slow march of “The Black and Crazy Blues” or a base as familiar as Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” and guide his band to places that tapped the deepest spaces of mood-altering sonics. The purity of lighthearted joy on the flute-led tribute to his young son, “A Laugh for Rory,” the manic giddiness of “Lovellevelliloqui”—it’s all overwhelming, so it’s even more of a rush when Kirk goes on one of his spectacular solo runs, like the Coltrane-rivaling tenor sax fusillade of “Many Blessings.” –Nate Patrin

Listen: Roland Kirk: “The Black and Crazy Blues”

The Sonics: Here Are the Sonics!!! (1965)

Rock’n’roll can be a lot of things, but for a certain snapshot of mid-’60s teenage delinquency—an inner world fueled by shaggy Rat Fink scuzziness and drive-in horror double features—the genre reached its ideal form in the Sonics. They weren’t necessarily the first garage rockers, but nobody embodied the style better, from the moment their debut single “The Witch” peeled fake woodgrain off speaker cabinets in 1964. The formula, as ruthlessly displayed on their 1965 debut LP Here Are the Sonics!!!, was simple: Make every instrument hit with the force of a brand new Pontiac GTO smashing through a guardrail. And if you’re going to get that raucous, make sure you’ve got a frontman like Jerry Roslie, whose range stretches from a demented bellow to an unhinged shriek—all in the service of songs about getting your kicks from drinking poison, tearing around in a “turn-on red” Mustang, and absolutely losing your mind over rejection. Throw in some rock and R&B standards performed as though they were all written by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins at his coffin-busting wildest, and you’ve got the big bang explosion that set the standard for everyone from the Cramps to Nirvana to the White Stripes. –Nate Patrin

Listen: The Sonics: “The Witch”

The Peter Brötzmann Octet: Machine Gun (1968)

When hard-blowing free jazz reaches a certain intensity, you start to wonder how far it can go and what its limitations of expression might be. Machine Gun is one idea of how such an impassable sonic barrier might present itself. On it, the German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and seven fellow improvisors—including British saxophonist Evan Parker and Dutch drummer Han Bennink, who would all make a serious mark in European free jazz—are still tethered to jazz proper, with variations on themes and melody and groove, but the result sounds closer to what we now call noise music.

Machine Gun is a roaring mass of energy that serves as an auditory Rorschach test: Given its title and its initial release during a violent, tumultuous, and war-wrecked year, the album can easily inspire fear, horror, and images of violence. But its spirit of collective invention, and the sheer delight of musicians pushing their instruments beyond their design, also yields an equally vivid joy. It’s the sound of eight creative people confronting musical barriers and working together to annihilate them. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Peter Brötzmann: “Machine Gun”

The Impressions: Keep On Pushing (1964)

With “Keep On Pushing,” penned in the middle of the civil rights movement, Curtis Mayfield channeled his gospel roots into a moment of motivation. The song’s message of strength and persistence had been stewing in him his whole life—a meditation on love, faith, existing on the streets of segregated Chicago, and how he thought things ought to be. Aided by his bandmates Fred Cash and Sam Gooden’s harmonies, Johnny Pate’s horn arrangements, and of course, the warm flourishes of his electric guitar, Mayfield’s stunning falsetto exuded the power and strength he preached.

Keep On Pushing was the Impressions’ first attempt at a proper album—their previous records were essentially singles collections. Every song is crafted just as beautifully as the title track, with Pate’s expert arrangements backing the trio’s earworm harmonies. Mayfield cements his soul icon status with songs about love affairs that are new (“Talking About My Baby”), forbidden (“I Ain’t Supposed To”), and gone (“Long, Long Winter”). And while Chicago blues is certainly present, gospel is the key ingredient. One year after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Impressions’ version of the spiritual standard “Amen” is arranged as a march. Mayfield’s first proper LP with the Impressions hinted at the artistic intent that would follow: Not long after its release, the Impressions would further soundtrack the movement with “People Get Ready,” “We’re a Winner,” and several other classics. With Keep On Pushing, Mayfield became a star, and it was just the beginning. –Evan Minsker

Listen: The Impressions: “Keep on Pushing”

The Byrds: The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968)

In 1968, the Byrds could be described as Sgt. Pepper’s-curious: a band longing for experimentation but still in touch with their jangly roots. There are moments when they sound like a conservative dad’s worst nightmare: aloof, stoned, and gently rebelling. “Things that seemed to be solid are not,” goes one trippy line from “Change Is Now,” and the song’s guitar solo is the sound of thousands of high school longhairs being threatened with military service. But for every early, intrepid use of a Moog synthesizer, there’s something like the gentle cover of Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “Goin’ Back,” which came with its own confession: “A little bit of courage is all we lack.” The Notorious Byrd Brothers catches the band in a space between, it’s the sound of psychedelic pop’s sugars fermenting, but not yet turning into alcohol. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: The Byrds: “Dolphin’s Smile”

Sonny Rollins: The Bridge (1962)

After releasing over 20 albums from 1953 to 1959, Sonny Rollins found himself being named in the same breath as John Coltrane and Miles Davis. But at the height of his fame, the tenor saxophonist disappeared from the jazz scene. Convalescing from the stresses of addiction and success, he began practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge’s pedestrian walkway, far from the peering eyes of the world (save the chance passerby).

Those three years of meditations led to The Bridge, an album that turns panoramic NYC vistas into ballads and bop of utmost soul. Stylistically, the record doesn’t veer far from the hard bop of Rollins’ celebrated 1956 LP Saxophone Colossus, but it digs a little deeper. The nimble title track, in particular, is a snapshot of his new level of control as his solo winds through a series of tempo changes. While his peers started to explore the structural limits of the genre with free jazz in the early ’60s, Rollins went further into what he knew, into himself, discovering a fount of grace in the process. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Sonny Rollins: “The Bridge”

The Beatles: A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

Beatlemania was well underway when the Fab Four created A Hard Day’s Night; they were also simultaneously filming their first feature, and the flurry of activity forced the songwriting team of John Lennon and Paul McCartney to focus on cranking out their first album of original tunes. Some tracks echo their earlier songs and influences—girl groups, Motown, and even Tin Pan Alley—but by synthesizing these sounds, the Beatles wound up with a style that felt like the start of something new. It’s not just the songs, it’s the grace notes: the double-tracked vocals on “Any Time at All,” the country-rock gait of “I’ll Cry Instead,” the 12-string George Harrison wields throughout. The album also opened the floodgates for all the beat groups and blues combos lying in wait in the UK, ready to cross the Atlantic once America was ready to hear them. Every band in the British Invasion owes a debt not just to the Beatles but to A Hard Day’s Night specifically: It is the record that created a whole new world. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: The Beatles: “Can’t Buy Me Love”

Big Brother & the Holding Company: Cheap Thrills (1968)

Janis Joplin proved she was an electrifying performer at the Monterey Pop festival, but she didn’t cement her legend until the next year, on the fourth track of Big Brother & the Holding Company’s major-label debut. “Piece of My Heart” is spare for a Big Brother track, with Sam Andrew and James Gurley’s rock guitars forced into the background by Joplin’s annihilating vocals. She squeezes out the chorus as though she is about to tear open her chest cavity.

Like the rest of Cheap Thrills, “Piece of My Heart” derives some of its power from John Simon’s canny production. By adding crowd noises to Big Brother’s studio recordings, he creates the impression that Joplin was fronting San Francisco’s rowdiest bar band—climbing up on a table, beer mug in hand, to howl about heartbreak to an audience of emotional drunks. On “Turtle Blues,” a ballad that mingles old-school blues piano with nimble guitar riffs, you can hear a glass shatter. The first 10 seconds of “Ball and Chain,” which transforms Big Mama Thornton’s classic into a languid acid-rock jam, sound like a false start. These moments could have felt like gimmicks if Joplin’s sincerity and fervor hadn’t endowed the album with such intimacy. –Judy Berman

Listen: Big Brother and the Holding Company: “Combination of the Two”

Dr. John: Gris-Gris (1968)

Mac Rebennack was far from the bayou in 1968. As a session musician in Los Angeles, he sat in with Frank Zappa, Phil Spector, and the Wrecking Crew at the height of the city’s psychedelic heyday, before the Manson family murders cast a pall over the Laurel Canyon dream. But despite being recorded in Spector’s favorite studio, Gold Star, not a sliver of local sun cuts through the mist of Gris-Gris, Rebennack’s debut album as his voodoo-inspired persona Dr. John the Nite Tripper. It’s a direct portal to his hometown of New Orleans, a sinewy swamp-funk jam that simmers together Afro-Caribbean percussion, earthy congas, whirling electric guitars, and pernicious flutes. Dr. John proves instantly at ease on opener “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya,” purring as he proclaims himself “the last of the best” medicine men, a French Quarter Rasputin as shifty as he is seductive. From there, he offers a collection of eccentric pleasures—aural charms and amulets amassed to foster luck and ward off evil spirits. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Dr. John: “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya”

White Noise: An Electric Storm (1969)

On November 23, 1963, one day after the assassination of JFK, British TV viewers were treated to their first episode of “Doctor Who,” an iconic TV series that would introduce not only the wonders of time travel and lo-fi monsters but also the sonic joys of early electronic music, thanks to the work of the fabled sound effects unit the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Five years later, Radiophonic composers Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson joined classical bass player David Vorhaus in White Noise, an experimental electronic act avant la lettre.

Their debut album, An Electric Storm, is astonishingly original. Side A is ostensibly in the lineage of ’60s psychedelic pop, home to the same darkly experimental melodic instincts that drove early Pink Floyd or the United States of America. Here, though, the music is adorned with tape-spliced electronic collages and sound effects, from the scrabbled circus sounds on “Here Come the Fleas” to the unsettling—and very “Doctor Who”—electronic pulses on “Firebird,” which create the impression of shifting sonic sands beneath the listener’s feet. Side B, however, is something entirely new, a terrifying theatrical soundscape of ghastly sonic intensity. One year later, Kraftwerk would release their debut album, but the future of electronic music had already arrived. –Ben Cardew

Listen: White Noise: “Love Without Sound”

Phil Ochs: I Ain’t Marching Anymore (1965)

Aesthetes who sneer at so-called “protest music” like to pretend that all songs with political agendas are strident statements of the obvious—sermons devoid of beauty, nuance, and especially humor. But Phil Ochs, a self-described “singing journalist” and a Dylan for the student-radical set, recorded some of the funniest, smartest, and prettiest tracks of the ’60s on his second album, I Ain’t Marching Anymore. The hilarious “Draft Dodger Rag” finds a would-be soldier telling the draft board he’s got epilepsy, a ruptured spleen, and, by the way, “I always carry a purse.” He also issues a scathing leftist critique of labor unions’ racism, over violently strummed acoustic guitar, on “Links on the Chain.”

Ochs’ most memorable songs make their points through poignant storytelling. The rousing title track is an allegory of a mythical soldier who’s spent over 150 years fighting for America and can no longer stomach imperialist violence. “Here’s to the State of Mississippi” closes the album with a vividly painted panorama of enforced ignorance, systemic bigotry, and police violence. These songs succeed as both art and political critique; it’s just unfortunate that, 50 years later, not one of them sounds like the relic of a less enlightened time. –Judy Berman

Listen: Phil Ochs: “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”

Ray Barretto: Acid (1968)

Although not nearly as “out there” as its title and artwork suggest, Ray Barretto’s 1968 experiment in Nuyorican soul is nevertheless an essential trip. It’s a missing link between the insanely catchy yet quickly dated Latin boogaloo sound of the early ’60s—a New York phenomenon that Barretto helped take international with his hit “El Watusi”—and the more expansive, Afrocentric Latin sound of the 1970s. Its strongest soul/boogaloo tracks have a Memphis-via-Harlem swing that captures the fierce, aspirational joy of mid-’60s soul.

Still, these moments are ultimately outshone by the pure, virtuosic salsa workout of “El Nuevo Barretto,” which opens the album. Its combination of Cuban roots and R&B vamping clearly foreshadows the more mainstream Latin rock of Carlos Santana. But if Acid is notable for its prophetic fusion, its real treasures—the bass-heavy, eight-minute jam “Espiritu Libre” and the minimalist title track, with its relentless Afro-Cuban drums—are not so much ahead of their time as they are removed from time, difficult to assign to a particular decade or hemisphere. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Ray Barretto: “Acid”

Alice Coltrane: A Monastic Trio (1968)

Alice Coltrane’s solo debut, A Monastic Trio, is also her tribute to her husband John Coltrane, who died the year before—a star-is-born/star-is-extinguished moment that remains unique in music. Anchored by Jimmy Garrison’s heavy bass frequencies, which take the modal structure of blues into something beyond it, its compositions sound like death. Coltrane’s resonant harp sets an ecstatic base for the strangled cries of Pharoah Sanders’ bass clarinet and tenor sax improvisations, and the album’s opening passages convey struggle and discord before giving way to celestial string trills and a lighter second side. Whether this sonic transformation is meant to embody John’s spiritual journey or Alice coming to terms with her grief, it is the rare instrumental album that is a difficult listen, both for the emotions it confronts and its willingness to push the boundaries of conventional music. It is equally difficult to forget. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Alice Coltrane: “Lord Help Me to Be”

Merle Haggard: Mama Tried (1968)

By 1968, Merle Haggard had made a comfortable niche singing honky-tonk-influenced songs about tough stuff like being a drunk and going it alone. At sharp but comfortable odds with the orchestral dressings of late-’60s Nashville—“countrypolitan,” they called it—Mama Tried is an album of difficult situations described with frankness and care, where a man sings of remembering his father’s hands broken and bleeding from work or the sight of his mother bedridden with disease his family was too poor to treat. At no moment does Haggard perform with undue sentiment; at no moment is his sound calibrated for pity. If anything, there’s something dreadful about Haggard’s ability to get on with it. True believers in sin, his narrators don’t bother seeking absolution through song. They wait for God, and already have a pretty good idea of what God’ll say. Blame the career-defining title track for inspiring hundreds, possibly thousands of tattoos worn by people with a dozen stories to tell but no good way to say they’re sorry. –Mike Powell

Listen: Merle Haggard: “Folsom Prison Blues”

Ornette Coleman Trio: Live at the “Golden Circle” Stockholm Vol. 1 (1965)

Ornette Coleman’s music is a study in contradiction: He questioned structure and his ideas launched the free jazz revolution, but he also had an infallible ear for melodies you can hum. He developed densely theoretical justifications for his boundary-pushing music, but his tone and approach were indebted to early days spent playing blues and R&B in bars. He was greatly admired by virtuoso players, but he was drawn to untutored playing, whether via his own experiments on trumpet and violin or by recruiting his 10-year-old son to drum on a record. It was never possible to boil Coleman’s music down to one or two concerns, but so much of what made him remarkable can be heard on At the “Golden Circle” Stockholm Vol. 1.

After an early run of quartet records with provocative titles (The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, This Is Our Music), Coleman spent the rest of his career experimenting with instrumentation, arrangements, and settings. His 1965 tour of Europe found him performing in a trio with bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett. With Coleman’s alto saxophone alone in front, he indulges his boundless melodic imagination, treating his new tunes like putty to be reshaped with each passing bar. His horn bellows, squeaks, and wails while also communicating on a microscopic level, with subtle shifts in phrasing and intonation that bring to mind the human voice. Golden Circle (and its equally fine, if further out, Vol. 2 companion) serves as both a terrific introduction to Coleman’s music and a towering highlight from his first decade. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Ornette Coleman Trio: “European Echoes”

Moondog: Moondog (1969)

The release of Moondog’s second self-titled album followed a 12-year hiatus, though in that time the iconoclastic poet and musician certainly wasn’t silent: Installed, as always, in his Viking garb on the streets of New York, he was in the company of Beat poets and members of all corners of the city’s musical avant-garde. (He even lived with Philip Glass for a period.) This album sees him trading in the shuffling modesty of his older recordings for a series of fully realized micro-symphonies that nevertheless retain his loving, oddball spirit. Many songs double as tributes to artist friends and inspirations: “Witch of Endor” was composed for a Martha Graham ballet; “Symphonique 6 (Good for Goodie)” and its woodwind swing nods to Benny Goodman; and “Lament I, ‘Bird’s Lament’” pays tribute to Charlie Parker with a free-ranging alto sax solo. Leaning as much on the bombast of European classicism as it does on the new rhythms coming out of New York minimalism, Moondog absorbs the essence of an era while peering beyond it. –Thea Ballard

Listen: Moondog: “Bird’s Lament”

The Delfonics: La La Means I Love You (1968)

For most of the ’60s, soul music was defined by the pop-minded sounds of Detroit and the bluesier rhythms of Memphis, but with this album, Philadelphia elbowed its way to the table. Spearheaded by producer/conductor Thom Bell, the Delfonics’ fastidiously orchestrated debut introduced the world to an imagining of R&B so suave and gentlemanly, it made the tuxedoed crooners of Motown sound like motorcycle-riding bad boys. At a time when soul was becoming faster and funkier, this effortlessly smooth group made an album with two Burt Bacharach covers on it.

The Delfonics’ sound became the foundation for some of the best soul music of the early ’70s, much of it also recorded with Bell, including classics from the Spinners and the O’Jays. As durable as the template proved to be, though, few of the Philly soul full-lengths that followed cast quite the same spell as La La Means I Love You, nor committed so completely to its pristine, white-marble vision. It’s still impossible not to be swept away by the sheer decadence of it all. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: The Delfonics: “Losing You”

Max Roach: We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (1960)

In 1959, drummer Max Roach and writer Oscar Brown Jr. began working on a civil rights-themed suite for jazz ensemble and chorus. They planned to debut it in 1963, in the 100th anniversary year of the Emancipation Proclamation. But when sit-in demonstrations against segregation began, Roach and his collaborator moved up their timetable. The urgency of the two 1960 recording sessions that resulted in We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite still prove dramatically gripping, just as the political themes that spurred the bebop drummer remain salient.

On “Driva’ Man,” Brown’s lyrics sketch the practices of sexual assault on plantations. Vocalist Abbey Lincoln handles Roach’s world-weary melody with defiant grace as saxophonist Coleman Hawkins projects mournfully. On the wordless “Triptych,” Lincoln creates a sense of drama and resolution by moving through textures of solemnity, rebellion, and repose. Whether in the company of a Nigerian percussionist (“All Africa”) or working with bop stylists like the trumpeter Booker Little, Roach’s playing is as sharp as his arrangements. By building successfully on jazz’s previous political messages (including Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”), We Insist! played a catalyzing role in the music’s next decade of protest. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Max Roach: “All Africa”

Jacques Brel: Ces Gens-là (1965)

Jacques Brel defected from the bourgeoisie as a young man, abandoning his stuffy Belgian family for the cabaret nightclubs of 1950s Paris. By 1966, he was an international icon, packing concert halls in New York, London, and throughout the Soviet Union. That year, a dozen before his death, the master songwriter threatened to retire from music, but not before releasing Ces Gens-là, a slippery chanson classic. In charismatic vignettes, Brel presents a cast of flawed and unreliable narrators—jealous lovers, inspired drunks, would-be superstars. His theatrical delivery conceals intimate observations, and he exorcises his characters’ unrealized dreams just when we might question their motives. On the song “Jef,” strings lurch across a tightrope of discord, mirroring the precarious friendship between a heartbroken alcoholic and his stargazing, gutter-dwelling savior. On the title track, the narrator deliciously satirizes a family of bourgeois degenerates: imitates their porcine soup-slobbering, laments their impatience for a rich relative’s death. As strings part the sky, he announces the family’s gravest crime: forbidding his relationship with Frida, the family daughter. Was his vicious class commentary a farce? Either way, a final twist somewhat validates their reservations: Our narrator—passionate, lovably flawed—half-confesses to having slit cats’ throats. “They didn’t smell good,” he reasons. Brel could not, at the very least, be accused of writing stock characters. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: Jacques Brel: “Ces Gens-là”

La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela: The Black Record (1969)

By 1969, La Monte Young already had a significant influence on the trajectory of popular music. A guru of drone switched on by the hum of electrical generators and high winds that surrounded his childhood home in rural Idaho, come the early ’60s, Young had relocated to New York, where he founded the experimental performance group Theatre of Eternal Music. Among his players was a young John Cale; shortly after, Cale took up his viola as part of a downtown rock band called the Warlocks, soon to be renamed the Velvet Underground, and the rest is history.

The Theatre’s ’60s recordings have emerged only as bootlegs, so it’s the so-called Black Record—its unofficial name a reference to the calligraphed cover by Young’s wife, collaborator and fellow Theatre member Marian Zazeela—that stands as the earliest official example of Young’s recorded work. Handily, its two side-long tracks neatly encapsulate Young’s late-’60s process. Untethered from the 12-note Western music vocabulary, the pair experiments with long, droning pitches that seem to collapse time around them. On “31 VII 69 10:26-10:49 PM,” Young and Zazeela vocalize around a single glowing sine wave, while on the flip (“23 VIII 64 2:50:45-3:11 AM”) we hear a gong acquired from the sculptor Robert Morris played with a double bass bow. The result is a yawning metallic void that presages everything from Brian Eno’s ambient music to the amplifier armageddon of Sunn O))). –Louis Pattison

Listen: La Monte Young: “31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta”

John Coltrane: Olé Coltrane (1961)

Olé Coltrane is a curious record in John Coltrane’s career. It’s his last session as a bandleader for Atlantic; it features one of his largest ensembles, including two bassists—Reggie Workman and Art Davis—and Eric Dolphy on flute. It precedes the spiritual and interstellar exploration of his work for Impulse! Records. Over the previous years, he had developed a method of improvisation, classified by critic Ira Gitler as “sheets of sound,” in which he would vertically and vertiginously stack arpeggios in his solos.

So it’s strange that Olé is, in a way, Coltrane’s most horizontal album, if only for how much real estate he cedes to the rhythm and groove. This is especially evident on “Olé,” which unfolds for 18 minutes on a hypnotic rhythm sustained by the fixtures of John Coltrane’s band, pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones. Workman and Davis, meanwhile, try to destabilize this groove by drawing strange, pulsing magnetic fields and sawing their basses so vigorously, they form long, dark shadows into which the song sinks. When Coltrane finally takes his solo, 13 minutes into the track, what pours out of his saxophone isn’t a toppling structure: Instead, one hears him scraping against the upper limits of his range. It sounds like he’s starting to escape the atmosphere. –Brad Nelson

Listen: John Coltrane: “Olé”

Son House: Father of Folk Blues (1965)

Eddie James “Son” House, Jr. did not sell his soul; he was not blinded by lye. If he seems less mythologized than the average bluesman of his era and stature, it’s largely because he was alive to record this album and subsequently receive polite applause at colleges and folk festivals for a decade afterward. But there’s no questioning his bona fides: House was blues bedrock enough to have once shooed away a young Robert Johnson.

