Jeff Gold has written an epic coffee table book about the golden age of rock – 101 Essential Rock Records, The Golden Age of Vinyl From the Beatles to The Sex Pistols.
Explains Jeff Gold….”The opening essay explains we’re covering the most seminal rock (not blues, not R&B, not straight-ahead folk) albums from the era where album sales dominated–from Beatlemania through the emergence of the Walkman and the dominance of the cassette. It’s arbitrary, but everything needs a beginning and end point and these are mine. Albums were chosen based on quality, originality and influence. As these criteria and what constitutes a rock album are completely subjective and I knew people would disagree, I’m just now finishing a website where people can argue with me and post their own lists. 101EssentialRecords.com will be ready next week.”
Being the engineering dork that I am, simply perusing the list of 101 wouldn’t suffice. So I took a somewhat deeper dive into the data with the result shown in this graph below.
Hardly an original insight, we are reminded again of the amazing burst of creative energy and music that emerged during the latter half of the 60’s into the early 70’s.
These rock records were the soundtrack of a rough and tumultuous time in our history as the USA slogged through the Vietnam war, the Cold War and the counter-culture war.
Completely unscripted, unexpected and essentially non-conformist and non-corporate, this prolific body of enduring music has defied all subsequent attempts to recapture this lightning in a bottle.
