1st
Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time.
1960 - 1970/ Liverpool, England
2nd
Pet Sounds -The Beach Boys
Carl, Dennis, and Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, David Marks and Bruce Johnston.
The Beatles made a point of echoing them on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band — an acknowledgment that Pet Sounds was the inspiration for the Beatles' masterpiece. That gesture actually completed a circle of influence: Wilson initially conceived of Pet Sounds as an effort to top the Beatles' Rubber Soul.
1961 - present day/ Hawthorne, California
3rd
Revolver - The Beatles
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
Part of that revolutionary impulse was visual. Klaus Voormann, one of the Beatles' artist buddies from their days in Hamburg, Germany, designed a striking photo-collage cover for Revolver; it was a crucial step on the road to the even trippier, more colorful imagery of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which would come less than a year later.
1960 - 1970/ Liverpool, England
4th
Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan recorded in a mind-boggling six days and released in August 1965, Highway 61 Revisited — named after the road that runs from Dylan's home state of Minnesota down through the Mississippi Delta — is one of those albums that, quite simply, changed everything. In and of itself, "Like a Rolling Stone," which was rumored to be about Andy Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick, forever altered the landscape of popular music
1959 - Present Day/ Duluth, Minnesotta
5th
Rubber Soul - The Beatles
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr
Released in December 1965 — and capping a year that had been defined by groundbreaking singles such as Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" and the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" — Rubber Soul finds the Beatles rising to meet the challenge their peers had set. Characteristically, they achieved a new musical sophistication and a greater thematic depth without sacrificing a whit of pop appeal. Producer George Martin described Rubber Soul as "the first album to present a new, growing Beatles to the world," and so it was.
1960 - 1970/ Liverpool, England
6th
What's Going On - Marvin Gaye
"In 1969 or 1970, I began to re-evaluate my whole concept of what I wanted my music to say," Gaye once said about the creation of What's Going On. "I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world.
1958 - 1984/ Washington D.C.
7th
Exile On Main Street - The Rolling Stones
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Ronnie Wood, Charlie Watts
A dirty whirl of blues and boogie, the Rolling Stones' 1972 double LP "was the first grunge record," guitarist Keith Richards crowed proudly last year. But inside the deliberately dense squall — Richards' and Mick Taylor's dogfight riffing, the lusty jump of the Bill Wyman/Charlie Watts rhythm engine, Mick Jagger's caged-animal bark and burned-soul croon — is the Stones' greatest album and Jagger and Richards' definitive songwriting statement of outlaw pride and dedication to grit.
1962 - present day/London, England
8th
London Calling - The Clash
Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simon, Pete Howard
Recorded in 1979 in London, which was then wrenched by surging unemployment and drug addiction, and released in America in January 1980, the dawn of an uncertain decade, London Calling is nineteen songs of apocalypse fueled by an unbending faith in rock & roll to beat back the darkness. Produced with no-surrender energy by legendary Sixties studio madman Guy Stevens, the Clash's third album sounds like a free-form radio broadcast from the end of the world, skidding from bleak punk ("London Calling") to rampaging ska ("Wrong 'Em Boyo") and disco resignation ("Lost in the Supermarket").
1976 - 1986/London, England
9th
Blonde On Blonde - Bob Dylan
Released on May 16th, 1966, rock's first studio double LP by a major artist was, as Dylan declared in 1978, "the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my head . . . that thin, that wild-mercury sound." There is no better description of the album's manic brilliance. After several false-start sessions in New York in the fall of 1965 and January 1966 with his killer road band the Hawks — "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" was the only keeper — Dylan blazed through the rest of Blonde on Blonde's fourteen tracks in two three-day runs at Columbia's Nashville studios in February and March 1966.
1959 - Present Day/ Duluth, Minnesotta
10th
The White Album - The Beatles
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr
Beyond its stylish minimalism, the essentially blank cover of The Beatles, better known as the White Album, served a symbolic purpose. The band could find no honest way to visually represent itself as a coherent unit. Each of the three main songwriters was pursuing his own vision, with the other members, however reluctantly, serving as backup musicians. Once a whole far greater than the sum of its parts, the Beatles were now a tense alliance of daunting individual talents.
1960 - 1970/ Liverpool, England