His rediscovery in the ’60s resulted in Father of Folk Blues, an album that’s even more stripped-down than his ’40s Library of Congress sessions with Alan Lomax, driven by his slinky steel guitar work and deceptively sweet vocals. More than a guitar player, House was a singer and a writer: Eight of this album’s nine songs are credited to him, and “Death Letter” and “Levee Camp Moan” have become classics in their own right. He may have never made a deal with the devil, but House paid a different cost, taking terrible jobs as a chef and railroad porter, waiting until someone cared. Father of Folk Blues is the payoff. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: Son House: “Sundown”

Roberta Flack: First Take (1969)

Roberta Flack’s singing is like a fever. Even as her vocals gather mass and volume, there is the sense that she is communicating something so intimate and honest that it burns from the inside. She returns to certain phrases and words in a way that widens their definitions; on her glacial recording of the Donny Hathaway/Robert Ayers–written “Our Ages or Our Hearts,” from her debut album First Take, she sings, “I thought… I thought we had a love that was true.” The second “thought” is broader than the first, drawing the unabridged history of a relationship into itself.

On First Take, Flack’s singing and spacious piano playing blend soul, blues, jazz, and folk. The arrangements are dense, but they almost exclusively express themselves in flourishes; in the opening track, “Compared to What,” the horn section abruptly sprouts out of the chorus. It’s a remarkable song on a remarkable debut, Flack expressing political and personal dissatisfaction while barely raising her voice. “Hate that human/Love that stinking mutt,” she sings in an angry simmer. “Try to make it real/But compared to what?” The fire in her voice flickers beyond a composed surface, but it still burns. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Roberta Flack: “I Told Jesus”

Don Cherry: Eternal Rhythm (1969)

A crucial player in the birth of free jazz in the early ’60s, trumpeter Don Cherry discovered an even freer world on Eternal Rhythm. Recorded in Berlin in November 1968, the album found him working with a transcontinental, all-star cast that included guitarist Sonny Sharrock and avant-garde French percussionist Jacques Thollot, establishing the Oklahoma City-born Cherry as a joyous visionary and global intermediary. Finding shapes on the far side of complete freeness, the LP’s two side-long suites encompass clouds of group improvisation but also mini ensembles, coalescing motifs, and solo flute pieces. Throughout, the constant chime of melodic percussion gives the music a rolling lightness, even as the ensemble hits full density on “Autumn Melody,” an earthy grounding for Sharrock’s splintering guitar. Open-eared and timeless in spirit, Eternal Rhythm remains a glowing doorway to music from the other side. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Don Cherry: “Eternal Rhythm, Pt. 1”

Jorge Ben: Samba Esquema Novo (1963)

Though most widely known for launching the endlessly covered “Mas, Que Nada,” Jorge Ben’s debut album is a bossa nova masterpiece rounded out by 11 other equally immortal, if less imitated, songs. Raised in Rio by an Ethiopian mother, the 18-year-old Ben infused fresh blood into the city’s established sound, incorporating a stronger samba influence in his rhythmic guitar style than his predecessors. Likewise, his vocal style was much less restrained, as likely to slide upward into a soaring, yipping cry for joy (“Uála Uálalá,” “A Tamba”) as it was to remain in the quiet, warm lounge tone most associated with the genre.

Samba Esquema Novo is one of most distinctive bossa nova albums ever recorded and a tantalizing glimpse into Ben’s unique oeuvre, which straddles bossa, samba, Tropicália, and Afro-funk. His impact as a songwriter and sonic innovator is particularly foreshadowed on the spooky, minor-keyed passages of “Quero Esquecer Você” and “A Tamba.” Though he has often been overlooked in comparison to contemporaries like Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and Sergio Mendes, particularly outside Brazil, his contribution is no less major. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Jorge Ben: “A Tamba”

Archie Shepp: Blasé (1969)

Before taking up the saxophone, Archie Shepp studied drama, training that proved belatedly useful: The players on Blasé sometimes seem to be trading off monologues, circling each other at his direction. Shepp’s theatrical form of jazz estranges tradition—the first sound heard here is blues harmonica, off-key and dissonant. The hymn “There Is a Balm in Gilead” is pared down to a resounding nothing: muted flugelhorn, piano keys faintly brushed. Like much of the album, one of five Shepp recorded in the same year, it wouldn’t work without the singer Jeanne Lee, who gives that title such ironic sting: “Blasé, ain’t you, daddy?/You, who shot your sperm into me/But never set me free.” Warmth and reproach mingle in her voice, like a handful of cinders. The notes contort while crawling on ahead, intimately menacing. –Chris Randle

Listen: Archie Shepp: “Blasé”

David Axelrod: Song of Innocence (1968)

In 1968, a former boxer turned producer, composer, and A&R man sets to work on his most ambitious project yet: an orchestral tone poem based around Song of Innocence and of Experience, a book of poems published by the visionary English author William Blake some two centuries before. David Axelrod had previously been the creative force behind the Electric Prunes’ Mass in F Minor, a psychedelic religious opera sung in Latin that all but killed off the hapless garage rockers that were its unlikely vessel. Despite that album’s noble failure, Axelrod somehow assembled an ensemble of some 30 players—including members of L.A.’s hotshot session players the Wrecking Crew—to bring Song of Innocence to life.

Baroque and of rarefied atmosphere, “Holy Thursday” and “The Smile” blossom with sumptuous strings, horns, and scorching electric guitar leads. But you can also hear hints of Axelrod the pugilist in the album’s punchy, funk-inflected drum breaks. Song of Innocence was seen by some as a folly, but by the 1990s, Axelrod’s work was being rediscovered by a generation of crate-diggers like DJ Shadow and Madlib, who recognized the holy, beautiful vision writ through his grooves. –Louis Pattison

Listen: David Axelrod: “Song of Innocence”

Alexander “Skip” Spence: Oar (1969)

A catalyst behind the early San Francisco rock scene, Alexander “Skip” Spence followed up a stint as the drummer in Jefferson Airplane by joining the star-crossed psych rock outfit Moby Grape. It didn’t go so well: While working on an album in New York, Spence took a fire ax to his bandmates, landing him in the Tombs and, eventually, Bellevue. After his discharge from the mental hospital, he went to Nashville and cut the entirety of Oar in four days with himself on every instrument. By turns shambolic, astonishing, silly, and shattered, the album is a haunting snapshot of an artist mastering country, loose-limbed rock, ghostly gospel, free-love ditties, and drum’n’bass abstraction as his mental state crumbles. There’s no darker portrait of the perils of the psychedelic era. –Andy Beta

Listen: Alexander “Skip” Spence: “Diana”

Frank Sinatra: September of My Years (1965)

The dewy-eyed oldie “It Was a Very Good Year” is on the shortlist of songs that define Frank Sinatra’s midlife resurgence, but the title also describes the year he was having when he sang it. In 1965, at age 50, the Voice got his second wind: He was the subject of the Emmy-winning special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music and made his directorial debut in None But the Brave, which he also starred in and produced. He was shadowed by Gay Talese for what would become the mythic Esquire article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” He bought his first Learjet, and two albums he released would go on to win Album of the Year Grammys. As he entered his golden years, Sinatra was solidifying his legend.

Even amid this career renaissance, twilight was clearly setting on the storied songman. So it’s fitting that September of My Years, the first of those two Grammy-winners, is a traditional pop standard-bearer about learning to accept growing old. The aging Lothario gazes longingly at young lovers and remembers his conquests, and he gazes reflectively at himself through the looking glass, catching glimpses of the man he once was. The album’s extended metaphor—autumn signaling the coming of the end—presents a bittersweet backdrop for his soul-searching. This collection of sentimental songs from a self-professed playboy feels as essential to his myth as any of the swanky displays of his youth; the writing is wistful and evocative and his voice swells into lush, crescendoing strings. September of My Years is graceful and meditative, willingly accepting of a time-imposed truth: “That world I knew is lost to me.” –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Frank Sinatra: “Once Upon a Time”

Shirley and Dolly Collins: Anthems in Eden (1969)

On 1969’s Anthems in Eden, English folk singer Shirley Collins and her sister Dolly delved into the past to give the modern folk scene a kick up the ærs. Shirley refashioned a clutch of traditional numbers into a song-cycle about women in wartime. Dolly arranged the material for David Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London, featuring the strange, dissonant sound of crumhorns and sacbuts. Together, they imbued this Old English material with disarming new vitality.

Anthems opens with “A Song-Story,” which describes a relationship between a young woman and a blacksmith who are besotted with one another. He betrays her, and a valuable, progressive lesson rings through their centuries-long tale (“There’s no trusted man/Not my own brother/So girls, if you would love/Love one each other”). Along with stories of personal treachery, Anthems offers a subtle indictment of war’s effect on the British working classes. Romantic, earthy, vengeful, and above all self-possessed, the album tells a timeless narrative of innocence and experience, and suggests that sacrifice is only worth making on one’s own terms. –Laura Snapes

Listen: Shirley and Dolly Collins: “God Dog”

Mary Lou Williams: Black Christ of the Andes (1964)

Upon her conversion to Catholicism in the 1950s, piano innovator Mary Lou Williams all but disappeared from the world of jazz. The following decade, she emerged from her prayerful isolation with this visionary 10-song LP. Initially an eponymous release, subsequent reissues formalized its title as Black Christ of the Andes—a reference to St. Martin de Porres, a dark-skinned 17th-century healer who symbolized racial harmony and was later canonized by Pope John XXIII. The first track is Williams’ largely a cappella hymn to the saint, its choral exclamations driven by traditional, mid-century pop-group harmony. But Williams also throws in startling, modernist harmonic material, reflecting her connection to bebop. Toward the end of the song, her piano makes a swooping entrance—and when the singers join her, there are swinging rhythms and call-and-response vocalizations in the reverent mix. This rich variety sets the tone for the rest of the album, which moves from the avant-garde solo piano strains of “A Fungus A Mungus” to the rousing and sanctified small-band groove of “Praise the Lord.” In earlier decades, jazz was seen as principally belonging to the secular realm, but Williams showed how swinging compositions and spiritual reflection could be one and the same. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Mary Lou Williams: “Black Christ of the Andes (St. Martin de Porres)”

Stevie Wonder: For Once in My Life (1968)

The story of Stevie Wonder’s first decade in music is his rise from young talent to true auteur—no small accomplishment for an artist working in Motown’s famously controlling machine. Wonder hadn’t completed that arc yet at age 18 when he released For Once in My Life. It was already his 10th LP, but this record marked some major milestones, including his most writing credits yet on an album and his first production one. Most significantly, it marked the first of Wonder’s pop albums to feature the clavinet, the instrument that would come to symbolize his creative ambitions.

Song for song, For Once in My Life is stronger than Wonder’s previous albums, but it’s the sheer eagerness of his performances that makes it stand out. By 1968, he’d fully grown into his adult voice, and he lets it soar here, eager to show off all its new tricks. You can hear Wonder take a deep breath and smack his tongue against the roof of his mouth before hitting the show-stopping note on “I Don’t Know Why,” and by the end of the song, he’s practically run himself ragged. Even would-be ballads like the title track get an ebullient, swinging treatment. The last thing Wonder wanted to do, at this point in his career, was slow down. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: Stevie Wonder: “For Once in My Life”

Sun Ra and His Arkestra: The Magic City (1966)

Keyboardist, bandleader, and self-proclaimed spaceman Sun Ra released more than 20 albums over the course of the ’60s. They all have their charms, but The Magic City is particularly vehement about being jazz on Ra and his Arkestra’s terms and no one else’s. Named after a train station sign in Ra’s hometown of Birmingham, Ala., “The Magic City” itself is a 27-minute group improvisation, with Ra playing fractured figures on a piano and reeling spacey whistles out of a Clavioline (sometimes simultaneously). For most of the piece, he pulls two or three musicians at a time into the spotlight, then out again; the Arkestra probes tentatively around the neon-light field of the imaginary place their leader is evoking, and sometimes erupts into swaggering clusters of horns. As a further backhand to jazz convention, the album includes both “Abstract Eye” and “Abstract ‘I’”—two versions of the same piece that suggest the flexibility of what a “composition” could mean to Ra and his group. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra: “The Magic City”

The Isley Brothers: It’s Our Thing (1969)

As It’s Our Thing opens, Ronald Isley catches a woman in a compromising situation. She’s been sleeping around, but Isley preempts any fears that he might rat on her. It’s all right, he assures her: He’s been cheating on his girl, too. And so sets the tone for one of the most exuberantly hedonistic soul albums of the ’60s, a judgment-free celebration of free love and freedom in general.

Autonomy was strong on the Isley Brothers’ minds at the time. They’d spent the previous few years on Motown, where they’d begun to feel out of place—Isley’s untamed voice often clashed with the smoother songs they’d been assigned to record, and the group had grown resentful as the label continually passed its surefire hits to other artists. Without Berry Gordy overseeing their image, the Isleys were free to run with their wild side, writing every song on It’s Our Thing themselves, and concocting a looser, funkier, and kinkier record than anything Motown would’ve allowed. The group would reinvent themselves ceaselessly over the next decade-and-a-half, but It’s Our Thing marked the moment where they first grasped how infinite the possibilities were. They could sleep with whomever they wanted. They could make whatever music they wanted. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: The Isley Brothers: “It’s Your Thing”

Roy Orbison: Crying (1962)

On the engagement ode “She Wears My Ring,” Roy Orbison allows himself a rare moment of pure joy. “She swears to wear it with eternal devotion,” he beams. Alas, this bliss is short-lived. On the album’s very next track, he’s all alone once again: It’s his wedding day, but all he has to hang on to is that same cold, gold ring. She’s gone.

Ardent devotee Bruce Springsteen, who copped Orbison’s melodramatic delivery on Born to Run, once described the singer as “the coolest uncool loser you’d ever seen.” His tinted shades gave him mystique, but he was a pining romantic at heart, an introvert who could turn a teary pop ballad into an opera for the ages. He wasn’t particularly suave onstage, like Elvis, or even that cute, like the Everly Brothers, but his dweebiness made his tales of unrequited love that much more believable. When he sings “love hurts” in that sterling, warbling tenor, you can practically see the bruises. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Roy Orbison: “Love Hurts”

Fred Neil: Fred Neil (1966)

Originally a singer-songwriter cog in the Brill Building pop machine, Fred Neil and his fathoms-deep baritone soon found a more accommodating setting in the Greenwich Village folk boom of the early ’60s. There, he mentored budding young folkies like Bob Dylan, Karen Dalton, Tim Buckley, and David Crosby and released a self-titled album that still resonates in its profundity. “The Dolphins” and “Everybody’s Talkin’” remain evocative classics, as humble and mysterious as the folk music standards Neil and cohorts previously emulated at Café Wha? The album ranges from harmonica and 12-string folk staples to ruminations that shimmer with electric guitar lines. Spare and serene yet with an underlying sadness, Neil proved that “searching for the dolphins in the sea” wasn’t just a metaphor but a life goal, soon turning his attentions from music altogether and towards dolphin conservation in South Florida instead. –Andy Beta

Listen: Fred Neil: “Everybody’s Talkin’”

Duke Ellington / Charles Mingus / Max Roach: Money Jungle (1963)

Already an immortal songwriter and composer, Duke Ellington refused to fade into the background, even as he reached his sixties. And with the one-day 1962 session that resulted in Money Jungle, he took the rare step of paring down his big band sound by playing in a trio with two artists decades his junior: bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach. Together, they catalyzed a rhythm section that pushed Ellington’s melodic and improvisational chops to the limit. On the title track, Ellington enthusiastically reckons with the avant-garde. The album’s quieter moments—the softly rustling “Fleurette Africaine” and the romantic, subtly bluesy “Warm Valley”—find odd-angled routes towards reverie. The album closes with two old standards from Ellington’s 1930s heyday—a deliriously joyful take on Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” and a lush meditation on the Ellington-composed “Solitude.” They advance the past into the future on terms even a musical forefather like Duke could welcome. –Nate Patrin

Listen: Duke Ellington/Charles Mingus/Max Roach: “Money Jungle”

Aretha Franklin: Aretha Now (1968)

Aretha Franklin’s 15th album, Aretha Now, came into a world on fire. The United States was in turmoil in 1968, reeling from the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; amid protests and uprisings, troops waged war in Vietnam. Perhaps on purpose, Franklin reflected those tensions on her opening song, “Think,” a volcanic soul stomp that cries for freedom.

As the story goes, Aretha Now was recorded in five days under the watch of producer Jerry Wexler, who also oversaw her smash Lady Soul earlier that year. Aretha Now turned out to be a barnburner in its own right, slightly overshadowed by its predecessor yet no less potent. On “You’re a Sweet Sweet Man,” for instance, Franklin sounds especially resonant, and her cover of “Hello Sunshine” might be better than Wilson Pickett’s original. Aretha Now captures Franklin ascending to the height of her power, helping her earn her rightful title as the Queen of Soul. –Marcus J. Moore

Listen: Aretha Franklin: “Hello Sunshine”

The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969)

In a flowery West Coast scene that dismissed George Jones and Porter Wagoner as conservative squares, Gram Parsons of the Flying Burrito Brothers treated country 45s as sacred texts. What’s more, he adopted their bedazzled Nudie suit uniform, tricking his out with pills and pot leaves. The band, formed by Parsons and Chris Hillman after they left the Byrds, played to Parsons’ strengths: a deep knowledge of country music, a strong voice, a pretty face, rock star friends, and a trust fund that kept him stocked with drugs and flashy duds. 

The Gilded Palace of Sin—the band’s first and best record—establishes their identity perfectly. The warm, loose twang of Kleinlow’s pedal steel underscores Parsons and Hillman’s harmonies. They offer up morality tales about music industry greed (“Sin City”), groupie culture (“Christine’s Tune”), draft-dodging (“My Uncle”), and in true country tradition, heartbreak (“Hot Burrito #1”). They also expand beyond country’s confines, covering two classics by the Muscle Shoals songwriting legends Chips Moman and Dan Penn. Gilded Palace is a testament to the band’s omnivorous nature: They blurred the lines between country and rock, James Carr and Lefty Frizzell, churchgoers and hippie boys. –Evan Minsker

Listen: The Flying Burrito Brothers: “Sin City”

Jimmy Cliff: Jimmy Cliff (1969)

If the 1972 soundtrack to The Harder They Come spread the sounds of reggae worldwide, that film’s star and soundtrack curator sowed the seeds for the incoming revolution three years earlier with his self-titled album. Jimmy Cliff was already a hero in his native Jamaica, a celebrity since he was a teen, but this is the record that brought the 21-year-old singer to an international audience. It includes some of Cliff’s most enduring songs—“Many Rivers to Cross,” “Vietnam,” “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”—and each one became a reggae standard in its own right, covered endlessly after Cliff let them loose into the world. The album also saw him showing off his range as a songwriter who was equally comfortable penning mournful ballads and incisive protest songs as he explored the flexibility of a sound on the cusp of its breakthrough. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Jimmy Cliff: “Vietnam”

Various Artists: A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963)

A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector is an advent calendar of tracks featuring the producer’s trademark opulence. But its grand soundscapes, from sweeping strings to clanging bells, would be nothing but window dressing without its talented cast—most notably Darlene Love, whose soaring, bittersweet vocals on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” challenge the season’s easy cheer. Throughout, Spector retrofits Yuletide standards with his maximalist Wall of Sound style, helping the Crystals breathe new life into “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and the Ronettes revive “Frosty the Snowman.” –Zoe Camp

Listen: Darlene Love: “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”

The United States of America: The United States of America (1968)

Their name was a provocation—“a way of expressing disdain for governmental policy. It was like hanging the flag upside down,” as the group’s Dorothy Moskowitz told Terrascope. But if you were young in 1968, there was a lot going on—LSD, Vietnam, The White Album, Stockhausen—and the United States of America somehow sounded like all of it at once: a counterculture state-of-the-union address. Their debut album was the work of a group of UCLA students working under the direction of Joseph Byrd, an ethnomusicologist and former student of John Cage.

Byrd, a card-carrying Communist, envisaged an avant-garde rock band with radical politics at its center, and from that combustible starting point came a suite of music that pulls in all directions. Fuzz-rock and musique concrète leaks into traditional jazz and ragtime, with Moskowitz’s beautiful but affectless voice a rare constant. By any conventional yardstick, it’s a jumble, but think of it as the musical equivalent of a Rauschenberg collage and it all makes sense. –Louis Pattison

Listen: The United States of America: “Cloud Song”

John Coltrane: Live at Birdland (1964)

“One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here,” writes the poet LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) in his liner notes to Live at Birdland. Throughout the 1960s, John Coltrane mastered this paradox, turning harrowing sadness into sublime beauty and vice versa. Live at Birdland, one of his most accessible and engaging albums from the decade, offers plenty of straight-up beauty, especially in Coltrane’s lilting version of Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro-Blue” and two other tunes recorded at an October 1963 concert.

But one piece recorded in a studio, “Alabama,” goes deeper, melding tragedy and grace into something epic despite lasting only five minutes. Written in reaction to the Birmingham church bombing just weeks prior, timed to match the cadence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorial speech, “Alabama” is played by Coltrane’s classic quartet with both solemnity and hope. It’s a stirring, timeless example of how music can grapple with incomprehensible human acts. –Marc Masters

Listen: John Coltrane: “Alabama”

The Monks: Black Monk Time (1966)

The Monks were rock’n’roll’s original trolls. In an era when British Invasion bands were sparking sexual revolutions and denying Jesus’ chart appeal, the Monks cheekily pledged allegiance to the monastic tradition, foregoing mop-tops in favor of tonsures. At the dawn of the guitar-god age, they wielded a banjo player. And where most young men their age were starting bands to get girls, the Monks seemed more interested in repelling them with caveman-stomped kiss-offs like “I Hate You.”

But the Monks’ novel nihilism was driven by very real neuroses. While budding U.S. rock bands could spout off about their teen angst from the comfort of their parents’ garages, the Monks were formed by five American GIs stationed in Germany, staring down the possibility of getting shipped off to Vietnam. That cloud of dread consumes even the most joyously anarchic songs on their 1966 debut. The opener “Monk Time” rolls out on a bouncing-ball beat like some children’s-show theme song for juvenile delinquents, but it’s overtaken by Gary Burger’s unsettling shrieks—“Stop it! I don’t like it!”—as if he were suddenly overcome by PTSD. Even when not directly addressing the horrors of combat, Black Monk Time is a discomfiting listen. –Stuart Berman

Listen: The Monks: “Shut Up”

Tammy Wynette: D-I-V-O-R-C-E (1968)

Tammy Wynette didn’t take long to peak. She was only just a couple of years into her career by 1968, but already in the middle of a long run of consecutive No. 1 hits that cemented her stardom. She released her signature song, “Stand By Your Man,” that year, as well as her tearjerker of a third album, D-I-V-O-R-C-E, which captured some of her most harrowing performances.

