About a year ago Rolling Stone updated their 500 greatest albums of all time list. You can read it here.
As the Essential Remnants Top 50 countdown reaches the midway point, I thought it would be interesting to list the albums that Rolling Stone honored that the Remnants have ignored (with a comment):
Little Richard, Here’s Little Richard: Not a single mention of Little Richard on any of our lists, which is surely an oversight.
Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions: Didn’t make the Top 50, but certainly qualifies.
John Coltrane, A Love Supreme: Everyone named one, different jazz album.
Bob Marley, Legend: Too big, too mainstream for the Remnants list.
The Band, The Band: We went with Big Pink. RS listed both.
Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon: Too monstrously popular to listen to anymore. Obviously of historical significance.
Love, Forever Changes: Not mentioned by us, but one of my favorite albums. This is Rolling Stone’s most idiosyncratic choice, since it isn’t historically significant or a big seller or representative of some genre. Nice!
The Beatles, Please Please Me: We have plenty of other Beatles. It’s all great.
Muddy Waters, Anthology: As a group we went for Howlin’ Wolf.
The Eagles, Hotel California: We went for Supershit 666 instead.
Carole King, Tapestry: Another hugely popular record it’s hard to hear fresh anymore.
Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home: Another obvious choice. We went with another obvious choice.
Joni Mitchell, Blue: We split the Joni vote between Court and Spark and Hejira, so she didn’t rank in the top 50.
Michael Jackson, Thriller: Yet another monster classic that didn’t need a mention.
Van Morrison, Astral Weeks: The obvious artsy choice from a giant. We had the more rocking Moondance in the running, but it didn’t quite make the cut.
Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run: Once again, RS goes with the obvious classic. We do have a Bruce on our list.
Nirvana, Nevermind: And yet again, the classic that’s been played a few million too many times.
Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks: Similarly classic, but though obvious still sounding fresh as the day it was released.
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue: More jazz. Not as great or as influential as A Love Supreme, but masterful and beloved.
Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On: Seems like there must have been a tabulation error. This was on our lists. The best album of a great singer and songwriter.
Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited: The Remnants didn’t go crazy over Dylan in their lists, but agreed on just one disk (not this one).
The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: The most artsy elpee they made doesn’t need more recognition, though it certainly isn’t undeserved.
“We went for Supershit 666 instead.” Perfect.
Many of the RS list would make it if we had 100 albums.
As for Little Richard, he isn’t the only titan neglected. But this is an album list and the singles artists are going to get shorted, no way around it.
For many years WCBS-FM in New York was a good commercial radio station, when “oldies” meant “pre-Bristish Invasion.” They gave me a good basic education in 50s-early 60s. On holiday weekends they would occasionally play a countdown of the Top 500 songs from that era. It would be very cool if we did our own version and held a 3-day party to play them at.
Hey, Z keeps telling me we need to launch “Remnant Radio” and that we could broadcast.
All the local stations in NorCal used to do Top 100’s or 500’s at holiday time and at end of year.
My brother and I had a mythical radio station (call letters IMOK) and did top 40 lists every week and broadcast our Top 100 every New Year’s Eve from our bedroom.
Sigh. Too bad he turned out to be such an asshole in so many ways.
As for RS, no argument with their choices. Maybe played to death, but that usually indicates good and successful.
However, the reason none of them made my list is I did get mostly get tired of them. Although I can always listen to the Dylan and Miles and Nirvana.
Happy Fourth my brothers!
If I named a jazz album please take it back.
I like Gene’s party idea.
Me too. I often check out Syl Sylvain’s “radio” show on Friday nights on the NY Dolls Facebook page. We could do it on the Rock Remnants Facebook page. Facebook kind of sucks, but it’s easier to draw a crowd.
Or we could do it here. My posts post to my Facebook stream. We can make everyone’s post or tweet and ideally draw a crowd.
I am SURE on saw Kenny G. on Steve’s list, right guys?
No, Steve is into semi-classical.
Lawr, I like your childhood.
David Johansen has a show on Sirius/XM 30 on Sunday mornings. He is Sri Ramalama Dingdong.
I don’t subscribe to Sirius, but I have heard Johansen’s show (a friend of mine is a big fan of it) and liked it a lot.
Sri is free-form to be sure. He loves Fats Waller like my father did.