classics

Record #924: Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath (1970)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

There is perhaps no more unlikely group to change the course of music than Black Sabbath. Originally called the Pulka Tulk Blues Band, and later Earth, the working class quartet from Birmingham cut their teeth playing in blues clubs with a sound not unlike the blues rock of Cream.

But somewhere between forming and recording their first album, a series of events caused them to morph into one of the most ferocious and influential bands of all time. And while Black Sabbath still retains a lot of their blues jam tendencies, the nucleus of their legendary career—and heavy metal as a whole—is impossible to miss.

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Record #853: Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells (1973)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Tubular Bells is an absolutely iconic record. It’s a staple in almost any collection. It is also a hokey, sprawling mess.

However, it’s also one of the first records of its scope to have been recorded largely by a single person using overdubs. This isn’t quite an impressive feat anymore—there are legions of solo artists making ambitious music on their laptops (I’ve even done so myself), and a lot of them are more listenable than this.

But there is a charm in Oldfield’s initial opus, burdened as it is by ambition and lack of focus. After all, he was only nineteen when he released it.

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Record #831: Iggy Pop – The Idiot (1977)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Iggy Pop lost himself for a while in the mid ’70s. His heroin addiction had proven too large a beast to manage, leading to the breakup of The Stooges in 1974. He tried his hand at a few musical ventures, auditioning to replace Jim Morrison in The Doors and to join KISS. Both were as unsuccessful as his stints in rehab.

In 1976, he reached out to his friend David Bowie, battling his own addictions, for help. The two moved in together into a Château near Paris and Bowie offered to produce an album for him. The resulting record, The Idiot, stripped away the proto-punk fury of Pop’s previous band in favor of Krautrock-influenced electronic textures—a sound that Iggy would describe as “James Brown mixed with Kraftwerk.”

In that way, The Idiot isn’t just a great record in Iggy’s catalog, but it’s also the spiritual prequel to Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy.

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Record #817: Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um (1959)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Some years bear a strange significance in music history. Single calendars that compress massive explosions of musical ingenuity within their pages.

In 1967, it was psychedelic and progressive rock. In 1977, it was punk. 1991 brought multiple waves of noisy guitar bands, from grunge to shoegaze to post-hardcore to the massive umbrella of alternative rock.

For jazz, that year was 1959, which saw several seminal releases: Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Brubeck’s Time Out, Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which is arguably the greatest jazz record of all time by every metric.

But even among such legendary peers, Charles Mingus’ masterpiece, Mingus Ah Um, stands unwavering on its own two feet and swings mightily at all challengers.

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Record #434: King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald
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The sixties were a weird time. And it had the music to match.
Every band, from the Beatles to the Byrds to the Beach Boys, dabbled in making some of the weirdest music of their career. Every band had at least one psychedelic album—even perennial rock and roll heroes the Rolling Stones. But by 1969, most of them had moved on from the weirdness of psychedelia.
But nobody told King Crimson that.
Their debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, isn’t just a coattail-riding, trend-following copycat that happens to be late to the game. It is a magnum opus of psychedelia that is still rightly celebrated today. The opening track, “21st Century Schizoid Man” is a balls-to-the-wall freight train of horns and guitar noodling (that Kanye West sampled, strangely enough). It’s seven and a half minutes of frenzy.
But as it fades, the record never revisits that bombast again. Which it doesn’t need to. Most of the record is driven by subdued, exploring guitar lines and Mellotron. At times, it flirts pretty heavily with jazz fusion (high praise). “Epitaph” and “The Court of the Crimson King” are epic ballads that manage to capture a dramatic scope that most psychedelic acts were devoid of. And it does that through extended arrangements and experimental composition.
While many psychedelic bands would eventually evolve into progressive rock, In the Court of the Crimson King manages to ride the line between them. As a result, this record is an absolute gem.