The main attraction is the title track, about a couple’s attempt to hide their divorce from their not-yet-literate 4-year-old child by spelling out the word instead of saying it. Wynette had a gift for sniffing out the sorrow in any material she was handed, though, so even the obligatory covers typical of country albums from that era soared—especially anguished takes on the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and country fiddler John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind.” Producer Billy Sherrill helped pioneer the “countrypolitan” sound—a sometimes overblown tangle of strings, choirs, and twang—but with Wynette, he always cleared plenty of room for her sterling voice, allowing every quiver and catch in her throat to speak for itself. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: Tammy Wynette: “Sweet Dreams”

Sonny Sharrock: Black Woman (1969)

Sonny Sharrock’s 1969 debut as a bandleader, Black Woman, is a distinguished free jazz record because of three things: the restless thrum of Milford Graves’ drumming, which never assembles into anything as coherent as a pulse; the antlered progressions of Sonny’s guitar playing; and the voice of Linda Sharrock—singular, gorgeous, uniquely capable of deconstructing itself in real time. When all those elements align in “Peanut,” they seem to produce a shimmer; when they stutter and fall apart, as they do often in “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black,” each part separates into its own bracing fraction. That Linda rarely sings any recognizable words is key: Black Woman tries to give shape to a nameless personal and emotional betweenness—between fraternity and isolation, between singing and screaming, between joy and pain. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Sonny Sharrock: “Peanut”

The Kinks: Something Else By the Kinks (1967)

While many of their British Invasion peers were hypnotized by the escapist allure of psychedelia, the Kinks offered a focused view of the cruel absurdities of real life. Their fifth album, Something Else, may boast all the telltale trappings of circa-’67 rock production (harpsichords, chirpy horns, woozy sound effects, bird calls), but they’re used to subtly color rather than to distort songwriter Ray Davies’ wry, acutely detailed portraits of workaday drudgery, paycheck-draining impoverishment, and family dysfunction (a subject he was all too familiar with). But on Something Else’s swooning closer, “Waterloo Sunset,” Davies’ withering social commentary gives way to a quiet reverence for his surroundings. Part love song, part urban travelogue, part zen mantra, “Waterloo Sunset” serves the same function as psychedelia—inviting us to block out the bustle and grime of city life and bask in a natural wonder—but with a sobering sense of clarity. –Stuart Berman

Listen: The Kinks: “Tin Soldier Man”

Marvin Gaye: In the Groove (1968)

Marvin Gaye and Norman Whitfield hated each other, but the producer Whitfield brought out a newfound intensity and fervor in Gaye’s performances on In the Groove. (Gaye later said his collaborator had him “reaching for notes that caused my throat veins to bulge.”) The strategy worked, though this album’s biggest hit almost didn’t even see the light of day: “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was shelved for a full year before being added to In the Groove at the last minute. The song became Gaye’s first single to top the Billboard 100 when it was later re-released as a single, eventually selling more than 4 million copies. It cemented the singer’s financial stability and gave him the leverage he needed to break free of Motown’s strict quality-control system and invent a whole new take on soul music a few years later. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Marvin Gaye: “Chained”

Mulatu Astatke: Afro-Latin Soul, Vol. 1 (1966)

The title is sublimely generic; the “Ethiopian Quintet” credited as backing band is mostly Puerto Rican. Mulatu Astatke would become better-known for the records he made after returning to Ethiopia in the 1970s, but Afro-Latin Soul is trickier than it first appears. His idiosyncratic style, fusing the traditional pentatonic scale with Western jazz chords, remained half-formed—this album resembles Latin dance music of the period, led by someone learning the jams secondhand. On tracks like “Askum,” there’s a charming sense that Astatke  is speeding up to match the tempo of the audience. He wrote lyrics for “I Faram Gami I Faram,” uncharacteristically, and got sideman Louis Rodriguez to sing them in Amharic, along with a trumpeting elephant. The vibraphone you hear everywhere doesn’t comfort or lull; it gives each groove a blurred weight, as if moving through the immaculate lacquer of dreams. –Chris Randle

Listen: Mulatu Astatke: “Shagu”

Desmond Dekker and The Aces: Israelites (1969)

In June 1969, a few years before Jimmy Cliff, Johnny Nash, and Bob Marley introduced reggae to the pop mainstream, Kingston group Desmond Dekker and the Aces cracked the Billboard Top 10 with “Israelites,” beguiling American listeners with an off-kilter, upstroke rhythm, Dekker’s high-pitched croon, and lyrics that linked hardscrabble Jamaican life to Old Testament myths. Dekker had released several Jamaican hit singles through the ’60s (and topped the UK charts in 1967 with the rude boy ode “007 (Shanty Town)”), but the U.S. success of “Israelites” led to a quick LP follow-up helmed by legendary producer Leslie Kong. Far from a simple cash-in, Israelites shows the depth of Dekker’s crossover capacity. Covers of Bill Anderson’s 1960 country hit “Tip of My Fingers” and a ballad version of “For Once in My Life,” a 1968 up-tempo smash for Stevie Wonder, share space with purely Jamaican tunes like the sassy “Rude Boy Train” and “It Mek” (island patois for “that’s what you get”). Unfairly classified as a “one-hit wonder” for the surprise success of “Israelites,” Dekker’s historical role is much more significant: He was the first Jamaican pop diplomat. –Eric Harvey

Listen: Desmond Dekker and the Aces: “It Mek”

Pink Floyd: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)

As a no-show on classic-rock playlists, Pink Floyd’s debut is rarely anyone’s starting point with the band. But even if the British group had ended with the dismissal of original leader Syd Barrett following the release of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, their place in psychedelic rock would be assured. The album is one of the mode’s greatest achievements, finding space for both fractured fairy tales and 10-minute interstellar freakouts while making both sound equally mind-altering (and frightening). It also makes a tragic hero out of the troubled, brilliant, and ultimately doomed Barrett. Fifty years later, it’s possible to see Pink Floyd as everything punk and indie rock sought to tear down as well as a foundational influence on those same movements. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Pink Floyd: “Astronomy Domine”

The Meters: The Meters (1969)

There were dozens of instrumental R&B hits in the ’60s, but most of them were showcases for a star soloist. New Orleans’ the Meters, the house band for Allen Toussaint, evolved into an impossibly tight funk ensemble without a leader and with no shortage of personalities. Their breakthrough hit “Cissy Strut” bounces equally between all four members, including drummer “Ziggy” Modeliste, whose cymbal smashes are direct commands to the hips.

The group whipped up most of their debut album quickly when “Cissy Strut” started climbing the charts, offering the dance grooves they’d honed and hardened in eight-hour gigs at the Ivanhoe club on Bourbon Street. It’s remarkable how much open air there is in The Meters’ funk: Keyboardist Art Neville glides as the rest of the musicians snap and crack, and burners like “Sophisticated Cissy” and “Ease Back” slow down sensually while heating the dance floor up. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: The Meters: “Live Wire”

The Beach Boys: Smiley Smile (1967)

After Brian Wilson’s epic Smile project came crashing to earth in 1967, the Beach Boys knocked out a quickie album to replace it. Filled with casual re-recordings of songs and fragments considered for Smile, along with two earlier singles that sound completely out of place in their baroque grandiosity (“Good Vibrations” and “Heroes and Villains,” the latter of which was labored over endlessly as Smile’s planned centerpiece), Smiley Smile seems at first like a Beach Boys album to skip, a final squib from the towering ambition of the previous few years.

But over time, Smiley Smile has developed a small cult of its own, attracting those drawn to its stripped-down, highly spontaneous, and deeply stoned vibe. Partly recorded at Wilson’s house, it has the feel of a mixtape, with a zany instrumental interlude, tape-warp nuttiness, explosive fits of laughter, and sound effects; the songs, about hair loss and visions of distant lands and the essential goodness of vegetables, have the cracked and colorful logic of daydreams. Considering how significant the Beach Boys were in the pop landscape at the time, it’s baffling that a major record label would release an album this goofy and slight. But Smiley Smile is a record of startling intimacy, and it basically invented the kind of lo-fi bedroom pop that would later propel Sebadoh, Animal Collective, and other characters. –Mark Richardson

Listen: The Beach Boys: “Little Pad”

Serge Gainsbourg: Initials B.B. (1968)

In the 1960s, the talk was of Swinging London, not Swinging Paris. So few people would have expected a French man who turned 40 in 1968 to make one of the most elegant albums of the decade. Recorded largely in London, Initials B.B. marries Serge Gainsbourg’s peerless sense of dramatic melody with some of the finest orchestral pop production the 1960s could offer, incorporating elements of jazz, yé-yé, chanson, and the baroque pop of the Left Bank with just a soupçon of Rubber Soul–era Beatles. From the cascading strings and imperial brass of the title track to the soulful cheek of “Marilu,” the heartbreakingly doomed love song “Bonnie and Clyde” to the swinging environmental critique of “Torrey Canyon,” not a second is wasted in this taut, 31-minute masterpiece. It evokes London fog and Parisian élan, contemporary pop nous and eternal orchestral splendor, in a way that makes even the most modish Anglo-American pop acts of the era look spectacularly ungainly. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Serge Gainsbourg: “Bloody Jack”

Miles Davis: Nefertiti (1968)

Of the run of albums Miles Davis made with his quintet in the 1960s, Nefertiti is the most alien and the most beautiful. The tunes, all of which were written by members of his band—three by saxophonist Wayne Shorter, two by pianist Herbie Hancock, and one by drummer Tony Williams, leaving only Davis and bassist Ron Carter without a credit—are eerily beautiful explorations of the possibilities of space and repetition, pointing in the direction of In a Silent Way. The pieces float and drift and breathe, with gently curling melodies held aloft by Williams’ astonishingly fluid approach to cymbals. This was Davis’ last purely acoustic album, as in the coming years he would explore dark, churning electronic noise. Nefertiti found him leaving the world of the traditional jazz combo on a brilliantly atmospheric note. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Miles Davis: “Nefertiti”

The Fugs: The Fugs First Album (1965)

Before there was punk, there were the Fugs: antagonistic, hilarious, and radically political to the bone. They were anarchic beat poets in the East Village who took folk instruments they could sort of play and didn’t give a damn. Their debut album was originally called The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction—though “sing” is subjective, as their vocals are fabulously off-key. The Fugs’ ringleader Ed Sanders is one of the most crucial figures in countercultural history: He founded the bookstore Peace Eye and the arts journal Fuck You and, among other late-’60s antics, he attempted to levitate the Pentagon and staged a funeral for flower power in San Francisco.

On their debut, the Fugs sing-song a surreal pop ditty about dying (“Carpe penum!/Sing, children, sing!/Death is a’coming!”) and, on “Nothing,” abrasively equate several sacred bohemian staples—Allen Ginsberg, church, sex, The Village Voice—with “nothing, nothing, nothing.” The record was originally released on the legendary labels Folkways and later ESP-Disk, which earned the Fugs their share of people who considered them very talented con artists. Their music was so anti-establishment, though, that it didn’t matter. Evoking the virtues of ugliness with a charisma that couldn’t be faked, the Fugs remain inspiring. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: The Fugs: “Slum Goddess”

Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1966)

It might be possible to ascribe an additional weight to Monk’s Straight, No Chaser based on the 1988 documentary of same name, which features footage of the man on tour and in the studio. That documentary’s image of Monk as an idiosyncratic, sometimes impenetrable artist with odd habits and an even more off-kilter playing style is one of the most detailed looks into the creative process of a jazz musician. But the album, named for a standard Monk first recorded in 1951, has its own perspective, in which his unpredictably timed moments of rhythmic and melodic dissonance are recorded at a continuously evolving state. Reworked original compositions like the title cut, “Locomotive,” and “We See” nail down deceptively lighthearted riffs before sprawling out into conversational improvised exchanges. It’s a versatile approach that he and his quartet apply slyly to the far-flung material of the other artists they interpret. You wouldn’t think there’s a lot in common between Rentarō Taki’s Meiji-period Japanese folk song “Kōjō no Tsuki” and the Cab Calloway–popularized 1930s standard “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (the latter of which arrives as an almost giddy solo piano rendition), but an artist as boundlessly rule-breaking as Monk always found a way through. –Nate Patrin

Listen: Thelonious Monk: “Locomotive” 

Harry Partch: The World of Harry Partch (1969)

Any popular musician who takes a public liking to creaky, homemade sounds devised in the pursuit of a singular vision is singing the song of Harry Partch. By the time Columbia Records discovered him and released the 1969 album The World of Harry Partch, which offers the most popular overview of his work, the itinerant Californian had spent decades honing the notes of that song, which happened outside of conservatories, outside the boundaries of “classical” and “popular,” and outside of the Western scale. He began by tinkering with violas and soon was inventing his own menagerie of instruments, beautiful creations with magnificent names like “the Quadrangularis Reversum” and the “Cloud-Chamber bowls,” all tuned to his own 43-tone scale.

The music he made with all of those bespoke noisemakers was too luminous and defiantly odd to fit into any existing culture; to a mildly curious new listener, it may have just seemed like a collection of out-of-tune bongs and clonks. But if you probed deeper, you found your way into music both richly detailed and ancient-sounding. These pieces, with their elemental pulses and crystalline webs of rhythm, shivered with the sort of holy feeling you might get upon entering a network of caves. The odd tones swim up to your ears like bioluminescent creatures, while Partch’s dry, avuncular voice patiently explains them all to you.

The World of Harry Partch was a late-breaking shaft of career sunshine for a man who had grown grudgingly accustomed to obscurity: He was a truly independent musician, in a time when that term was much lonelier than it is today. “I am supremely indifferent as to whether anyone chooses to follow in my footsteps,” he professed in 1959. But follow they did: From La Monte Young to Tom Waits, Jack White to Matmos, Partch remains the patron saint for anyone seeking to reconnect us to the physical miracle of sound. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Harry Partch: “Chromelodeon I”

The Paragons: On the Beach (1967)

Originally an uptempo ska vocal group, the Paragons redefined themselves into a Jamaican rocksteady act in the late ’60s, when singer John Holt joined their ranks. On the Beach, their lone album with Holt before he bolted for a successful solo career, remains a high-water mark of that era in Jamaican music; it’s a succinct and breezy encapsulation of the short-lived rocksteady sound, full of lilting rhythms, sparkling horns, and vocal harmonies sweeter than tropical fruit. Holt’s songwriting yielded outright classics like “Wear You to the Ball,” “Only a Smile,” and “The Tide Is High”—songs subsequently covered by admirers as diverse as Gregory Isaacs, UB40, and Blondie. –Andy Beta

Listen: The Paragons: “On the Beach”

Tom Zé: Grande Liquidação (1968)

Tom Zé’s debut isn’t as obviously experimental as some of his 1970s albums, from which David Byrne would largely compile 1990’s Brazil Classics 4: The Best of Tom Zé, the Brazilian musician’s introduction to a worldwide audience after years in obscurity. But even absent the monosyllabic lyrical experiments and unorthodox instruments (a typewriter, a food blender) that pepper his later work, Grande Liquidação’s explosive color and creativity offers a fascinating snapshot of a young talent blossoming amidst cultural upheaval.

“São, São Paulo/Quanta dor” (“São Paulo/So much pain”) begins the album’s very first song, a dulcet tribute to the Brazilian city’s eight million inhabitants; “First lesson/Stop being poor,” he admonishes in “Curso Intensivo de Boas Maneiras” (“Intensive Course of Good Manners”), a subversive look at social norms in post-coup Brazil. Like his comrades in the Tropicalía movement, Zé asks what it means to be a modern Brazilian, constructing magpie-like arrangements in which organs thrum and stacked horns suggest a tropical Sgt. Pepper’s. Through it all, Zé’s playful, slightly pinched voice transmits both wry wisdom and indefatigable cheer. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Tom Zé: “Gloria”

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World (1969)

As the story goes, the Shaggs were born from a palm reading. When Austin Wiggin was young, his mother predicted that he would marry a strawberry blonde, have two sons whom she would never meet, and also have daughters who would form a popular band. After the first two parts came true, Austin took fate into his own hands: He removed his teenage daughters Dot, Betty, and Helen from school and confined them to constant rehearsals, where they attempted to create pop music on instruments they could barely play.

The New Hampshire trio’s only studio record, Philosophy of the World, more closely resembles Captain Beefheart than their beloved Herman’s Hermits. Their discordant voices and clunky mimicry of pop melodies may be off-putting at first, but beneath the awkward instrumentation are three girls singing earnestly about their lost family cat (“My Pal Foot Foot”) and a lover’s cruel side (“Sweet Thing”). Though the Shaggs never reached the level of fame their father desired, much to their surprise, Philosophy of the World eventually became a cult favorite: Frank Zappa called them “better than the Beatles” and Kurt Cobain dubbed it one of his favorite records. Who could have predicted that? –Quinn Moreland

Listen: The Shaggs: “My Pal Foot Foot”

Terry Riley: A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969)

In 1969, Columbia Records was looking for classical LPs that might “capture the imagination of the young audience,” and Terry Riley was uniquely suited to the task. Over the previous decade, he had steeped himself in minimalism, a new style of American classical music that relied on elements like sustained tones (La Monte Young’s Trio for Strings) or a restricted range of melodic material, explored over long durations (Dennis Johnson’s November). Riley was friendly with Young and Johnson, and inspired by both, but he also brought new elements to the party—including an interest in tape loops and fast, rhythmic pulses.

On A Rainbow in Curved Air, Riley’s layers of fast keyboard riffing on Side A have a rock-ready, psychedelic edge that was quick to filter into the pop consciousness. (The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” gives the composer a sideways name-check.) His droning, multi-tracked soprano sax lines on the Side B opus “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band” connect with elements of the experimental jazz zeitgeist, like the marathon solos of John Coltrane. As indebted to these artists as he was forward-thinking, Riley bridged their aesthetic spheres, calmly creating a new hybrid sound—all without seeming to contort a muscle. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Terry Riley: “A Rainbow in Curved Air”

Charles Mingus: Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (1963)

The music of bassist, composer, and bandleader Charles Mingus was an inventive mix of jazz past and present. But Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus is literally old and new: All but two of its tracks are re-recorded versions of songs that had shown up on previous Mingus albums, confusingly (or perhaps deceptively) given new names. But the results are the opposite of retread. Two 11-piece ensembles, both heavy on brass and sax, breathe such fresh, vibrant life into some of Mingus’ best tunes that it often sounds like they’re trying blow them up. His mass of horns push “Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul” to a much louder, denser plane than its appearance on his 1959 album Mingus Ah Um, while the frenetic pace of “II B.S.” makes the 1957 version on The Clown, with the name “Haitian Fight Song,” seem almost tame. Given how driven and sharp the performances are, it’s shocking that Mingus would soon hit a dry spell, releasing no more group studio albums for the rest of the decade. Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus is a fitting coda to a seven-year stretch of greatness, by a musical mind always able to reimagine the past—even his own. –Marc Masters

Listen: Charles Mingus: “Mood Indigo”

Four Tops: Reach Out (1967)

The Motown songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland created classics for everyone from the Supremes to the Miracles, and one of their last recordings for the Detroit label helped cement its trademark sound. Belted by lead singer Levi Stubbs, the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” is a soaring paean to romantic loyalty that topped the charts in October 1966. On the vocal group’s accompanying album, Stubbs’ voice ties together Motown’s famed anthemic choruses and lyrical love songs under the same aching banner. Even two Monkees covers are injected with a shot of openhearted soul, showing that the Four Tops’ appeal could cross over the period’s racial music divides in every direction. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Four Tops: “I’m a Believer”

Ornette Coleman: Free Jazz (1961)

No tune, no chord changes, no key. Four top-flight musicians in the left channel, four more in the right channel, enough tape for a whole album. Go.

Ornette Coleman was already a famously polarizing artist when he and his one-off “double quartet” recorded Free Jazz, and although the idea of improvisation without a theme wasn’t entirely new, nobody had filled an entire album with such experimentation before. John Tynan’s zero-stars review in jazz bible Down Beat—paired with an opposing five-star review—called the group “eight nihilists... with one common cause: to destroy the music that gave them birth.” Still, records don’t get genres named after them by playing it safe, and time has been kind to Coleman’s dare—it’s obvious now that the “free” in the title means “no longer captive,” rather than “the ultimate devaluation.” It’s also clearer in retrospect that Free Jazz isn’t totally without structure: A more-or-less composed fanfare introduces each musician’s turn as the leader of the group’s conversation, and the double rhythm section keeps the pulse steady until bassist Charlie Haden, always a revolutionary, nudges them out of it. Over these epochal 37 minutes, you can hear the group shaking off the constraints they’d always taken for granted. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: Ornette Coleman: “Free Jazz (Part 1)”

Simon & Garfunkel: Sounds of Silence (1966)

In a decade obsessed with fashion, there was little cool about Simon & Garfunkel, a bookish duo who looked like they would be more at home poring over folk history books than dropping acid in Haight-Ashbury. This studiousness occasionally creeps into Sounds of Silence, their second album, which includes songs based on an Edwin Arlington Robinson poem (“Richard Cory”) and a newspaper article about a suicide (“A Most Peculiar Man”), as well as a cover of an instrumental guitar piece by the British folk revivalist Davey Graham (“Anji”). However, any sense of intellectual fastidiousness is overcome by songs like “The Sound of Silence,” “April Come She Will,” and “I Am a Rock,” which speak to universal human truths like loneliness, depression, and the impossibility of communication via uncluttered arrangements and crystal harmonies that let the celestial melodies breathe. The effect is quietly devastating, and it seems fitting that an album of such lasting emotional truths has been preserved by the Library of Congress so future generations can cry their eyes out to them, too. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Simon & Garfunkel: “I Am a Rock”

Patsy Cline: Sentimentally Yours (1962)

There was a fullness to Patsy Cline’s vocal delivery, a confidence that heartbreak was the only proper state of being. Her brilliance as a singer allowed her to transcend a wide range of material. Sentimentally Yours, Cline’s third and final album, includes just two songs written specifically for her: “She’s Got You” (which climbed both country and pop charts) and “Strange.” The rest of the album consists of songs popularized by others, but Cline finds a way to make them her own. She added country flair to the pop standards and reigned in the honky-tonk for a note of elegance. She revived the languid “Heartaches,” turning it into a surprise breakout single, while imbuing two Hank Williams songs (“Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)”) with stoic nous more than lonesome blues. Patsy Cline’s singular voice makes Sentimentally Yours entirely hers, teasing out the songs’ nuances that would’ve been less in others’ hands. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Patsy Cline: “Your Cheatin’ Heart”

Stan Getz & João Gilberto: Getz/Gilberto (1964)

In late-1950s Rio de Janeiro, Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto started a quiet revolution. Jobim, known for his “soft and sophisticated” compositions, teamed with the hushed singer-guitarist Gilberto to create bossa nova, which teleported the swaying rhythms of Brazil’s samba dance style into a more intimate setting. American saxophonist Stan Getz, whose plush yet understated approach the jazz world called simply “the Sound,” was a natural fit. When Jobim, Gilberto, and Getz came together, the result was bossa nova’s crowning achievement.

The Sound met the new sound on 1962’s Jazz Samba, a chart-topping album featuring guitarist Charlie Byrd. Then, what might’ve looked like a fad instead blossomed into Getz/Gilberto. The supple melodies of bossa nova’s American interpreter meld perfectly with the lullaby vocals of the artist who’d defined it. Some of the piano, and most of the eight songs—about stars, seas, love, moonlight, and a certain girl from Ipanema—are by Jobim. The overall effect is of saudade, a beautifully untranslatable Portuguese word for melancholy longing that appeared in the title of Jobim and Gilberto’s first bossa nova record. This is heightened by the casual elegance of Gilberto’s then-wife, Astrud, making her fateful singing debut. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Getz/Gilberto: “The Girl From Ipanema”

Elvis Presley: From Elvis in Memphis (1969)

“I had to leave town for a little while,” sings Elvis Presley at the outset of From Elvis in Memphis. Back in 1969, those words rang true. The singer appeared absent during the height of the British Invasion, making movies that held little interest for him or his audience. Presley’s patience with Hollywood ran out in 1968, though, pushing him to turn a Christmas television special into a showcase for his undiminished skills. Following that famed comeback performance, he was determined to prove his artistic worth, so he set up shop at Memphis’ American Sound Studios and recorded a set of songs that saw no boundary between rock, soul, country, and schmaltzy pop.

This wasn’t Elvis getting back to his roots: In ’69, Memphis was the epicenter of American cool, the place where Southern soul took hold, and by associating himself with the city, Presley reckoned with modern music. Just as crucially, he decided to sing songs that had no interest in separating love from memory and regret—a far cry from the teenage exuberance of his earliest records. So while his culturally explosive Sun Sessions sides from the 1950s retain their excitement, From Elvis in Memphis cuts deeper. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: Elvis Presley: “Long Black Limousine” 

The Mothers of Invention: Freak Out! (1966)

Birthed by the theatrical Los Angeles “freak” scene—a cousin of the Bay Area hippies—the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! predicted, and in some ways outdid, the LSD-gobbling Summer of Love by about a year. This debut double album was concocted by the drug-despising Dadaist Frank Zappa as a self-consciously smart-assed statement, one that smirked at the “turned-on” generation with songs that were themselves undeniably psychedelic. Freak Out! features some of rock’s earliest and headiest forays into experimental composition and tape looping, sequenced amid ominous pop pastiches like the folk-rock suicide note “I’m Not Satisfied,” the doo-wop throwback “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder,” and the Watts Riots–inspired blues lament “Trouble Every Day.” Paul McCartney would later claim that Sgt. Pepper’s was the Beatles’ attempt at making a Freak Out!, but from their debut forward, the Mothers were clearly on their own trip. –Eric Harvey

Listen: The Mothers of Invention: “Hungry Freaks, Daddy”

Sun Ra: The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra (1965)

Sun Ra was a Gemini. “That’s one reason I have the big band,” he  explained to a critic toward the end of his tenure on Earth. “I want to hear the alto, then I want to hear the tenor, then I want to hear the trumpet, then I want to hear the rhythm, then I want to hear me—keep moving, that’s my nature.” Ra changed his name, dressed in brilliant raiments, and elaborated a whole Afrofuturist cosmology, but he’d still come up on Duke Ellington. The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra shows his Arkestra navigating between big-band cohesion and loose improvisation, between the concert hall and the stars above.

The label ESP-Disk, which released this album, probably wanted more composed, neo-classical jazz, but Ra spent his life frustrating such desires. Halfway through “Outer Nothingness,” the band abandons any horn charts they’d mapped out; there are long moments of silence, and then the leader’s bass marimba, each strike so deep and resonant that the wood might have landed from a distant planet. Eternity looms behind every latitude they claim, and on Heliocentric Worlds, Ra captures the sound of unity straining to hold itself together. –Chris Randle

Listen: Sun Ra: “Heliocentric”

Gilberto Gil: Gilberto Gil (1968)

Even before it had a name, Tropicália was introduced to the masses at the 1967 TV Record music festival in São Paulo, when the 25-year-old Gilberto Gil brought out a teenaged Os Mutantes to perform “Domingo No Parque.” With acoustic orchestration, electric guitar, and twangy berimbau, the now-classic song told the story of a crime of passion using fragmented word-scenes. It was controversial, overturning conventions of Brazilian song structure and themes typical of música popular brasileira.

Gilberto Gil, the album it soon appeared on, also made waves. From the world of Anglo-American pop, Gil absorbed the Beatles’ psych-rock sensibilities and Jimi Hendrix’s electronic effects and vocal stylings. From his home of Bahia, Gil drew on Afro-Brazilian traditions like capoeira and samba, mashing up snippets of honking horns with ocean waves and absurdist poetry. To the Brazilian military dictatorship, all of this read as provocative and threatening, and in 1969, they exiled Tropicália’s original masterminds, Gil and Caetano Veloso. But by then, Gil had already helped spark an entire Brazilian counterculture. –Minna Zhou

Listen: Gilberto Gil: “Frevo Rasgado”

The Rolling Stones: Aftermath (1966)

The Rolling Stones glimpsed the dark side of the ’60s several years before Altamont, probably because they’d already enjoyed more than their share of sex and drugs by the time hippie kids started flooding Haight-Ashbury. Their sixth album in two years was also the first Stones LP written entirely by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and its best songs make the aggression of “Get Off of My Cloud” sound polite.

“It was the period where everything—songwriting, recording, performing—stepped into a new league,” Richards recalls in his memoir, Life. For proof he wasn’t exaggerating, look no further than the album’s opening track. Rock’s most nihilistic hit to date, “Paint It, Black” finds Jagger confessing urges worthy of a serial killer over an intoxicating collage of guitar, sitar, and kick drum. Sure, Aftermath indulged the Stones’ misogyny on the bitchy diss track “Stupid Girl” and tamed a shrew on “Under My Thumb,” a nasty piece of work that Brian Jones’ bouncy marimbas rendered irresistible even to legendary feminist critics. But with Jones ditching his guitar for a closetful of exotic instruments and the band channeling their touring musicians’ homesickness on the record’s 11-minute culminating blues jam, “Goin’ Home,” they also pushed rock forward. –Judy Berman

Listen: The Rolling Stones: “Goin’ Home”

Randy Newman: Randy Newman (1968)

You’d have trouble finding an album by a young person more at odds with youth culture than Randy Newman’s 1968 debut. At a time when the zeitgeist was occupied with free love and third eyes, Newman—then 24—was writing ragtime-influenced orchestral vignettes about abusing your friends (“Davy the Fat Boy”) and shipping your parents off to die in Florida (“Love Story”), a sound too cruel for squares and too square for anyone else.

Newman, who went on to make a good life as a cult favorite and composer for Disney movies, has maintained he would’ve done better if he’d written more love songs. But those who can get on his wavelength of jaundice and disappointment, of kids who never visit and can’t wait to leave when they do, of the forever teased if remembered at all, know that love songs are exactly what these are. –Mike Powell

Listen: Randy Newman: “Linda”

Howlin’ Wolf: Howlin’ Wolf (1962)

Like so many ’60s LPs, Howlin’ Wolf wasn’t designed as a proper album, per se. It rounds up all the A and B sides from the six singles the Chicago bluesman released between 1960 and early 1962, a time when he was on a hot streak, at least artistically. Wolf hadn’t hit the R&B charts since 1956, the year rock’n’roll reshaped popular music, yet at least half of this record consists of songs known by anybody with a passing familiarity with 20th century blues: “Little Red Rooster,” “Wang Dang Doodle,” “Back Door Man.” In the hands of all the ’60s British blues boys—not to mention all the Americans who followed—these songs lost their tension, with the focus shifting from songs to solos. Still, the appeal of the 12 songs on Howlin’ Wolf  is the wild, rangy groove of the Chess house band and, of course, the full-blooded roar of Wolf. Whether he’s murmuring or howling, the singer seems to keep some essential part of himself in reserve, which is why the music can seem so intimidating so many years after its recording. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: Howlin’ Wolf: “Spoonful”

The Doors: The Doors (1967)

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” So hypothesized the poet William Blake toward the end of the 18th century. More than 150 years later, his theory would become a counterculture mission statement when the novelist Aldous Huxley referenced the quote in the title of his 1952 mescaline memoir The Doors of Perception, which in turn inspired rock’n’roll’s most notorious romantics to call themselves the Doors.

Though their self-titled debut may have launched a thousand trips, it’s anything but hippie-dippy. Instead of endless possibility or untapped potential, frontman Jim Morrison’s notion of infinity suggests an ever-present, invariably destructive cosmic malaise filled with agonizing bar crawls, sordid hook-ups, and, of course, death. How marvelous, then, that as the void closes in on the album’s crown jewel, “Light My Fire,” the predominant mood is cathartic rather than catastrophic. –Zoe Camp

Listen: The Doors: “The End”

Nina Simone: In Concert (1964)

So much of Nina Simone’s power manifested in performance. She was a commanding presence with a rare and extraordinary voice that could cut into even the most hardened skeptics. She didn’t so much communicate pain as inflict it, requiring anyone within striking distance to share her distress. But she was also elegant, capable of capturing and holding a crowd’s attention with sweeping gestures. She had a peculiar showmanship: part entertainer, part instructor, both charmer and empathic guide. She injured; she healed.

Simone’s virtuosity is on full display at Carnegie Hall during the three live shows that comprise In Concert, in which she emerges a civil rights emissary. The album is powerful, funny, and haunting, a daring exploration of bondage and discomfort. “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written yet,” she says during the first protest song she wrote, “Mississippi Goddam,” coaxing laughter out of her mostly white audience. What immediately follows is a full-fledged condemnation of American values and black displacement. “Lord have mercy on this land of mine,” she sings. “I don’t belong here/I don’t belong there.” Simone is constantly disarming her audience, and it is still affecting to hear her sing “Old Jim Crow” now, as it must’ve been then, amid lynchings, bus attacks, and church bombings. As black bodies continue to be endangered, rendered lifeless, and unavenged today, her voice echoes through time, reminding us that we are scarcely disconnected from the sins of the past. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Nina Simone: “Mississippi Goddam”

Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle (1967)

A former child actor and L.A. session player, Van Dyke Parks became a noted producer in the ’60s, eventually finding himself sitting in Brian Wilson’s sandbox in an attempt to help the Beach Boy wunderkind follow up Pet Sounds. But as that album, Smile, failed to come to fruition, Parks turned his attentions to Song Cycle. Made up of a decidedly unfashionable mélange of vaudeville showtunes, bluegrass, and clashing orchestras, Song Cycle remains one of the most precious and winking albums of its era. Sure, it sounded hopelessly outdated amid the psychedelic swirl of the late ’60s, but Parks sneakily anticipated a future time, when musicians as diverse as Joanna Newsom, Rufus Wainwright, and Skrillex would seek him out for eclectic collaboration. –Andy Beta

Listen: Van Dyke Parks: “Vine Street”

Gal Costa: Gal Costa (1969)

Gal Costa begins as though in the midst of alien invasion, with UFOs whizzing by and a lone pedestrian screaming. The scene, which bookends the opening track “Não Identificado” (“Unidentified”), is a hint that this seemingly saccharine love song isn’t all it appears to be.

Gal, like her Tropicálista cohort, often cloaked her social critiques in absurd or sentimental images and sounds, drawing on everything from Brazilian Cinema Novo to kitsch. Gal Costa classics like “Divino Maravilhoso” are clear in their political undertones, while tracks like “Baby” and “Lost in the Paradise” are hazy, surreal songs that comment on everything from bourgeois living to the state of South America. Where fellow Tropicálistas Os Mutantes shot their political statements through with freaky dystopic psychedelia and edgy humor, Gal Costa veils hers in gauzy melodies and bossa nova–indebted vocals. Able to channel bossa icon João Gilberto as much as blues rocker Janis Joplin, Costa’s delivery is dreamy yet trenchant, making Gal Costa a coil of barbed wire wrapped in silk, an unidentified object ready to cut. –Minna Zhou

Listen: Gal Costa: “Não Identificado”

James Brown: Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud (1969)

Funk was born with a grunt. After a gig in the late ’60s, James Brown started dictating rhythms to his bandmate Pee Wee Ellis in measured, guttural noises. Brown and Ellis turned the exchange into 1967’s “Cold Sweat,” the first true channeling of Brown’s crazed genius and the revolution of the drum break, to boot.

“Cold Sweat” was a funk landmark, but the duo’s breakthrough came in 1969, when they recorded “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” weaponizing funk for black empowerment. The song is the only splash of overt activism on the album bearing its name, but far from the only splash of color; Say It Loud is a vibrant selection of funk love songs slathered in blues, featuring the smoldering shrieker “Goodbye My Love, Pts. 1 & 2” and the self-explanatory “Shades of Brown.” The consummate entertainer and authoritarian, Brown displays full command of the band, funneling his revolutionary visions through them and combining secular swing with big gospel soul. “That’s what created funk music—gospel and jazz mixed together by James Brown with a little help from God,” Brown once told Guitar World. Say It Loud is among his boldest works, smooth and slick and strutting—proudly black in each utterance. Inside its grooves, Soul Brother No. 1 refuses to compromise. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: James Brown: “Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud”

Françoise Hardy: Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles (1962)

The early-’60s French “yé-yé” scene was made up mainly of young women who sang sexually-charged bubblegum written by older men. Françoise Hardy stood apart, both by maintaining autonomy over the lonesome yearning in her songs and by writing most of them. Her music would grow more intricate and eclectic over the years, most notably on 1971’s bossa nova–tinged masterwork La Question, but the reasons she ruled over the yé-yé period are apparent on her debut album.

Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles squeezes bouncy charm out of little more than twangy guitar, prominent bass, shuffling percussion, and Hardy’s disarmingly conversational (even if you don’t converse en français) vocals. The title hit, a loveless narrator’s solitary waltz across streets filled with adoring couples, feels like the platonic ideal for songs of this familiar trope. Perhaps it was translated so many times because it can’t be improved upon. But the rest of the album also finds an enduring middle ground between rockabilly shimmy and Gallic introspection, delivered by the most glamorous wallflower in France. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Françoise Hardy: “Tous les garçons et les filles”

The Temptations: Cloud Nine (1969)

In the middle of 1968, the Temptations were at loose ends. They’d kicked out their difficult star tenor David Ruffin, and when Otis Williams, the group’s rock-solid baritone anchor, went to songwriter/producer Norman Whitfield and said he wanted the group to keep up with Sly and the Family Stone’s innovations, Whitfield dismissed the idea. Fortunately, he changed his mind quickly.

“Cloud Nine,” the first signal of their new direction, was a major hit—angry, funky, and hipper than Motown had been in a while—and it won the label’s first Grammy. The centerpiece of the subsequent Cloud Nine album was an even more startling Whitfield/Barrett Strong invention: “Runaway Child, Running Wild,” which segues into harrowing screams and an instrumental jam by Motown’s house band, the Funk Brothers. The Temptations’ psychedelic soul period would continue for the next few years, with Whitfield treating the group’s voices as the brightest hues in his palette. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: The Temptations: “Runaway Child, Running Wild”

13th Floor Elevators: The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966)

The first LP from Austin rock band 13th Floor Elevators was purportedly also the first record to refer to its sound as “psychedelic.” Accompanied by a lurid red-and-green illustration of an eye within an eye, its liner notes—written by founding member and electric jug player Tommy Hall—lay out a blueprint for what the term might mean: In essence, humanity is stilted by what he calls its “vertical” organization of thought, and psychedelic drugs offer a way to see beyond such a limited structure. So rather than seeking a deliberate fringe sound, Hall wrote, “It is this quest for pure sanity that forms the basis of the songs on this record.”

Here, their search involves sunburnt, agitated garage rock that wedges Hall’s freak texture between Roky Erickson and Stacy Sutherland’s blues-inflected guitars. For all its trippy philosophies, this ultimately accessible album doesn’t necessarily strain the limits of the mind too much, and perhaps that’s the point: As the lyrics to “The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You” imply, the experience isn’t about taking a trip to somewhere faraway as much as it’s about zeroing in to where we already are. –Thea Ballard

Listen: 13th Floor Elevators: “You’re Gonna Miss Me”

Lee Hazlewood / Nancy Sinatra: Nancy & Lee (1968)

Having penned and produced several of Nancy Sinatra’s biggest hits, including “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” Lee Hazlewood, the gravel-throated cowboy songwriter from Oklahoma, gave the Swinging Sixties some of its most enduring anthems. When the pair met up for the duet album Nancy & Lee, the tongue-in-cheek quality of their previous chart-toppers was all but eclipsed by a more robust, intense incarnation of country-tinged psychedelia. On each of the album’s 11 tracks, Hazlewood and Sinatra’s voices intertwine in a sort of intoxicated tango, their harmonies almost out of sync and yet perfectly tempered. Each artist holds their own: On “Some Velvet Morning,” Hazlewood’s sober verses are uplifted by Sinatra’s angelic chorus. They coast through a beaming cover of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” with an air of sweet resignation, a sentiment that carries them through the album. Though certainly a collection of pitch-perfect country-pop tunes, Nancy & Lee is first and foremost a document of a flawless collaboration, two musicians marrying their bespoke styles for an album that would be the apex of both their careers. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Nancy Sinatra / Lee Hazlewood: “Summer Wine”

Marvin Gaye / Tammi Terrell: United (1967)

In the ’60s, Marvin Gaye was Motown’s solo male sex symbol amid a roster of vocal groups, and Berry Gordy exploited his matinee idol charm by pairing him on albums with Mary Wells and Kim Weston. It was on 1967’s United when Gaye finally met his match, however, in 22-year-old Philadelphia firebrand Tammi Terrell. Discovered at 15 by Luther Dixon, Terrell carried herself like a wily veteran in the studio, pushing Gaye toward some of his finest vocal performances. Gordy paired them with newly signed Motown songwriters Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who served as the duo’s behind-the-scenes counterparts. They merged Gaye’s smooth, vulnerable tenor with Terrell’s bold soprano on the crossover gospel-pop classics “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Your Precious Love,” transforming the perfectly matched pair into the embodiment of mainstream African-American puppy love.

Though the duo would release two more collaborations, this was the only LP with Terrell’s full participation: during a performance of “Mountain” two months after United’s release, Terrell collapsed into Gaye’s arms, the earliest indication of a brain tumor that ended her life less than three years later. While this tragic early end casts United in a sad light, the album’s sincere, simple expressions of youthful romance endure. –Eric Harvey

Listen: Marvin Gaye / Tammi Terrell: “Sad Wedding”

The Byrds: Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968)

Sweetheart of the Rodeo has inspired thousands of denim jacket patches and tasteful alt-country bands, but that took time. Upon the album’s release a half century ago, it caused a crowd mutiny at the Grand Ole Opry; the legendary Nashville radio DJ Ralph Emery even accused them of being hippies while they were guests on his show. Maybe the Byrds flew too close to the sun: Nine of the 11 songs are covers taken from the Louvin Brothers, Bob Dylan, and Merle Haggard. And no matter how respectful they were to the source material, as far as the Ralph Emerys were concerned, the Byrds were longhairs trying to sully the most pure of American music.

Sweetheart of the Rodeo may not have made country cool, but it showed the volatility of two competing visions of Americana coexisting in the same space. If you can’t picture how Sweetheart of the Rodeo would be received right now, just find a record that has its genre’s purists up in arms—it is probably a glimpse of the future. –Ian Cohen

Listen: The Byrds: “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”

Ray Charles: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962)

Ray Charles’ 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was hailed as a pioneering fusion of Nashville C&W with the swinging R&B for which Charles was known, but the LP is so much more than that. With sweet strings and swooning vocal arrangements by Marty Paich, producer Sid Feller helped Charles pick out the songs to record but ceded full creative control to the 31-year-old genius singer and keyboardist. Taking on Hank Williams (“You Win Again,” “Hey, Good Lookin’”), Don Gibson (“I Can’t Stop Loving You”), and traditional songs he could claim as his own (“Careless Love”), Charles’ performances instantly reveal the illusory boundaries between genres.

The mere existence of Modern Sounds was a statement: an album of “hillbilly” songs, as the music industry once called them, recorded by a black man as the civil rights battles of the ’60s were heating up. And though the album didn’t make a dent on the country charts, its enormous popular success began to break down barriers inside Nashville, musical and otherwise. It helped bring a generation of black artists to country music, and—in a sense, blessed by Charles’ cool—even helped country music itself in its move towards a more contemporary and mainstream image. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music are tunes about feeling bad that still feel exquisitely good. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Ray Charles: “I Can’t Stop Loving You”

Morton Subotnick: Silver Apples of the Moon (1967)

With a $500 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation burning a hole in his pocket, the composer Morton Subotnick commissioned inventor Don Buchla to create an “electronic music box.” Then, with his new Buchla 100, Subotnick made Silver Apples of the Moon. The sounds on it seem like the byproduct of an experiment gone wrong: Its eerie tones, elliptical pulses, enigmatic thumps, and waves of cybertronic wails are still otherworldly.

The album is not only the first piece of electronic music conceived specifically for the LP; it’s also, arguably, the first album of electronic dance music. Anchoring the album is a ghostly chorus of beats and rhythms that would bloom into techno two decades later, and Subotnick was dumbstruck when he saw people dancing to the music during early performances. In a decade dedicated to the exploration of the fringes, of moon landings and subatomic exploration, Silver Apples was another attempt to break open the door into the future and walk on through. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Morton Subotnick: “Silver Apples of the Moon”

Herbie Hancock: Maiden Voyage (1965)

Improvisation is, essentially, spontaneous composition, but within the realm of jazz, the practice evolved so rapidly and dramatically that it came to resemble telepathy. Toward the end of his solo on the title track of Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Freddie Hubbard produces a sequence of figure eights on his trumpet that resemble a dragonfly gently skating across the surface of a lake. Hancock and Tony Williams—on piano and drums, respectively—anticipate this shift and become the lake; their playing loses shape and melts into something more liquid and impressionistic. The ensemble on Maiden Voyage—consisting of Hubbard, Williams, George Coleman on tenor saxophone, and Ron Carter on bass—are listening to each other so hard, so attentively, that they seem to merge into one unusually flexible mind, as individual waves merge into a body of water. Presumably this is why Hancock found the sea so fascinating that he had to write an entire concept album about it: It’s an endless improvisation. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Herbie Hancock: “Maiden Voyage”

The Band: The Band (1969)

The phrase “the old weird America” is useful to the point of being overused. Coined by Greil Marcus in his 1997 book about Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, it has become easy shorthand for any musical act that draws from sources and sounds predating rock’n’roll. Marcus intended it to describe the strange nation glimpsed through Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and, by extension, through the songs Dylan and the Band recorded together. But few albums have offered such a majestic panorama of the old weird America as the Band’s self-titled second album.

Nothing here sounds up to date. It’s proudly antiquated, pre-modern, the songs stowed for generations in a dusty attic somewhere, cracked and yellowed with the years. Robbie Robertson proves himself a fine storyteller, giving us a Southerner’s view of the Civil War on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and a union worker’s Dust Bowl worries on “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” But really, it’s the Band who brings these characters and this setting to life, arranging and performing these songs to showcase their own eccentricities—and, by extension, the eccentricities of the nation itself. The album’s weirdness has not waned with time, no matter how many subsequent generations of roots musicians borrow its songs or its ideas. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: The Band: “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Kontakte (1964)

Many musicians would be content with discovering a new way to make music, but German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen set his sights higher: He wanted to help us find new ways to listen. Refined over 700 pages of notation and six months of work with tape machines at Cologne’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Kontakte (“Contacts”), was groundbreaking, both in terms of Stockhausen’s process and for electronic music as a whole.

The album is about connections, most obviously between acoustic and electronic sounds—cymbals and gongs ring in alien timbres, woodblocks and bamboo claves transform into gurgles or collapse into pure texture. But it’s also about connections in time and space. This is a sparse, abstract work in which distinct moments reach out to one another across a void; live performances of Kontakte often had the audience situated in the middle of four speakers, where Stockhausen’s experiments in spatial movement could be best appreciated. And while the pace of technological advancement means that Stockhausen’s methods on Kontakte would now be considered antiquated, the work itself still stands up, demanding—and rewarding—concentration and contemplation. –Louis Pattison

Listen: Karlheinz Stockhausen: “Kontakte”

Caetano Veloso: Caetano Veloso (1968)

In 1968, the same year that the Beatles toyed with the idea of revolution, Caetano Veloso was quietly leading his own in Brazil. Four years earlier, a military-led coup toppled the left-leaning presidency of João Goulart, ushering in a period of cultural repression and censorship. Veloso’s self-titled solo debut sparked the Tropicália movement, setting the standard of speaking out “against the dictatorship without saying anything about it.”

Through its embrace of American psychedelia, bossa nova, traditional Brazilian orchestrations, and gentle acoustic guitars, Caetano Veloso rejects the junta’s nationalism and calls for cultural cannibalism, the idea of mixing influences to create a unique entity. Veloso’s lyrics, particularly in the ecstatic “Alegria, Alegria,” use pop culture references like Coca-Cola, Brigitte Bardot, and television to show the Tropicálistas’ embrace of Western culture. Veloso would become a political prisoner the year after Caetano Veloso’s release, proving that even soft protests wield a mighty sword. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Caetano Veloso: “Alegria, Alegria”

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Willy and the Poor Boys (1969)

Nowadays, we tend to think the cycles of media and fame move at a rate fast enough to bewilder previous generations. But in 1969, John Fogerty was so scared of falling off the charts that Creedence Clearwater Revival released three albums. Willy and the Poor Boys is the last, and breeziest, of those offerings, but that hardly matters: Creedence didn’t meaningfully attempt to differentiate their albums in tone, subject matter, or style. Instead, the business model was this: People need more great songs, so here are some more great songs.

Keeping this hectic pace with relevance, Creedence pumped out felt, lived-in anthems. They’re often held up as a quintessential American band, and they were: They lied about their origins, had bad haircuts, and cribbed all their best moves from African-American pioneers. But their sturdiest tie to the land of the free was their frightening, locomotive commitment to efficiency. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: Creedence Clearwater Revival: “Down on the Corner”

Silver Apples: Silver Apples (1968)

If Silver Apples sound like they’re rejecting rock on their 1968 debut, that’s because rock rejected them. Singer Simeon Coxe III and drummer Danny Taylor were playing in the Overland Electric Stage Band when Coxe (known since as Simeon) inserted an oscillator into the mix. Their bandmates were so offended that Simeon and Taylor split off into their own group. Adding more oscillators and electronics, Simeon creating a hybrid instrument he called “the Thing,” and the duo made repetitive music that sounded like nothing else at the time.

Silver Apples does sound like a lot of music that came after it, though. Taylor’s ritualistic beats and Simeon’s low-end loops predict Can’s ritualistic jams, while their persistent whirr presages the throbbing pre-punk of Suicide, whose Alan Vega championed Silver Apples around New York. Still, there’s plenty on Silver Apples that hasn’t been replicated, particularly Simeon’s austere falsetto, which floats like an apparition conjured by the duo’s grinding grooves. It’s spooky and trippy but also profoundly calm, a record that still haunts rock simply by standing outside of it. –Marc Masters

Listen: Silver Apples: “Oscillations”

Steve Reich / Richard Maxfield / Pauline Oliveros: New Sounds in Electronic Music (Come Out / Night Music / I of IV) (1969)

The ’60s were a heady time for experimental electronic music. David Behrman, who produced this essential compilation, was at the helm of the Music of Our Time series for Columbia and its Odyssey sub-label, bringing the way-out sounds of electronic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen to the masses. New Sounds showcased three radically different approaches: The first track on the A-side, Richard Maxfield’s “Night Music,” is a tape collage of pulses meant to evoke “the antiphonal chirping of birds and insects on a summer night.” Pauline Oliveros’ “I of IV,” which takes up the entirety of the B-side, is a real-time studio performance of squealing oscillators and tape delay, with an expressive character that would prefigure noise music and freeform electronic improv for decades to come.

But the highlight of the set is undoubtedly Steve Reich’s “Come Out.” Composed as part of a benefit for the Harlem Six, a group of black teenagers who were arrested and beaten by police, Reich’s piece takes a single line from one of the boys’ testimony—“I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them”—and loops it across two tape recorders playing out of phase with each other. Turning a documentary artifact into an ominously psychedelic meditation on violence, it is both a cornerstone of minimalism and an enduring snapshot of the decade’s upheavals. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Steve Reich: “Come Out”

Toots and the Maytals: Sweet and Dandy (1969)

Toots and the Maytals were nearly a movement unto themselves within Jamaican music, and Sweet and Dandy catches them at their peak. Its all-time classics, including “54-46 That’s My Number” and “Pressure Drop,” gave reggae much of its sound and momentum, harnessing the forward motion of ska into a slower, chugging tempo, emphasizing the bass work and double-time guitar that are now hallmarks of the genre. (Omitted here, however: Toots’ 1968 hit “Do the Reggay,” which also gave the burgeoning sound its name.)

Toots’ songwriting here shaped reggae deeply. “54-46” indelibly recounts his prison experience (he had served time for marijuana possession), complete with cinematic dialogue, while “Pressure Drop” distills the revolutionary impulse of the ’60s to a single melodic phrase that’s been covered by everyone from the Clash to Keith Richards. His vocals are unstoppable, a transporting Pentecostalist shout that’s been compared to James Brown and Otis Redding—not so much because it’s derivative in style, but because it’s their equal in firepower. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Toots and the Maytals: “Sweet and Dandy”

John Fahey: The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965)

John Fahey’s first four albums included the word “death” in their titles, but only the last one framed it as a miracle. With The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, Fahey suggests that the character he invented on his debut LP, Blind Joe Death, had morphed into something divine, and the music suggested it, too. It’s one of the steel-string guitarist’s most joyously diverse works, a mix of traditional tunes, adaptations, medleys, and inventive originals. Fahey often employed tunings and techniques that he invented himself, but Transfiguration is less about prowess than passion, with every track conveying emotion, enthusiasm, and a reverent awe for the material. There’s a raw edge to the recording—strings buzz, notes echo, even a dog barks—that fits Fahey’s mission to get to the core of things. His playing is precise, to be sure, but The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death is much more about revelation than refinement. –Marc Masters

Listen: John Fahey: “On the Sunny Side of the Ocean”

Joni Mitchell: Clouds (1969)

“We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides,” Saul Bellow mused about air travel in his novel Henderson the Rain King. “What a privilege!” By the time Joni Mitchell’s Clouds was released a decade later, her signature song “Both Sides, Now”—inspired by Bellow’s words—had already traveled the globe. In 1967, she gave it to Judy Collins, who made it a hit. Later, Frank Sinatra changed its title; Marie Laforêt translated it to French; Leonard Nimoy twisted it into a joke about the Starship Enterprise. It was the first time—though certainly not the last—that Mitchell’s music flew away to find a life of its own.

Clouds, her hushed and hazy sophomore album, marks the end of an era for Mitchell. The bright-eyed, flower-wielding self-portrait she painted on the cover seems to narrate each of its gentle, intricately fingerpicked folk songs: “Aging children, I am one,” she tells us in one of its most psychedelic refrains. On masterpieces to come, Mitchell would paint deeper portraits of the characters she introduced here, fascinated by what keeps them together, what drives them apart, what lingers in the aftermath. On Clouds, she crafts a gorgeous still life as she watches from afar, high above the earth, where there’s only two sides to see things from. By 25, she’d already mastered both perspectives: Soon, she’d discover that there were infinitely more. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Joni Mitchell: “Both Sides Now”

Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin (1969)

Few classic rock bands had the kind of slow and careful buildup that Led Zeppelin had. The members were all seasoned studio professionals by the time they found each other, steeped in the British blues scene, with seemingly no kinks to work out. They locked together like muscle fibers, instantly and irrevocably, and they flexed.

There are precious few secrets or left turns in Led Zeppelin’s discography: They made the Led Zeppelin album, over and over again, and you picked your favorite. This one happened, temporally, in 1969, but that still seems like a mistake. Culturally, it feels like a chunk of the 1970s that crash-landed on the wrong side of the calendar. With the first 30 seconds of “Good Times Bad Times”—track one of their first album—they basically defined what the next 10 years of rock music would sound like. The most perfect-sounding E power chord in rock history, underlined by rock’s most indelible thumping toms; drum fills like rushing water, crystalline and emphatic and happening everywhere. Like all the best Zeppelin music, it is resistant to argument: It is a physically satiating sound for those who crave it, and repulsive to those who hate it, but every reaction to Zeppelin occurs in the limbic system, in dank areas far beneath the bland cubicle of your neocortex.

All of the things that might make someone wrinkle their nose at Led Zeppelin are here, in abundance: the British folk longueurs; the straight blues rips, muddy and a little ponderous; the hammy, howled lyrics about women spending your “hard-earned pay.” But so are some of the most staggering sounds a rock band ever made. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Led Zeppelin: “Good Times Bad Times”

Sam Cooke: Ain’t That Good News (1964)

Sam Cooke’s optimistic swan song, Ain’t That Good News, was clouded by tragedy. Before he finished recording the album, Cooke’s 18-month-old son Vincent drowned in the family’s swimming pool. Only nine months after it was released, the soul singer was shot and killed in a motel. The motel’s manager alleged that Cooke burst into her office and attacked her, and that she fired in self-defense; the circumstances were disputed. A bullet pierced his heart, a sad bit of symbolism for the man who wrote “Cupid.”

Bad news marks Ain’t That Good News’ place in history but, displaced from that reality, it consists primarily of warmth and romance: falling in and out of love, spending a Saturday night trawling for a bedmate, basking in sunny days spent counting cash. These are feel-good romps and ballads anchored by the most stirring voice in soul, croons that would come to define a generation and influence several more. Cooke sings of intimacy and longing with a tenderness that slows time. But then there’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a harbinger of social justice that became a trademark for the civil rights movement. “It’s been too hard living/But I’m afraid to die,” he sings, revealing long-held black anxieties before circling back to the hopeful refrain. The fear of death only strengthens Cooke’s resolve to see a brighter future, to find hope amid strife as only he could. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Sam Cooke: “A Change Is Gonna Come”

Leonard Cohen: Songs From a Room (1969)

While Leonard Cohen’s work would eventually lift skyward in the form of standards, hymns, and prophecies, the music on his sophomore album is something humbler: country tunes. In writing it, he abandoned his initial sessions in Hollywood with David Crosby and headed to Nashville, where he filled the studio with banjos and buzzing jaw harps.

Nashville welcomed him: The album’s opening song, the immortal “Bird on the Wire,” was covered by both Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. Kris Kristofferson famously requested its opening lines be inscribed on his grave. Like the best country music, Songs From a Room flows with a casual grace, belying some of the songwriter’s darkest poetry—meditations on life, death, and all the pain and drinking along the way. In “The Butcher,” Cohen rambles in a bold, conversational speak-sing while his guitar stumbles, as if in agony. In its final lines, Cohen bears the word of God: “Lead on, my son,” he instructs. “It is your world.” On Songs From a Room, this sounds like both a blessing and a burden. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Leonard Cohen: “Bird on the Wire”

The Who: The Who Sell Out (1967)

Designed as a satirical valentine to the pirate radio stations of London, The Who Sell Out is premised as a collection of faux 45s intercut with mock ads, a record where the concept lies entirely on the surface. Forget any sense of narrative or deeper meanings, the tropes that often sink concept albums: This is inherently pop art, an album where the style is substance and the style is so strong, it doesn’t matter that the Who leave some loose ends hanging. (See: when Pete Townshend doesn’t write a final stanza for “Tattoo,” or when the album’s very concept is abandoned shortly into the second side.)

The first edition is impossible to find now, as it’s been replaced by two subsequent expansions with more music and commercials that enhance the parody. In any incarnation, though, The Who Sell Out plays to all of the band’s contradictory strengths: It’s furious and funny, vulnerable and impervious, artful and artless in equal measure. The Who never made another album like it, and they never made a better album or one that captured their personality so thoroughly. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: The Who: “I Can See for Miles”

Simon & Garfunkel: Bookends (1968)

The boho idealism of the ’60s didn’t display itself entirely in flower-strewn festivals and fiery political sit-ins—sometimes it took the form of a rumpled introvert on a bus watching the prairie whirr by, wondering if he was headed toward contentment. Paul Simon wrote Bookends when he was 27, a rising folk star slightly too sophisticated for the waning Greenwich Village scene; he sang about his mortality with a twinge of envy, eager to claim the wisdom that would surely amass with the wrinkles.

At the core of Simon and Garfunkel’s self-produced fourth album is a song cycle about a life’s journey, from youth to old age. The duo harness the shifting perspectives of maturity and disillusionment via gently clever melodic motifs and cautiously openhearted vignettes; the melodramatic nursery rhyme chorus of “Save the Life of My Child” matures into the plaintive, uneasy guitar wanderlust of “America.” The pair, usually so luminous in harmony, fracture and sidestep each other gingerly in “Overs,” rising in feeble hope before slinking away, spurned. By the time they’re perched together on a park bench, elders quietly appraising the sunset, they’ve served a stately rebuff to another ’60s credo—it doesn’t sound like a drag, so much, getting old. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Simon and Garfunkel: “Mrs. Robinson”

Thelonious Monk: Solo Monk (1965)

Raised on the bottom-heavy sound of stride pianists like Fats Waller or Willie Smith, Monk was a radical enamored with the past, someone who didn’t break with tradition so much as bend it into weird new shapes. Split between standards and originals, Solo Monk—one of several albums of solo piano he released—is a good walking companion, or music for the hypothetical parlor. It’s charming, funny, and beautiful but not so beautiful that you worry what it might try to sell you. These are not bop abstractions but Polaroids, snapshots in which someone blinks, or where half the landscape is obscured by the photographer’s thumb; not the finessed but the flawed, the inimitable, the real. As a listener, the revelation is coming to hear the wrong notes without pining after the right one. –Mike Powell

Listen: Thelonious Monk: “Ruby, My Dear”

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Illuminations (1969)

The Canadian singer Buffy Sainte-Marie made her name in the early-’60s Greenwich Village folk scene with protest songs informed by her Native heritage and a breathtaking vibrato. But her sixth album, Illuminations, embraced a more adventurous sound: It was one of the first records to use the analog Buchla synthesizer to treat vocals, and it is possessed of the cosmic energy its title suggests. When the psychedelic edges of its Leonard Cohen–penned opening track, “God Is Alive Magic Is Afoot,” suddenly begin to quaver—the song’s organic sound turning synthetic—it is startling and then astonishing, the sound of a woman peering into the future. The charging, independent-woman anthem “Better to Find Out for Yourself” still feels ahead of its time as her words—“Take it from me/A man can be more trouble than you’ll ever know!”—tumble into each other thrillingly.

Illuminations offered a vision of the freak-folk scene that would take three more decades to form in America. Sainte-Marie’s audience dwindled in the ‘60s, and it wasn’t just because her music was growing odder: Her records were quietly blacklisted from U.S. airwaves during Vietnam, due to the government’s belief that she was “determined to encourage widespread citizen protest.” With this monumental roadblock, Sainte-Marie’s record sales declined, but in the last few decades Illuminations is being heard at last. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: Buffy Sainte-Marie: “Better to Find Out for Yourself”

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: Safe as Milk (1967)

As anyone who’s heard the unfettered skronk of 1969’s Trout Mask Replica can attest, Don Van Vliet would go on to make much more alien and lacerating music. In fact, from a 2017 vantage point, it’s hard to hear now what was so radical about Safe as Milk, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s debut album, that A&M declined to release it. Delta blues and R&B are driving forces; “Zig Zag Wanderer” captures the kind of hot-blooded twang that British Invasion acts tied themselves up in knots trying to imitate; “I’m Glad” is a woozy doo-wop number in debt to Stax and Motown. But there are rumblings of stranger things afoot, like the live-wire Theremin that runs through “Electricity,” to say nothing of a young Ry Cooder’s lithe guitar work, which whips around the edges of the music like leaves signaling the onset of a storm.

The fulcrum is Van Vliet himself, crooning and bellowing like a man possessed, luxuriating in the grain of a voice that seemed to know neither its upper nor lower limits. Years later, he would say that, in his youth, he chose music over sculpture because “it’s more perishable; it’s more swirling, like smoke.” While his wispiest abstractions were still a ways off, Safe as Milk is where he lights the embers. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Captain Beefheart: “Dropout Boogie”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Axis: Bold as Love (1967)

The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s 1967 debut, Are You Experienced, was the sort of epochal record that made even the rowdiest rock’n’roll of its day seem instantly square, while demoting the most revered guitar gods back to mere-mortal status. Hendrix wasn’t just the greatest, most wildly inventive six-string slinger of his generation, he was also its most outrageous showman: a hot doggin’, lighter-fluid-squirting, sexy MF to which all future aspiring sexy MFs would bow before, a psychedelic shaman who used garage rock as a portal into the great unknown. So what could he possibly do for an encore? Prove that he was one of the best singers and songwriters in the game, too.

Axis: Bold as Love was released just months after his debut, but Hendrix worked in dogs’ years, packing in a half-decade’s worth of artistic growth into a minuscule window of time. While he would go on to famously cover Dylan, Hendrix was already channeling Bob’s iconoclastic essence on the militaristic strike “If 6 Was 9,” where he not only declares, “I’m going to wave my freak flag high,” but delivers the stormy gust in which it can valiantly flutter. And on the titanic “Bold as Love,” Hendrix established the jive-talkin’ swagger and cosmic majesty of glam rock at a time when Bowie was still making small talk with gnomes. Still, Axis: Bold as Love’s most immersive moments are its most intimate, like the brief, beautiful ballad “Little Wing”—vivid, emotionally resonant vignettes that remind us Hendrix was as much a master of words as wah-wah pedals. –Stuart Berman

Listen: The Jimi Hendrix Experience: “Little Wing”

Laura Nyro: New York Tendaberry (1969)

Laura Nyro had a tendency for making up words that conveyed sensation rather than action. “Can you surry? Can you picnic?” the Bronx-born singer asked on “Stoned Soul Picnic,” from her second album, 1968’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. (Well, can you?) She named her third album for one of them: 1969’s New York Tendaberry referred to the “warm, tender core she perceives deep inside the city’s grating exterior,” as New York Times reporter William Kloman observed it. Nyro—then 21—didn’t just perceive it, but raised it from beneath the sidewalks in a rapturous reckoning between “health and sickness, god and the devil.”

New York Tendaberry is aggressively romantic, and Nyro is among the greatest evangelists for New York’s wonder in the face of all contradictory evidence—the conniving sailors and Bowery prowlers, “ravin’ crazy gamblers,” destitute addicts and sleazy landlords that populate her record. She often took a horse and cart through Central Park to the studio, where she worked long, luxurious nights by candlelight, playing for love rather than any need for precision. Nyro’s energy on Tendaberry is uncontainable, vaulting between wispy piano and godly rage, leaving the band to play catch up (and add overdubs later). She was following a more profound rhythm. “You want to dig the vibrations I’ve been getting?” she asked Kloman. “The real United States of America is about to be born. That’s what’s coming out of the revolution.” –Laura Snapes

Listen: Laura Nyro: “Save the Country”

Etta James: At Last! (1960)

Etta James doesn’t ask for much on her debut album, At Last! All she wants is a lover who writes, someone for whom she could make bread and treat right, a “Sunday Kind of Love” that lasts “past Saturday night.” James had a difficult early life; she was essentially abandoned by her young mother, never knew her father, and abused by the man who encouraged her singing. Still, on At Last!, she opens her heart to the world, and the microphone can hardly contain her outbursts of desire. But only in its famous title track, a joyous relief in love found, does James’ voice get to relish in unbridled softness. James could have chosen to sing more celebratory standards instead of such candid ballads, but perhaps the former girl-group member knew already that she could broadcast the blues like no one else. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Etta James: “My Dearest Darling”

Nick Drake: Five Leaves Left (1969)

Had this list been made at the time of Nick Drake’s death in 1974, or even a decade later, his debut album would never have appeared on it. Five Leaves Left (named after the warning in Rizla rolling papers’ packaging) had sunk with barely a ripple, as had his subsequent records. His posh murmur, studious fingerpicking, and musings on mortality and alienation had, perhaps, been too polite to raise a fuss. But Drake’s flame was maintained by a cult that grew larger and more devoted over time, as well as by his producer, Joe Boyd, whose contract with Island Records specified that Drake’s music could never go out of print. With every year, the quiet, thoughtful Five Leaves Left sounds more elegantly wrought, and Drake’s performances and songwriting bear fruit like an overlooked grove. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: Nick Drake: “Time Has Told Me”

Grateful Dead: Live/Dead (1969)

Since you can’t currently walk into a brunch joint or turn over a celebrity photo without some Grateful Dead merch scurrying out, it’s helpful to remember that, for most people, the band required a great amount of editing to appear presentable. Live/Dead was the first such sonic haircut, and it still resulted in a 75-minute double LP in which the shortest song—outside of the "And We Bid You Goodnight" outro—is nearly seven minutes long. The album remains a compelling document of the band at a time when they were able to slip effortlessly between blues-rock powerhouse and cosmic voyagers, often twice or more during the same composition. The version of their cornerstone jam “Dark Star” that opens the album has effectively functioned as a red pill/blue pill fork in the road for college freshmen for nearly 50 years: This is either all the Dead you’ll ever need, or you embrace it and stay in wonderland. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: The Grateful Dead: “Dark Star”

Bill Evans Trio: Sunday at the Village Vanguard (1961)

If Sundays are inherently mournful, it’s fitting that one of the greatest live jazz albums doubles as a partial requiem. As Bill Evans, bassist Scott LaFaro, and drummer Paul Motian descended into the Village Vanguard basement on this early summer Sabbath, they created a form of musical telepathy as original and animated as the Alice in Wonderland waltz they covered.

Before Evans formed his virtuosic trio, he’d been the pianist in the immortal sextet that shaded Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. He was a heroin-shooting, Buddhist, classically trained player who looked like a nebbish bookkeeper stashed in the Sterling Cooper basement, but according to Davis, he played like “crystal notes or sparkling water.” Until Sunday at the Village Vanguard, piano trios largely existed as centerpieces for the bandleader, but here, Evans commands a triad as psychically tethered and footloose as the Magi. Reimagined numbers from Miles Davis, Cole Porter, and George and Ira Gershwin elegantly toast LaFaro’s originals in which he bends the bass with balletic grace underneath Evans’ Zen restraint. Less than two weeks later, LaFaro, 25, would die in a car accident, becoming a tragic myth immortalized by one Sunday recording, the applause for his genius still ringing in perpetuity. –Jeff Weiss

Listen: Bill Evans: “Gloria’s Step”

Johnny Cash: At Folsom Prison (1968)

“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” The Man in Black was one of the biggest stars in country music when he played a series of shows at Folsom Prison in January 1968, yet that simple statement suggests a proper reintroduction. Part country singer and part punk rocker, he roars through the rowdy set with such violent intensity that you’d think he was trying to incite a riot; every song—including the one by Glen Sherley, in Folsom for armed robbery—addresses the harshness of the setting. The album also conveys a humanistic warmth because Cash, then still overcoming his own addictions, was trying to understand the circumstances of every prisoner in that room and talk to him directly. One of the most electric live albums in any genre, At Folsom Prison demonstrates how country music might speak for a population that has been denied a voice. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: Johnny Cash: “Folsom Prison Blues”

The Ornette Coleman Quartet: This Is Our Music (1961)

When This Is Our Music was released in 1961, some seasoned jazz listeners of the day took it as a work of sacrilege. Heard through modern ears, it’s not immediately clear why. The melodies are bright as buttons, the likes of “Blues Connotation” have undeniable swing, and there’s even a standard in the shape of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Embraceable You,” played all languid and lovely. But placed in the continuity of a discography, you can hear Ornette and band stretching the form, his improvisations becoming more elastic, the restraints of harmony and structure fraying and beginning to fall away. This is undeniably a group effort: a 23-year-old Don Cherry shadows Ornette’s piercing alto sax with tart pocket trumpet, while bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Ed Blackwell share a bubbly energy, equal parts play and purpose. This Is Our Music captures Ornette in a state of beautiful transition, a record both bold and undeniable. –Louis Pattinson

Listen: Ornette Coleman: “Embraceable You”

King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)

King Crimson became royalty quickly. Their breakthrough show was at London’s Hyde Park alongside the Rolling Stones in 1969, before an audience of hundreds of thousands. When their debut album arrived later that year—a bold and overwhelming brew of British folk, free jazz, psych-rock, and proto-metal—it won over audiences around the world, expanding young minds and inspiring fellow artists. In a rambling, near-indecipherable exaltation of the record, the Who’s Pete Townshend called it “an uncanny masterpiece,” like “everything multitracked a billion times.”

In the Court of the Crimson King was a window into the decade to come. Its long, immersive, Mellotron-heavy songs helped define the sound of progressive rock, acting as a blueprint for future acts. Ironically, the band it introduced would soon cease to exist: By the following year, guitarist Robert Fripp would be their only original member remaining, leaving behind Greg Lake’s stately, sad-eyed vocals, Ian McDonald’s skronking saxophone, and Michael Giles’ skittering drums. Fripp could have spent his career following up this album, refining its indulgences and recreating its successes. Instead, he moved on. Having already seen one future, he began his search for the next one. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: King Crimson: “Epitaph”

Bob Dylan: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)

With his second album, 21-year-old Bob Dylan documented the tempestuous world in front of him in the moments before headlines became history. “Oxford Town” recounts the violence with which civil rights movement protests were met; “Talkin’ World War III Blues” sees its protagonist haunted by the promise of nuclear war; “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which is based on the African-American spiritual “No More Auction Block for Me,” turns philosophical questions into a counterculture anthem.

For an album that’s largely just guitar and voice, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is expansive, with Dylan broadening his observations through poetic musing and wry humor. Songs like “Girl from the North Country” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” further extend the record’s reach, positioning intimate romantic melancholy on equal footing with the analysis of political chaos. And he’s reaching out to the rambling, electrified sound he’d soon embrace: Propelled by a howling refrain, the seven-minute “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” cracks open contained folk mannerisms. Through generations, the album has become a living monument to a moment in American youth culture, made up of songs that can still teach us how to feel. –Thea Ballard

Listen: Bob Dylan: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica (1969)

By the late ’60s, eccentrics were in vogue. With an eye on the psych fringes, labels had learned to package the weird and wayward as outsider kitsch. Into this era of pop perversion, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band swaggered like angry gods. A blues-fueled collision of free-jazz wit and rock’n’roll energy, their art-rock calamity Trout Mask Replica confronted and ridiculed rock orthodoxy—too bewildering to emulate, too fast and deranged for casual consumption. For every new band formed off the back of The Velvet Underground & Nico, Trout Mask Replica might have driven a few to dive out the fire escape.

Part of the record’s legend stems from its listener-repellant veneer, a dizzy array of free-association poetry and cubist illogic. A studio tyrant, bandleader Don Van Vliet took pains to craft this illusion of perpetually combusting genius. He commandeered a house in Los Angeles’ Woodland Hills neighborhood and ran it like a zoo; one member claims he was fed nothing but soybeans for a month. The Captain dictated the music note by note, sculpting the band to fit his skewed vision of virtuosity. Together, they produced something both surreal and intimate: the abstract vision of a man untouched by time, attuned to nature’s untamed rhythms. None of it makes sense, then everything does. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: Captain Beefheart: “Wild Life”

Pharoah Sanders: Karma (1969)

Pharoah Sanders’ legend was well-established by 1969—he’d received his name from Sun Ra (changed from Farrell Sanders) and was the final horn player to play alongside John Coltrane. He’d already recorded some albums of his own by the time he saw Leon Thomas yodeling at a jazz club, and immediately asked him to join his band and write some lyrics “that would enlighten people.”

The result is “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” a 32-minute, multi-side opus with a beautiful sentiment at its core: “Peace and happiness for every man.” Three percussionists, two bassists, a flautist, and a French horn player accompany them on their spirit journey, and it’s not all breeziness and calm. At times, Thomas’ unhinged voice intertwines with Sanders’ bleating, blown-out sax. Closing with the much more succinct “Colors,” an ode to the Earth’s natural beauty, Karma proved to be a crossover hit beyond jazz circles, charting after being picked up by freeform rock radio. It remains a comforting reminder in times of upheaval and uncertainty. –Evan Minsker

Listen: Pharoah Sanders: “Colors”

Karen Dalton: It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best (1969)

For a time, Karen Dalton was all but a tall tale of the folk era, a singer so tragic and beautiful that she seemed unreal. Her debut album didn’t sell well at the time, but the ensuing decades—and reissues—have given It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best its due. Dalton was a subtly sophisticated guitar and banjo player, and this album of covers accurately captures how direct and piercing her playing could be. But it’s her voice in particular that still sounds shockingly new—that reedy Appalachian delivery coupled with her ability to elongate words and vowels to their limit has yet to be reproduced by anyone else. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Karen Dalton “Little Bit of Rain”

Os Mutantes: Os Mutantes (1968)

Os Mutantes were known for their tongue-in-cheek humor, provocative costumes, and DIY instruments, but they represented a serious movement. The three kids from São Paulo were the youngest stars in Brazil’s Tropicália scene, the enfants terribles who helped defy the country’s oppressive military regime through rock music. The subject matter on their debut album is sneakily serious, despite the goofy exteriors: “Panis et Circensis” highlights the contrast between an upper class occupied with fanciful dreams and a lower class beholden to ruthless cycles of birth and death, and “Trem Fantasma” starts with lively samba drumming before sinking into a soft horror story about a couple boarding a ghostly train ride. Even the band's covers of otherwise anodyne pop songs (Françoise Hardy’s “Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour,” the Mama and the Papas’ “Once Was a Time I Thought”) are twisted into something more grotesque. But despite Os Mutantes’ strangeness, it was their keen pop sensibility and wild experimentation that most shaped the Tropicália movement. For the short time they were together, they were the ultimate funhouse mirror, distorting and redrawing the lines of what Brazilian music could be. –Minna Zhou

Listen: Os Mutantes: “Panis et Circenses”

MC5: Kick Out the Jams (1969)

The MC5 were deeply entrenched in the White Panther Party—a militant, far-left, anti-racist group cofounded by their manager, John Sinclair. His influence on the message and mayhem of their debut album, Kick Out the Jams, cannot be overstated—he even wrote the gatefold manifesto. This iconic live album is, as singer Rob Tyner screams, a testimonial—a sermon on the power of frantic, firestorm rock’n’roll. It’s an album with loud, catchy songs about lust (“I Want You Right Now”) and songs with nonsensical party earworms (“Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa”). They’ve got a heavy blues ripper about their city engulfed in flames (which, recorded in Detroit on Halloween weekend, feels prescient), and they channel Sun Ra’s limitless dissonance on “Starship.” If the goal was to get people to come together, as Sinclair wrote, they did so by whipping them into a frenzy, inspiring legions of future punks with their insistence to “kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” before riding into fuzzy, belligerent, immortal grooves. –Evan Minsker

Listen: MC5: “Borderline”

The Shangri-Las: Leader of the Pack (1965)

Best believe that two decades before Nicki Minaj was born, the Shangri-Las were the baddest bitches in Queens. Formed by two sets of sisters, they were the girl group known for being hard-as-nails in real life and in their aching, baroque pop songs. They wore leather with ripped stockings and fell for tortured bad boys out in the streets.

The Shangri-Las’ songs were like stage shows in miniature, with revving engines, wounded strings, and strange, labyrinthine plot lines; this was melodrama. Their best-known song, “Leader of the Pack,” is a candy-shop romance-turned-tragedy about a boyfriend who dies in a motorcycle accident. “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” was covered a decade later by the glam-punk maniacs the New York Dolls. The Shangri-Las perfected an entire emotional state: vulnerability coupled with herculean resolve. One “Leader of the Pack” line sums them up completely: “They told me he was bad/I knew he was sad.”

Leader of the Pack testifies to the resilience of teenage girls in a male-dominated space, timeless because it came from somewhere real. As singer Mary Weiss said in 2001, “I had enough pain in me, at the time, to pull off anything.” –Jenn Pelly

Listen: The Shangri-Las: “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”

Can: Monster Movie (1969)

The cover of Monster Movie credits its creators as “The Can,” a collective name that adheres nicely to ’60s rock band conventions. And for the album’s first half, at least, Can do resemble a conventional group: “Outside My Door” sounds like an attempt to pare down Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” into howling garage rock, and their narcotic twist on the traditional nursery rhyme “Mary, Mary So Contrary” reinforced the spiritual kinship between psychedelia and children’s entertainment.

But in Malcolm Mooney, Can possessed a singer who was as liable to follow as lead: As “Father Cannot Yell” transforms from a ragged, Velvets-styled rave-up into a vacuum-sealed motorik thrust, his panting vocal tics lock into Holger Czukay’s bass groove like human maracas. And on “Yoo Doo Right”—the 20-minute colossus that devours all of the second side—the band explores variations on a theme like a painter retracing the same pattern until the colors and shape distort into an unrecognizable blur and the canvas tears open to reveal a portal into another dimension. Powered by the thundering thwacks and elastic rhythms of Jaki Liebezeit—the John Bonham of the avant-garde—“Yoo Doo Right” prophesied the hypnotic, heart-racing ebb and flow of electronic music using traditional rock instrumentation. From there, Can would drop the “The”—and also any pretense of functioning like a regular rock band. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Can: “Mary, Mary So Contrary”

The Zombies: Odessey and Oracle (1968)

Colin Bluntstone’s psych-pop group needed to die before a sudden revival secured their immortality. After crafting Odessey and Oracle, the British daydreamers watched its impeccable lead singles nosedive; commercially adrift, the band split, and their label stalled the album’s release. That this preternaturally catchy trove eluded enormity speaks to the shifting sands of late-’60s pop, where Sgt. Pepper’s and the White Album were fomenting an appetite for formal experimentation.

Odessey and Oracle is relatively modest, an autumnal twist on Pet Sounds, but like that record, it coheres into something more than comfort food: a sweet, tonally complex meditation on the insularity of sadness and the dizziness of bliss. It’s music of chances missed and summers past, full of lingering question marks—even the gorgeous “This Will Be Our Year” has you second-guessing its sun-dappled optimism, just as you might spend a cloudless afternoon glued to an old flame’s Instagram feed. It’s fitting that, when the LP closer “Time of the Season” became a hit in 1968, the group refused to reunite, prompting promoters to animate a phalanx of fake Zombies to take the stage. The moment a good thing dissolves is just when you realize it’s precious. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: The Zombies: “Changes”

The Beatles: Rubber Soul (1965)

Every Beatles album fundamentally shaped how pop music is understood, so Rubber Soul is one of the most important records ever made, by default: Floppy-haired pop pin-ups discover Dylan and drugs, write songs about something other than love, and present their ideas as a coherent piece rather than a couple of hit singles padded by filler. Rubber Soul was an even exchange between pop fans and folkies: While it was likely the first time Beatlemaniacs encountered a sitar, the album also forced self-serious Llewyn Davis types to reckon with generational statements like “In My Life” and “Nowhere Man” coexisting with the pure pleasures of “Drive My Car” and “I’m Looking Through You.” Even in 2017, whenever a pop singer makes a serious turn, or an anointed serious band says they’ve learned to embrace pop, Rubber Soul can’t help but enter the conversation. –Ian Cohen

Listen: The Beatles: “Drive My Car”

Scott Walker: Scott 4 (1969)

Scott 4 is when Scott Walker started seeing things. Often celebrated as his break from the sunny boy-band pop of the Walker Brothers, Scott 4 is a uniquely haunting work, featuring some of the reclusive crooner’s most indelible images. In its opening verses, he watches a knight play chess with death and searches for him through a town ravaged by plague. Later, he gazes in horror as a massive hand bursts through the clouds to wreak havoc upon the earth.

Walker’s first collection of all-original material, originally released under his birth name Noel Scott Engel, Scott 4 highlights his growing mastery of the abstract. His voice, too, had never been stronger—seducing with stately charisma in “Dutchess,” summoning both vicious rage and empathy in “Hero of the War,” stretching the syllables of “Boy Child” against an otherworldly arrangement that sounds like sunrise on a distant planet. Alone at the microphone, Walker acts as a guide through the nightmarish world that is opening up before him, threatening to disappear into its darkness at any moment. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Scott Walker: “The Seventh Seal”

Jane Birkin / Serge Gainsbourg: Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg (1969)

By the time Serge Gainsbourg met and fell in love with the British actress Jane Birkin in 1968, he had already been the poet laureate of French song for a decade, from his early jazz- and Latin-influenced records through the yé-yé boom of the mid-’60s. In that time, Gainsbourg had positioned himself as a somber playboy, known for duets and collaborations in which his brooding demeanor came crashing up against the sensuality of his female counterparts.

After writing massively successful pop singles for France Gall and Brigitte Bardot, Gainsbourg found in Birkin both the youthful innocence of the former and the full-blown sexuality of the latter. Throughout their 12-year relationship, she was able to channel his creative energy into her own unique output. Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg is a love letter read out loud by its recipient: Every note and lyric is meant to highlight a certain aspect of Birkin’s persona though Gainsbourg’s lens, from her breathless delivery of every line to her heavily accented, coquettish French. The culmination of their artistic and carnal union is “Je t’aime… moi non plus,” the slinky disco classic that was deemed so pornographic, it was banned by the BBC. For a man who made a career out of loving women, Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg is his greatest affair ever committed to vinyl. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg: “Je T’aime...Moi Non Plus”

Miles Davis: Sketches of Spain (1960)

In the winter of 1959, Miles Davis, the birther of cool, sat in the studio with a flautist, trombonist, and trumpeter behind him, his collaborator Gil Evans conducting an orchestra nearby. With great care, he began to feel out notes, placing them delicately within the Andalusian world Evans was building around him—a realm of flamenco touches, Third Stream music, and alternately straight-ahead and swung rhythms that thrust and parried around each other.

Sketches of Spain conjures an impressionist, classical mood, one that runs counter to Davis’ peak from the previous year, the soaring and mercurial Kind of Blue. Though he was at the peak of his celebrity in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Davis never settled—so here he was now, back down to earth, reorganizing Joaquín Rodrigo’s guitar concerto and adapting the traditional flamenco seato voice to his trumpet. For Davis, setting these notes to tape was exhausting; he later said of the process, “I was drained of all emotion.” Yet as the storm of free jazz brewed in the distance, here was the spirit of both the written and improvised note at its peak. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Miles Davis: “Solea”

Nico: Chelsea Girl (1967)

Nico invented goth. On her debut album, Chelsea Girl, she sounds like a subterranean sorceress singing of her lost dreams by the light of the moon. After feeling like a “mannequin” in the Velvet Underground—and allegedly getting kicked out on account of lateness—the O.G. sad girl struck out on her own with a handful of compositions by then-teenager Jackson Browne, naming her album after the 1966 Warhol film she starred in.

Nico’s minor-key contralto is defiantly flat, even over melodies this glorious: “These Days,” penned by Browne; “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” which Dylan gave her; “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” one of Lou Reed’s early Velvets tunes. With John Cale’s assistance, the sound of Chelsea Girl is an even more accessible mix of pop and the avant-garde than the Velvet Underground had yet achieved. Nico’s grave voice attracts all its pieces with magnetic force; her spectral, centering singing is like a manifesto for living, a mix of dignity, severity, drama, and grace.

To New Yorkers, hippies were scum, and it’s written all over Chelsea Girl’s noise guitars and quiet, unsettling elegance. When producer Tom Wilson overdubbed flutes to lighten the sound, Nico was disturbed. In 1967, this was flower power deflated, all wilted and pressed roses in a jet-black book. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: Nico: “These Days”

Terry Riley: In C (1968)

Consider this record a placeholder. “In C,” the first major composition by Terry Riley—and a landmark of 20th-century minimalism—is defined by its performance and the iterations it entails. This particular performance stands as the first widely available Riley release; playing with members of the University at Buffalo’s Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, Riley’s path here involves a long, treble-heavy build to crescendo, and then an extended comedown. Which is all fine, but perhaps the most compelling aspect of “In C” is how much there is left to explore, as this performance errs on the side of politeness and too many versions of the piece have succeeded it. Indeed, a simple change of orchestration can still reveal unplumbed depths. Some of the more entertaining online performances feature faltering rhythms, or a mass of guitars, or tubas. “In C” isn’t a record you measure against Pet Sounds or Blonde on Blonde—it’s a record you recreate with the six other nerdiest kids in band class. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: Terry Riley: “In C”

Ike & Tina Turner: River Deep – Mountain High (1966)

Given their disastrous marriage, which in retrospect seems more like a hostage situation than any sort of legitimate partnership, it can be difficult to see past the dire infamy of Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship and focus on the music. But River Deep – Mountain High is the essential chronicle of their union, a record in which soul defiantly skirts extreme emotion on its way to catharsis. Performed by another singer, the LP’s eponymous track could have merely been another rock’n’roll song about undying love; infused with Tina’s almost superhuman wails, it’s an epic odyssey of obsession, pain, and longing. Bearing the full weight of Phil Spector’s production, this was the album that made Tina a star; reportedly, Spector paid Ike $20,000 up front to not contribute to the River Deep sessions, thus securing Tina’s stellar, unencumbered performance—the first true incarnation of an unshakable artist. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Ike & Tina Turner: “River Deep – Mountain High”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Are You Experienced (1967)

The bleary riff that opens “Purple Haze” is the sound of psychedelia distilled—built on the most ear-troubling and unnatural-sounding interval in all of Western music, the introductory tritone contains all of the era’s unstable energy in a few notes. When Jimi’s voice arrives soon after, he sounds a thousand miles away, swathed in so much reverb that he seems to be in danger of slipping away. Here, too, there is something fundamental to Hendrix, the sense that he was here to dissolve upon contact.

Are You Experienced is the sound of a brilliant, humming engine of a mind allowing itself to overheat and melt down on purpose. This was the fundamental and most thrilling promise of psychedelia, and this album still delivers it without a hint of dated goofiness. It was his debut album with drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, but it came after a run of rigorous schooling in blues and rock’n’roll: Hendrix had played behind the likes of Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and B.B. King. And on “Hey Joe,” or on “I Don’t Live Today,” you can hear all those lessons efflorescing in one brilliant plume.

The lore has it that, during the making of the record, Hendrix cherished a sort of erupting spontaneity. “There are many things that were just done in the studio, created in the studio, written in the studio, played once, and never played again—onstage or anywhere else,” Mitchell remembered years later. It is this drive to constantly reinvent, the terrifying confidence and exhilarating freedom it brought, that makes Are You Experienced such a tireless cultural totem. –Jayson Greene

Listen: The Jimi Hendrix Experience: “Red House”

Bob Dylan: Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

In 1965, Bob Dylan set himself aflame. Bored with playing the guitar alone onstage and inspired by the Beatles, he decided, once again, to reinvent himself. For his fifth record, Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan infused his folk tunes with rock’n’roll energy and Beat surrealism. Gone is the familiar tumbleweed Guthrie disciple searching for answers in the wind; in his place is a Kerouacian mystic whose breathless spewing can barely keep up with his strumming.

Though Dylan had by now abandoned overtly finger-pointing songs, here he casts a scornful eye on the pressures confronting youth culture, the cruel punishments of capitalism, and America’s nightmarish early days. With the exception of the sleepy “Mr. Tambourine Man,” even the record’s acoustic second half is caustic and cynical. Dylan wrote in the record’s liner notes that he had “given up at making any attempt at perfection,” but Bringing It All Back Home shows that the meaning of perfection changes when one welcomes chaos. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Bob Dylan: “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin II (1969)

“When it comes down to making out, whenever possible, put on Side One of Led Zeppelin IV.”

In 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, this is the most important part of Damone’s five-point dating plan for the awkward Ratner, but he chose the wrong Zep album. Robert Plant himself called Led Zeppelin II “very virile”—an understatement. Recorded during a six-month span where Led Zeppelin seemingly did little else but tour and fuck, their second album of 1969 is the final document of the band in all their zero-entendre glory. Granted, it basically created cock-rock; every solo since influenced by either “Heartbreaker” or “Moby Dick” has been called masturbatory. But it’s not just anthems like “What Is and What Should Never Be” that granted young lust such a mythic aura: “Ramble On” throws in a Lord of the Rings reference to let the nerdy shut-ins know that this could possibly be you with a lucky roll of the 12-sided die. Even if Led Zeppelin II was borne of partying with the GTOs in the Chateau Marmont, no album sounds more like the product of the backseat of a station wagon. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Led Zeppelin: “Whole Lotta Love”

John Coltrane: Giant Steps (1960)

Giant Steps is an auspicious title for an album and, as the first record John Coltrane released during his storied run at Atlantic Records, it’s also an accurate one. The album builds on the music Coltrane made as a sideman for Miles Davis, but where Miles deliberately restrained himself and his band on the epochal Kind of Blue, Coltrane tests his limits. Not everything Coltrane discovers is frenetic—he’d never before written a ballad as lovely and gentle as “Naima,” not coincidentally recorded with a different combo than the rest of the record. But Giant Steps’ allure lies in how it’s pitched expertly between his hard bop past and his exploratory future, a restless mix of beauty and adventure. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: John Coltrane: “Naima”

The Rolling Stones: Beggars Banquet (1968)

Though they spent much of 1967 embroiled in drug-related dramas, the Rolling Stones weren’t very good at sounding stoned. So following Their Satanic Majesties Request, the band’s atypically whimsical, commercially disappointing entry in the psychedelic sweepstakes, they got back to the grit, reconnecting with blues, country, and gospel. And if the Stones sounded out of place in the Summer of Love, they felt right at home in the following year’s Summer of Protest: Beggars Banquet is the dirty-ashtray petri dish where disillusionment breeds lawlessness, desire leads to transgression, and sinners are celebrated as saints.

It’s primarily an acoustic record, but one that uses tourniquets for capos and dirty syringes for bottleneck slides. Never before had a band of celebrity rock stars produced music that sounded so squalid and so at ease mired in the filth. The album marks the moment when the Stones’ sensationalistic, lock-up-yer-daughters reputation gave way to a genuinely sinister energy, as summoned through the demonic voodoo grooves of “Sympathy for the Devil,” the finger-slicing strums of “Street Fighting Man,” and the predatory menace of “Stray Cat Blues,” a song so lecherous it should come with its own arrest warrant. Not coincidentally, in the album’s wake, the Stones’ mythos shifted from tall tales of acid, cops, and strategically placed Mars bars to one permanently tainted by death—of band members, of concertgoers, of the ’60s dream itself. –Stuart Berman

Listen: The Rolling Stones: “Street Fighting Man”

Otis Redding: Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul (1965)

As a child, Otis Redding wanted to be like Little Richard, the larger-than-life showman who represented his hometown of Macon, Georgia. So in his early days, he closely emulated the rock trailblazer, even winning a formative talent show for 15 consecutive Sundays by performing “Heebie Jeebies.” Later, he fronted Richard’s backing band, the Upsetters, when the singer abandoned rock for gospel. Richard’s explosiveness informed the swing and swagger in Redding’s soul, but Redding also idolized Sam Cooke, the preeminent soul man.

Both artists helped shape Otis Blue, an album planted squarely at the nexus of soul, rock, and blues. Redding’s poise and sophistication is only matched by his full-throated breaths of fire, backed by Isaac Hayes on piano, the influential Stax Records session musicians Booker T. & the M.G.’s, and the Stax house band the Mar-Keys. Many of the songs were familiar, and the ones that weren’t soon would be, but Redding makes each his own. There’s a strutting Temptations rework, a version of Cooke’s civil rights anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a spin through the Stones’ “Satisfaction,” and “Respect,” the song that would later become Aretha Franklin’s calling card. Mostly cut in just 24 hours, Otis Blue is the masterwork of Redding’s tragically short career. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Otis Redding: “Satisfaction”

Love: Forever Changes (1967)

In 1967, Love’s third album, Forever Changes, was a flop. It barely dented the charts or exerted much impact beyond the Los Angeles scene it so pessimistically chronicled. Frontman Arthur Lee wrote much of the album while the band was holed up in a mansion once owned by Bela Lugosi, which afforded him a distant view of the city below and an opportunity to imagine the biblical destruction that would surely befall humanity.

The resulting songs are psychedelia at its darkest and most apocalyptic. Trading electric guitars for acoustics and chamber strings, the music can be startlingly gorgeous, yet Lee’s songs are full of literal double-talk: strange voices intoning words over his own lyrics, as though censoring his thoughts even as he thinks them. The album takes a cynical view of hippie piousness and has remained horrifically relevant in America. In true psychedelic fashion, Forever Changes changed with the times, regenerating itself for Watergate in the ’70s, for the Cold War in the ’80s, and again for modern times and the war on terror, where these songs sound especially prescient. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: Love: “Alone Again Or”

Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)

Birthing two rock archetypes on one album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was a triumph for 23-year-old Neil Young. Anchored by a couple of gnarly guitar jams with his new backing band, Crazy Horse, Young’s second LP found the right settings for his singular musical personality. Young seemed to know it instantly, releasing Everybody Knows only six months after his self-titled, overdub-drenched failure of a debut.

As much as lead guitarist Danny Whitten and his compatriots serve as jamming partners on “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” they are equally gorgeous on the easy, breezy title track, investing the ragged mojo with real harmonies. There’s plenty of jangling folk, too: a violin-aided jam on “Running Dry (Requiem for the Rockets)” pointing towards further horizons, and the hypnotic “Round & Round (It Won’t Be Long)” seeming like it should be at odds with the nine-minute “Down by the River” that follows. And yet both fit comfortably next to each other, each reaching for the same dreaminess in different ways. While much of popular rock and folk would get slicker soon, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere planted a flag for sloppy transcendence, both quiet and loud at the same time. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Neil Young: “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”

The Ronettes: Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica (1964)

“Whoa-oh-oh-oh.” When Ronnie Spector, née Veronica Bennett, sings her signature phrase on the Ronettes’ only studio album, it means so much. Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica sounds like a teenager’s fantasy of love, a heart beating out of its chest, and Ronnie’s voice is the truth that grounds it. She and her fellow Ronettes met Phil Spector when the arch-producer was still laying the foundations for his Wall of Sound with richly layered hits by Darlene Love and the Crystals, and Ronnie didn’t sing like them. But her quavering earnestness turned out to be exactly what the cavernous grandeur of her future (ex-)husband’s “little symphonies for the kids” was missing.

Ronnie’s ability to belt simple lyrics with raw power made her an early rock star. Unusually for its genre and producer, this album gathers all the singles that prove it; even more unusually, their mood and meaning is enriched by the non-singles. Do the gender dynamics feel uncomfortably stodgy in the spirited “Chapel of Love,” recorded before the Dixie Cups’ chart-topping take? Maybe. But their raucous cover of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say”—which this trio of mixed-race Spanish Harlem kids once used to conquer Midtown’s Peppermint Lounge—shows why they were the girl-group era’s “bad girls.” Teenage fantasy doesn’t last. “Be My Baby” still thumps. –Marc Hogan

Listen: The Ronettes: “Walking in the Rain” 

Albert Ayler: Spiritual Unity (1964)

In 1961, Ornette Coleman released the landmark album Free Jazz, kicking off a decade of immense exploration for jazz. John Coltrane, once the genre’s mainstream VIP, was one of many inspired to push his horn’s sound to its furthest reaches; where Coltrane went, others followed, and free jazz’s furious squeal became commonplace. By 1964, when tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler released Spiritual Unity, the genre was already ripe for reimagining. A trio record with Gary Peacock on bass and Sunny Murray on drums, the playing on Spiritual Unity is deeply loose and casual—at times it sounds like they are practicing. Ayler’s horn dips in and out, often leaving Murray and Peacock space to tool around on their own. That makes Ayler’s presence, and the moments when he revs himself up, feel earned, special. Unique among early free jazz players, Ayler often favored supremely catchy melodies, as on the beginning of “Ghosts,” a song he recorded over and over throughout his career. His tenor is rich and strong, and while not sloppy, it careens across the scale like he’s the marshal of some kind of drunk parade. Peacock and Murray follow behind, just as beautifully blitzed. Instead of pushing ahead to break ground, Ayler found you could be equally free if you pulled back. –Matthew Schnipper

Listen: Albert Ayler: “Ghosts: First Variation”

Aretha Franklin: Lady Soul (1968)

Aretha Franklin finished recording Lady Soul at the end of 1967, a few months after her righteous cover of “Respect” topped the pop charts, and just days after that song’s writer—her friend Otis Redding—died. Such unprecedented highs and devastating lows would come to define Frankin’s 1968. You can hear the extremes in Lady Soul’s two lead singles, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Chain of Fools.” The former she considered a love song to the Lord, made evident in her delivery, one of pop’s most crucial gospel moments; the latter, a searing condemnation of a no-good man, was turbulently autobiographical.

According to producer Jerry Wexler, Franklin showed up for the final Lady Soul sessions looking like she’d been beaten by her then-husband/manager Ted White. The push and pull of codependent, volatile romance drives much of the album, particularly in “Sweet Sweet Baby (Since You’ve Been Gone)” and “Good to Me As I Am to You,” two songs Franklin wrote (but White also took credit for). The stunning closing ballad “Ain’t No Way” is where Franklin reaches the sort of quiet clarity that arrives amid restless nights: Love simply can’t survive if both parties won’t nurture it. On Lady Soul, this once-in-an-era voice grappled with her own fight for respect at home, the one she had emboldened so many women to take up. It was her turn, and this was her time. –Jillian Mapes

Listen: Aretha Franklin: “Chain of Fools”

The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

To not a few people, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a religious text: The genesis of the concept album, endless multi-tracking, album covers as art objects, and songs about drugs best heard while on them. And to the group, it was a biblical undertaking: By the time its 700-hour recording process was over, they had emerged less a band than a musical co-op. Meet the mustachioed Beatles, whose curious, panoramic lens to the world now captured German oom-pah (“When I’m Sixty-Four”), rubato Eastern thought (“Within You Without You”), and stuffy Britishisms (“Lovely Rita”). Here, through all their eager collaboration, so many perfect little moments bloomed into a fractal garden of psychedelic pop, a wondrously overstuffed, pompous masterpiece that celebrated the freedom to ignore barriers and act on youthful impulses.

Many of the greatest albums of the ’60s looked outside the artist, preserving in amber what was happening in fractious and romantic times. But Sgt. Pepper’s reacted more to what was happening in 1967 inside the Beatles, the biggest band in the world. They were restless, more within than without: John tripped back to his home near Strawberry Field and George spun into ego-death and tamburas, leaving Paul and Ringo sheepishly holding on to pop songs for dear life. But for all of Sgt. Pepper’s big conceits, it is still such a massively human accomplishment, the sound of four Liverpool lads embracing the circus only they knew how to conduct. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: The Beatles: “A Day in the Life”

The Kinks: The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968)

Bright, young, and fueled by the success of their 1964 single “You Really Got Me,” the Kinks traveled to America to tour. It went badly. The band fought often and drank more. At a taping of “The Dick Clark Show,” singer Ray Davies ended up getting into a fistfight with someone he thought worked at the TV station, but who knows. They were banned by the American Federation of Musicians for several years, effectively foreclosing on the possibility of broader success. Resigned, they acquiesced to being what they already were: British.

Their 1967 album, Something Else, retreated from the increasingly libertine world of rock into little harpsichord-led sketches of quotidian English life. The full title of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society was itself a flag: an eschewal of nifty, rock’n’roll constructions like Kinda Kinks and The Kink Kontroversy for the blandness of small-town record halls, the sleepwalking outskirts of bureaucracy, of entities both official and irrelevant. The songs—sunny, folksy, nostalgic but ambivalently so—seem to stand on a hill as the world around them goes dim. Here, at the height of hippie culture in the popular imagination, one can hear about things like steam trains, riverside picnics, gluttonous cats, and falling in love with the village prostitute, Monica. Talking to an interviewer in 2002, Davies suggested that such homespun quaintness was his own “form of psychedelia.” The strangest place is invariably right outside your door. –Mike Powell

Listen: The Kinks: “Starstruck”

The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat (1968)

When they entered the studio in the fall of 1967, the Velvet Underground were in such a groove that they insisted on recording live, at the same volume they played onstage. The small Scepter Studios in Manhattan couldn’t properly handle such levels, though, resulting in a smeared, chaotic record filled with hammering riffs, pounding beats, and Lou Reed guitar solos pushed way past the red.

White Light/White Heat is the most vivid expression on wax of Reed and John Cale’s symbiotic partnership: On “The Gift,” Cale gives a droll reading of a hilarious short story Reed wrote in college, while during “Lady Godiva’s Operation,” the pair actually finish each other’s sentences. But their most explosive chemistry comes during the 17-minute monster jam “Sister Ray,” as Reed’s guitar and Cale’s organ battle to see who can break the tape first. It cemented White Light/White Heat’s status as the band’s most difficult album, but also the one that inspired the most extreme and exciting music for decades after. “That’s the litmus test,” guitarist Sterling Morrison once said. “If you like that album, then you like the Velvet Underground.” –Marc Masters

Listen: The Velvet Underground: “I Heard Her Call My Name”

Sly and the Family Stone: Stand! (1969)

From its big-top opening drum roll to its closing jam “You Can Make It If You Try,” no album captures the utopic, empowered, euphoric (and short-lived) ideals of the Love Generation as perfectly as Stand!, Sly and the Family Stone’s crossover smash. As rock’s first co-ed, integrated band—with an auteur every bit the equal of Brian Wilson—Sly and the Family Stone perfected a vivacious rock, soul, and pop formula. But the album wasn’t just wide-eyed exuberance; Stand! also touches on simmering racial tension, inner-city blues, and ever-increasing paranoia. As they first squared off against the darkness that would define their 1970s output, Sly and his bandmates went high instead of low, then took all of their listeners higher. Stand! inspired the likes of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and George Clinton to strive for new artistic vistas, and its gospel has renewed for a new generation of voices that includes D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and Kendrick Lamar. –Andy Beta

Listen: Sly and the Family Stone: “Stand!”

Van Morrison: Astral Weeks (1968)

No rocker got bitter quicker than Van Morrison. With just one solo album to his name, the 22-year-old singer-songwriter was already desperate to be relieved from his recording contract—sick of the industry, fed up with the phonies. To fulfill his obligations with Bang Records, Morrison recorded a spiteful set of acoustic songs in one afternoon, proudly mocking the people who helped turn his latest single, “Brown Eyed Girl,” into a smash hit. Then he walked out the door and made his masterpiece.

“The approach was spontaneity,” he later recalled about recording Astral Weeks. Many of the songs arrived full, in bursts of stream-of-consciousness inspiration with his session musicians; you can hear the excitement in each instrument. Acoustic guitars and pianos, flutes and harpsichords, string arrangements and saxophone solos all seemed to fit together behind Morrison’s wild, fragmented bursts of poetry, like it was all too much for him to describe at the moment. While Astral Weeks’ ecstatic blend of genres was massively influential, there’s still no record quite like it. It plays like endorphins kicking in, happy just to be alive and in motion. Never again would Van Morrison sound so hopeful, so carefree, so young. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Van Morrison: “Madame George”

Isaac Hayes: Hot Buttered Soul (1969)

Isaac Hayes dismissed his first album, 1967’s Presenting Isaac Hayes, as something he threw together while half-drunk. If he was going to make another record, he wanted creative control. Stax Records granted his wish, and so this trusted soul hitmaker—co-writer of “B-A-B-Y” and “Soul Man”—decided to make an album with elaborately arranged covers of schmaltzy pop songs. Under his command, these songs were dissected, busted apart, and milked for everything they were worth.

Here, Hayes turns Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk on By” into a 12-minute opus, one in which his hushed, bruised vocals give way to an overwhelming horn hook. On “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” he stretches Glen Campbell’s tearjerker across 19 minutes, spending the first eight-and-a-half in spoken word mode, telling a story of betrayal, and by the song’s end, our narrator can barely read the 3 a.m. highway signs through his tears. Hayes didn’t have any grand sales ambitions for Hot Buttered Soul, but his long cuts and high drama made him a star, one who pried the creative doors open for the artists who followed. –Evan Minsker

Listen: Isaac Hayes: “One Woman”

The Supremes: Where Did Our Love Go (1964)

Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard’s 1962 debut album, Meet the Supremes, won them the nickname of the “no-hit Supremes” around Motown’s Detroit headquarters. Had Berry Gordy not seen something in them—a certain poise he thought he could market to white audiences—perhaps the Supremes would have been cast aside, like so many other young female vocal groups from the early ’60s. But a trickle of Holland-Dozier-Holland hits became a flood, and from these Gordy compiled Where Did Our Love Go. It was once the highest-charting album by a female group and the first album to yield three pop No. 1s (the title track, “Baby Love,” and “Come See About Me.”) More than any other LP from the first half of the decade, this is the record that solidified Motown’s position as a massive commercial force.

Recorded piecemeal between ’62 and ’64, Where Did Our Love Go captures the Supremes’ sonic progression, from longing early harmonies to the dynamic soul that became their signature. The themes are unflinching in their commitment, mostly to romance itself. For pop’s leading demographic, teen girls, it was a revelation to hear young, female voices sing relatably about matters of the heart. –Jillian Mapes

Listen: The Supremes: “Baby Love”

Nina Simone: Pastel Blues (1965)

Nina Simone was a Juilliard-trained classical pianist and a preternaturally adroit interpreter of jazz, folk, and pop, but in 1965, she was singing the blues. In January, Simone’s friend Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin in the Sun, died from cancer; in February, on Simone’s 32nd birthday, her friend Malcolm X was assassinated. Within weeks, Simone was performing during the Selma-to-Montgomery march and warning Martin Luther King, Jr., “I’m not nonviolent.”

Simone’s pain hangs all over Pastel Blues, which brilliantly reaffirms that the blues isn’t only a music of rural pathos but also of urban protest. Its vibrant, piano-centered tracks include some of her best. A cappella opener “Be My Husband,” Simone’s then-husband Andy Stroud’s adaptation of an old prison song, testifies powerfully that love is work. Though Simone would later object to Billie Holiday comparisons, here she transforms “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching song Holiday defined, from mournful to damning. “Sinnerman,” Simone’s epic take on a traditional spiritual, rumbles headlong toward Judgment Day. Perhaps it has become so widely repurposed because Simone knew to withhold absolution. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Nina Simone: “Strange Fruit”

The Stooges: The Stooges (1969)

The Stooges’ debut album practically dared listeners not to flee in the other direction, whether from disgust or boredom. The album’s second song finds Iggy Pop—a knot of pure sinew given to stripping shirtless, smearing himself in peanut butter, and surfing across the crowd—drawling a bizarrely submissive love song about curling up like Fido. Song three, “We Will Fall,” is a 10-minute, drum-free dirge suggestive of Hare Krishnas on heavy Quaaludes. Even the album’s crackerjack opener, the nihilist “1969,” begins with four bars of plodding wah-wah and quarter-note snares, like a turgid fake-out to scare off the squares.

But anyone who stuck around quickly discovered the pleasures of the Stooges’ gut-punch approach. The teenage ennui of “1969” still sounds as timely as ever; “Real Cool Time” amounts to a defiant cry of lunkheaded joy. And “I Wanna Be Your Dog” summons one of the most sinister riffs in rock’n’roll. The album is unabashedly savage, fuzzy as a moldy peach, subtle as a hangover. Nevertheless, John Cale’s production on the album harnesses just enough studio magic to make them sound positively otherworldly, from the swollen low end, dark as a bruise, to the blown-out sonics of Ron Asheton’s guitar solos. Throughout, in unexpected pockets of silence, handclaps pop like fireworks. What could be more American than that? –Philip Sherburne

Listen: The Stooges: “1969”

Dusty Springfield: Dusty in Memphis (1969)

“I wish I’d been born coloured,” British belter Dusty Springfield once told an interviewer. “When it comes to singing and feeling, I just want to be one of them and not me. Then again, I see how some of them are treated and I thank God I’m white.” Springfield walked a racially-charged line with her music, but it wasn’t always this way. After scoring tame pop hits early on, she signed to Atlantic Records, then the heart of soul music, and set about making the kind of music she’d long favored. Recorded at Memphis’ famed American Sound Studio using musicians favored by Aretha Franklin, Dusty in Memphis was marked by the pressure Springfield felt following in the Queen of Soul’s footsteps. Not only was Springfield inspired to re-record the bulk of her vocals in New York, but her biggest hit—the sexual coming-of-age memento “Son of a Preacher Man”—was originally rejected by Franklin (who later covered it).

Springfield had a dreamier approach to cinematic soul, one that allowed her to extol the benefits of morning sex and lament the loneliness of lurid affairs while still appealing to an easy-listening crowd. Though she may have doubted her ability to compete with the emotional depths plumbed by her black peers, what she created in their model was a perspective all her own. –Jillian Mapes

Listen: Dusty Springfield: “The Windmills of Your Mind”

The Rolling Stones: Let It Bleed (1969)

Popular thinking has it that the 1960s ended with Altamont, the Manson killings, or the Beatles’ split. But Let It Bleed, the Rolling Stones’ eighth album released in Britain, could also make a strong claim to killing the decade’s dream. Released at the end of 1969, Let It Bleed brilliantly captures the ’60s fantasy turned dark, more blood in the streets than flowers in the hair.

A feeling of imminent doom hangs over the record in its apocalyptic lyrics of war, rape, and murder, in its edgy blues riffs, and in Mick Jagger’s sneering, lascivious vocals. It can be felt in the murderous, hard Chicago blues of “Midnight Rambler,” in the anguished cry for help of “Gimme Shelter,” and in the strutting filth of “Monkey Man,” which celebrates depravity while parodying the band’s popular image. This desperation was expressed by the Stones at their very musical peak, when they were loose enough to let a song like “Let It Bleed” swing and hadn’t slid into the occasional sloppiness of their 1970s recordings. Let It Bleed may not be the most original album of the ’60s, with African-American influences hanging heavily over its nine songs, but it is one of the most brilliantly atmospheric, endearingly brutal, and downright menacing albums of the decade. –Ben Cardew

Listen: The Rolling Stones: “You Got the Silver”

Charles Mingus: The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963)

Charles Mingus was one of the 20th century’s great composers and improvisers—traits distilled nowhere so clearly as on this 40-minute extended composition from 1963, a work for 10 players that often sounds more explosive than any progressive big-band or orchestral opus. Down-home blues, Ellington swing, and classical textures are all here, though no single style is able to fully capture this unpredictable but ultimately joyful music.

The opening track builds to a state of fevered wailing, after starting from a solo drum pattern devised by Mingus to suggest three different tempos. "Track B-Duet and Solo Dancers" offers sweet balladry, before quickening into a passage of locomotive crunch. In any given moment, the piece is always holding multiple potential moods in reserve. These bustling ideas seem to stand in for Mingus’ own psyche—a view that the composer all but endorsed by inviting his personal psychologist to contribute liner notes for the album. On this elaborate project, even the clinical asides from a doctor prove lyrical: “His music is a call for acceptance, respect, love, understanding, fellowship, freedom—a plea to change the evil in man and to end hatred.” –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Charles Mingus: “Solo Dancer”

The Beatles: Abbey Road (1969)

Everyone knows now that the Beatles hated each other by the end. But Abbey Road, the final album they recorded, has become a fantasy of togetherness that both the world and the band itself needed to indulge. After the acrimony spurred by Let It Be’s jam-session approach, Paul McCartney and producer George Martin called for one more record featuring the collaboration and cohesion of the band’s early days. But they only got halfway there. The first side featured standalone songs that represented their individual visions, including George Harrison’s most stunning compositions with the Beatles (“Something,” “Here Comes the Sun”), and flashes of rawness from the two main songwriters (“Oh! Darling,” where McCartney pushes his voice to its limit, and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” in which John Lennon predates heavy-metal transcendence).

Side two, on the other hand, fed into the idea that the Beatles could still work together in the name of ambitious art. Though its songs were written separately and stitched together by McCartney and Martin, the run from “Because” to “The End” has a beauty that exceeds the value of any given part. “Because” wouldn’t be a great song if John, Paul, and George hadn’t nailed the eerie three-part harmony, just as “The End” wouldn’t hit nearly as hard without Ringo’s only on-record drum solo and those dueling guitars. McCartney knew what was coming and turned a sentimental eye towards closure, ultimately offering one of the most quoted lines about love in pop’s history (“And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make”). Now that is how you end a band. –Jillian Mapes

Listen: The Beatles: “Here Comes the Sun”

Eric Dolphy: Out to Lunch! (1964)

When Eric Dolphy recorded Out to Lunch!, the saxophonist/flautist/clarinetist assembled a group that lacked a piano as its central, chordal engine. He replaced it with an instrument that was more crystalline, as well as depthless: a vibraphone, here played by Bobby Hutcherson. No one player solos through the space where a piano should be so much as they talk sensitively and intuitively to each other inside of it, which makes even the most free and explosive phrases on the album blend into a dynamic, harmonious conversation. Like a good dialogue, it can degenerate into anomie or brief parentheses of silence, but just as often, the different voices almost symphonically align to express an idea that they couldn’t have discovered separately. As Dolphy was quoted as saying on the original liner notes for the album, “Everyone’s a leader in this session.” –Brad Nelson

Listen: Eric Dolphy: “Hat and Beard”

Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

Along U.S. Route 61, blues music was born and Bessie Smith died. The highway was a northbound escape route for those seeking to leave the poverty of the Mississippi Delta, and a southbound escape route for James Earl Ray after he assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. It also connected a young Jewish man from his home in Minnesota to the Southern music he’d adopt and find new clarity in.

Highway 61 Revisited documents an era’s rising tide of anger and disassociation—not to mention Dylan’s own. In 1965, having outgrown his acoustic guitar and the Greenwich Village scene, he rewired the meaning of folk music, plugging in and writing about truths and untruths, the clowns of state, the circus of relativism, and the plight of the worker, all with a comic cynicism and romantic yearning. The studio sessions were chaotic and musically undefined; his lyrics went on for pages; a slide whistle factored in prominently. But out of this tangle of blues and country, he hit upon the countercultural chasm between the youth of the ’60s and elder generations, concluding with a smirk: “Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.”

Dylan created this text as a map of America, its history rooted in oppression, filtered through the lupine howl of a 24-year-old bohemian nipping at the heels of Rimbaud and Verlaine. But its wisdom remains perplexing: How could Ma Rainey and Beethoven both fit into a two-chord song that moves like a locomotive on fire? How do Paul Griffin’s honky-tonk piano parts and Dylan's limerick-level verses stay this potent? Dylan’s surreal travelogues reflect his uncertain world, and his most powerful moment on the album is a confession of what he doesn’t know: “How does it feel?” he asks. “How does it feel?” He smirks again, and says you might find whatever you’re looking for down on Highway 61, the central nerve that separates and unites America. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Bob Dylan: “Like a Rolling Stone”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Electric Ladyland (1968)

Jimi Hendrix as guitarist is legend enough. A southpaw innovator who thought in noise and texture as much as notes and chords, he defined one of the most important aspects of psychedelic rock by splitting the difference between Chicago blues and free jazz. Electric Ladyland was the point when it became clear why he was making all that transcendent racket. It offered virtuosity in the service of worldbuilding—the old ways of hooky, three-minute rhythm & blues finding renewed purpose in this brave new Aquarian frontier.

Hendrix was a master of both the boundless potential and the immediate simplicity of rock, as he proves on this double LP, the third blueprint-redrawing album he released with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell in a year and a half. In Ladyland, he puts the stompy kazoo funk of “Crosstown Traffic” and his supercharged cover of Earl King’s “Come On” in the same universe as the supernatural ritual of “Voodoo Chile” and the underwater, post-apocalypse utopian vision of “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” All these sides can be heard in a four-minute microcosm, too: Hendrix repossesses “All Along the Watchtower” so thoroughly, reshaping a desolate folk-rock lament into a harrowing escape plan, that Bob Dylan himself couldn’t hear his song afterwards without Jimi’s transformations haunting him. –Nate Patrin

Listen: The Jimi Hendrix Experience: “All Along the Watchtower”

The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground (1969)

After the hedonistic moments of their first album gave way to the hard-rock hallucinations of White Light/White Heat, the Velvet Underground took an unexpected turn for the spiritual. Lou Reed once grasped for transcendence on “Heroin,” but the masochists and dope fiends that had colored the band’s previous releases largely receded into the background on their self-titled third album.

In their place was introspection, empathy, and even sweetness. Tracks as rollicking as “Beginning to See the Light” and as whispery as “Jesus” sound like prayers for salvation. For an account of adultery, “Pale Blue Eyes” is disarmingly zen, with Reed ceding his claim on a married soulmate over watery strumming and distant shakes of tambourine. You don’t have to know that the folksy lullaby “Candy Says” was a portrait of transgender Warhol superstar Candy Darling for its characterization of the human body as a prison to resonate. The band kept their underworld mystique alive on “The Murder Mystery,” a nine-minute collage of lurid narratives that later appeared as a poem in The Paris Review. That the track doesn't sound jarring amid all that sincerity only confirms that grit was always VU’s schtick, not their true subject. –Judy Berman

Listen: The Velvet Underground: “Pale Blue Eyes”

Leonard Cohen: Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)

A 33-year-old Leonard Cohen arrived to the folk scene a stranger in a strange land, with the aura of someone much older. He beheld you from the cover of his debut album with doe eyes and a grim mouth, in a black-and-white photo that seemed to belong to the 1940s more than the 1960s. His music was similarly out-of-time, with unforgettable lyrics that blew in like a breeze from some remote isle, perfumed with odd scents—tea, oranges. He played guitar gently and with great precision, the same way that he sang. He might have been friends with Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, but he didn’t strum or holler, and Songs of Leonard Cohen existed in a world without rock’n’roll.

Cohen’s path to the recording studio was wayward and ambling, animated by an inner melody that only he seemed to hear. He began his career as a published writer, typing out love poems about the ovens of Auschwitz and serenely filthy novels about sex and drugs. He carried all of this with him to the studio, and Songs of Leonard Cohen feels like the continuation of a larger story. There are characters in these songs, people with names that Cohen clearly knows intimately and expects you to know as well. Now that Cohen has passed, his discography sits like a holy stone city, and this record is the church at the city’s center: You can walk around it, listen to the echoes, put your hands on the smooth stones. You can read its address by the moon. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Leonard Cohen: “The Stranger Song”

Aretha Franklin: I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967)

The Queen of Soul’s reign began here. Groomed as a jazz-pop singer by Columbia, Aretha Franklin jumped to the R&B powerhouse Atlantic for her 11th album, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. The label’s big idea was to “let Aretha be Aretha.” For the Memphis-born daughter of a Detroit preacher man, a 24-year-old mother of three who was trapped in a troubled marriage, that meant singing about adult emotional complexities with world-weary wisdom and barrel-chested expressiveness, accompanied by her own gospel piano chords, a bottom-heavy Muscle Shoals rhythm section, and punchy horns. It also meant hits, actual hits.

Franklin’s biggest solo smash is still this album’s reinvention of Otis Redding’s “Respect” as a dancefloor-ready call to consciousness, spelled out and spiced up with sock-it-to-me backing vocals by her sisters (“Ree,” as in “ree-ree-ree-ree-respect,” was their nickname for Aretha). The bluesy title track enacts a toxic codependency; the country-molasses waltz “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” could keep any couple together. Franklin showed her songwriting strengths, too, especially on the candidly lustful “Dr. Feelgood.” But she was more apt to lay claim on songs made famous by male R&B greats—not only Redding but also Ray Charles and, twice, her hero Sam Cooke, whose civil rights anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come” she reimagines no less boldly than “Respect,” proclaiming, “My change is gonna come.” –Marc Hogan

Listen: Aretha Franklin: “Respect”

Miles Davis: In a Silent Way (1969)

In 1969, Miles Davis was in search of a new sound, and In a Silent Way is the soundtrack to that search. At 42, he had already reinvented jazz a few times, and with the genre on the cusp of being completely eclipsed by rock and pop, he pivoted once again, taken with the psychedelic electrics of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. But this album isn’t a trend hop as much as it’s a soothsaying outlier—it hinted at what would become known as jazz fusion in the ’70s, but it also wafted into Tortoise’s post-rock of the ’90s and Radiohead’s most outré experiments of the 21st century. Even now, it still stands out of time, in limbo, floating.

“Why don’t you play it like you don’t know how to play the guitar?” That’s the advice Miles gave to his guitarist, John McLaughlin, while recording the record’s title track. On the surface, the suggestion is nonsensical. In practice, it’s a skeleton key opening doors to sounds unheard. So as McLaughlin’s clean notes begin to slowly unwind at the start of the song, electric pianos and organ quietly dot the background, like errant raindrops after a sunshower, and then Miles’ rasping horn begins its own quest out of the darkness. Everything has to earn its intrusion into the silent void. Consider how Davis mainstay Tony Williams, one of jazz’s great drummers, rides his hi-hat—and only his hi-hat—throughout the entire first half of the record before switching to an unfussy, rim-click metronome on the second side. This is music made by a bunch of geniuses who are doing everything they can to not sound like a bunch of geniuses. Nevertheless, genius ensues. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Miles Davis: “Shhh/Peaceful”

The Beatles: Revolver (1966)

Both a landmark and a pivot, Revolver bursts with the creativity of four men in their 20s discovering Indian scales, tape loops, psychedelics, baroque string arrangements, surreal kid-folk, fuzz pedals, and themselves. Already possessing the world’s ear following several years of increasingly ranging hits, Revolver continued the quartet’s transfiguration from lovable moptops to lovable visionaries, reinventing rock with an effortlessness akin to magic. The album signaled the dawn of a stoned and eclectic pop age, from the cheeky garage snarl of George Harrison’s “Taxman” to the radiophonic swirl of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” John Lennon and producer George Martin’s first psychedelic opus. Even a half-century after being absorbed into rock’s lingua franca, Revolver not only sounds fresh but fun, perfectly bottling the exuberant rush of youth while pioneering new songwriting modes and production tricks with nearly every verse, chorus, and middle eight. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: The Beatles: “Eleanor Rigby”

James Brown: Live at the Apollo (1963)

When James Brown pitched the idea of a live LP to King Records founder Syd Nathan, he was famously rebuffed. So Brown bankrolled Live at the Apollo himself, providing coffee to those freezing in line outside the legendary Harlem venue where, hours later, he would make the best live album of all time.

Live at the Apollo documents a disciplined, exhaustively road-tested touring unit and a hungry 29-year-old frontman who’d gone nine singles between hits. From emcee Fats Gonder’s nickname-filled introduction to the airtight rhythm workouts, from the nearly 11-minute exaltation of “Lost Someone” to the breakneck medley bookended by “Please, Please, Please,” the James Brown Revue teased, tested, and defied the clock this evening. But just as essential were the fans on this Wednesday night in fall 1962, screaming and begging as the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened global devastation outside. Soon enough, listeners worldwide would share the passion that Brown’s Apollo audience had for him. –Marc Hogan

Listen: James Brown: “I’ll Go Crazy”

Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde (1966)

Bob Dylan put out seven albums in his first four years on Columbia, a creative arc perhaps best represented by a hot-air balloon going straight up into the stratosphere. In this formulation, Blonde on Blonde—lucky No. 7, released when Dylan was hungry and it was his world—is the point where his music reaches the edges of space, the frightening limit beyond which it could go no further. This is the album with the most intricate melodies, the harshest harmonica bleats, the most tangled imagery; it subtweets John Lennon, tells you where to hang your binoculars, and correctly notes that to live outside the law, you have to be honest. It’s the one with Dylan’s funniest jokes but it’s also filled with crushing heartbreak, and it’s the one with the best drumming and the fattest organ sound.

Dylan never made another record like it. Blonde on Blonde is a sprawling and messy double-album, a record that opens with an adolescent joke about weed and closes with an epic, surreal, and deeply moving side-long meditation on love. Improbably, despite its length and speed-addled excess and rhymes that are approximately 20 percent duds, it all hangs together, not unlike a mattress balancing on a bottle of wine. About two months after its release, Dylan may or may not have taken a motorcycle ride that ended in a crash, and the balloon that shot skyward would drop a few thousand feet. The view was still great, but the air wasn’t quite so thin, and the mercury sound wasn’t quite so wild. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Bob Dylan: “Just Like a Woman”

Nina Simone: Wild Is the Wind (1966)

On the morning of September 15, 1963, a bomb planted by members of the Ku Klux Klan went off underneath the stairs of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls. Like many, Nina Simone was galvanized by the tragedy. After making her name with memorable takes on love songs and showtunes, she felt a new responsibility to help the black community with her art. The next year, rage fueled “Mississippi Goddam,” her first musical reaction to such injustices; “Four Women,” the lone song she wrote on Wild Is the Wind, is more subdued but just as cutting. She details the stereotypical roles available for black women in civil rights-era America—the old auntie, the biracial outcast, the prostitute, the revolutionary—embedding histories of slavery, colorism, and oppression into music sparse enough to soundtrack a supper club soiree. Without those four girls in Birmingham, “Four Women” may have never come to be. The song would help set her creative course as she became increasingly involved in the movements around her.

The rest of Wild Is the Wind zeroes in on a more romantic brand of heartbreak. In 1966, Simone was in the middle of her tumultuous relationship with husband and manager Andrew Stroud, who often tried to steer her away from cultural commentary in favor of less heavy—and, potentially, more commercial—material. But even when she’s playing the more traditional balladeer on “Lilac Wine” or the album’s title track, Simone’s tremulous voice conjures world-churning drama out of every curling phrase. In turn, each song adds a haunting humanity to her sketches of black womanhood. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Nina Simone: “Four Women”

The Beatles: The Beatles (1968)

With Sgt. Pepper’s, the Beatles invented the rock album: What it might sound like, what sort of artwork might accompany it, how it might look displayed on the shelf. It was a wildly audacious gambit for a group of kids, and just 18 months later, with The Beatles, they shattered their own idea completely, with an object so heavy and unyielding the shelf collapsed.

The idea of a smartly sequenced, tightly stitched suite of songs goes out the window: What we hear on the White Album, as it’s now universally called, is an assembly line of products with no operator. You can stare at the tantalizingly blank sleeve until you go snow-blind, trying to decode it. Nothing about it makes any kind of sense, and you will never meet a living soul who insists all the songs on it are worth keeping, nor will you find two people who agree on which songs to cut. The only real story binding its four sides occurs offstage, in the Beatles’ soap opera of creative differences; in band mythology, this was the moment the ship sailed irreversibly towards the iceberg, with three squabbling creative forces bent on wresting the wheel from one another. But cocooned inside the music, we don’t hear the bickering.

As a result, the White Album is entirely what you make of it. The wild tonal variants, the hairpin turns from mocking and specious (“Glass Onion,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.”) to nakedly emotional (“Blackbird,” “Julia,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) to scabrous and ugly (“Yer Blues,” “Helter Skelter”)—we draw our own maps. Generations of songwriters have taken one or more of its dead-end roads and hacked a new subgenre out of the brush, from Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk to the Clash’s London Calling to Elliott Smith’s XO. To record your White Album is to make something that tugs and bursts at its own seams. To listen to your White Album is to never reach the same set of conclusions. –Jayson Greene

Listen: The Beatles: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme (1965)

John Coltrane’s classic quartet—featuring pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones—hit a pinnacle of their expressive potential together in the recording session that took place on December 9, 1964. Given all that it contains, the album put to tape on that day can seem paradoxically compact: It’s not quite 33 minutes long, so how is it possible for there to be so much space for each soloist to shine? Enough time for Coltrane, as composer, to make the spiritual stakes of this four-movement suite so dramatically clear?

A Love Supreme’s unusual power remains as mysterious as its pleasures are durable. There are an impressive number of Coltranes that we can hear. His solos are full of passages that show off his sturdy tone as well as his fluid melodic variations, but, in a surprise move, he also sings the album’s title during the opening “Acknowledgement.” Occasionally, he ventures high-register notes on his tenor sax that seem to gasp with airy vulnerability. Jimmy Garrison’s bass creates a mood of risk as well as grace as he steadily navigates a series of fresh chords at the end of “Pursuance.” Pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones foster breakneck swing or deep reflection, given the needs of the moment.

In A Love Supreme’s liner notes, Coltrane describes the album as a “humble offering to HIM.” But this is no easygoing tribute; personal and social struggle informs it throughout. As Ashley Kahn observes in a recent reissue set essay, Coltrane’s drafted score for A Love Supreme references the closing chord of “Alabama,” his earlier tribute to the victims of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. A Love Supreme carries a similarly complex spirit, working at a celebration of life while also confronting the reality of terror. To make good on the effort, the album strikes an interfaith posture: Some of its blues cries come from the black church, and Coltrane’s chanted vocals suggest Eastern spiritual traditions. Just as the album demands much of its composer and his fellow players, it also encourages us to enlarge our own capacities. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: John Coltrane: “Acknowledgement” 

The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds (1966)

Before Pet Sounds, rock existed in the declarative, the shouting of the succinct: The Beatles wanted to hold this, the Stones couldn’t get that, the Kinks wanted you then. Even the Beach Boys were content to party there, ankles in the surf, harmonizing salt-flecked snapshots of the Southern California idyll. But on the group’s 11th album, Brian Wilson turned his attention inward, to ask questions without clear answers—and, along the way, invented the modern pop auteur.

Pet Sounds is an album of grand, immediate pleasures: rhapsodic falsettos, deep melodies elated by strings and brass, blips of bike horns and barking dogs. But it also bows to a central humility—the unknowability of love—and in doing so, reaches grace. To other bands, affairs were prizes won and lost, the products of obvious motives and crisp faults. But here, Wilson writes in the wistful, patient meditations of the perennial outsider; he has no explanations on how romance endures, or why it leaves, or where innocence is lost. Whether marveling over his wife’s fidelity in “You Still Believe in Me,” or bidding goodbye to his heart’s ideal on “Caroline, No,” he is wide-eyed. In “God Only Knows,” the most beautiful pop song of the ’60s, Brian and lyricist Tony Asher direct cherubic vocalist Carl Wilson to be helpless with awe, alighting on a willfully unromantic suggestion—that love is a sustained choice, after it’s a lightning bolt—inside a melody so sublime it becomes a sonnet. None of this is delivered in absolutes; Wilson’s most confident resolution on the album is that he doesn’t fit in, that he “just wasn’t made for these times.”

He was ahead of them, while channeling centuries before. On Pet Sounds, Wilson introduces many tropes now central to pop music: the lone savant who conducts the band and the recording studio; the pensive observer, too gentle for this world; and the song cycle, a succession of tracks with entwined emotional and musical motifs. It’s no accident these are contemporary updates on classical composers, like Wilson’s beloved Gershwin and Beethoven. Here, as producer and arranger, he coaxes in elements of their symphonies—plus exotica, baroque, calypso, and a funhouse of eccentric instruments—electronically stacking it all into a roiling wave of sound, topped with the most spiritual and psychedelic harmonies the Beach Boys would ever swoon. Today, Wilson continues to speak to the romantic in every listener, in the radiant spaces between what is known. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: The Beach Boys: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”

The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

The dream of the underground as an autonomous zone takes root here: a sense of style that would pave the way for glam rock; a sense of nihilism that would bulldoze a clear path for punk; an uncompromisingly avant-garde sound that would lead to post-punk and beyond. There was their subject matter, decadent and depraved: whips and furs, back-alley blowjobs, tragic heroines, and also heroin—lots of heroin. The hippie phenomenon was a populist movement, as relatable to teenagers as bubble-gum pop had been a few years prior, and the Velvets were anything but. They invented a whole new kind of cool, their sound raw and shambolic: “Femme Fatale,” despite its glamorous premise, sounds like it was recorded in a broom closet. Lou Reed’s voice is high and nasal, and Nico—a fashion model and actor from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Warhol’s Chelsea Girls—sounds about as lively as an IV drip. The record was grotty and lo-fi, the sound of a reel-to-reel tape retreating into a turtle shell. And yet they had noise, much from their avant-gardist John Cale, a classically trained violist who turned his education into droning, seesawing, nails-on-a-chalkboard frequencies. When they performed, incongruously, at a formal dinner for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry in 1966, one shrink called them “a short-lived torture of cacophony.”

Today, it’s easy to see The Velvet Underground & Nico as a solipsistic record, given all the social and political problems of the era that it ignores; the Velvets weren’t so much turning on and dropping out as digging in and shooting up. If the contemporary underground begins here then so too, perhaps, does its occasionally blinkered perspective. Art for art’s sake can be a hell of a drug. But for all of their danger and debasement, there was also something cozy about the Velvet Underground. “Sunday Morning” is a song about taking stock of the “wasted years,” yet it’s as gentle as a lullaby. “Heroin,” despite Reed’s bleak decision to “nullify my life,” turns two chords and a motorik beat into a burbling sunrise pulse that feels like rock’n’roll heaven. Far from “closing in on death,” the Velvet Underground were zeroing in on the sound of the future. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: The Velvet Underground & Nico: “There She Goes Again”