Sly and the Family Stone
The 50 Best Live Albums of the 1970s
The concert industry exploded in the 1970s, and the live album, a stopgap project once reserved for only the biggest artists, became a compulsory ritual and a pivotal moment for many artists. Live albums captured legendarily loud bands like The Who and The Ramones in their natural element. Once obscure regional acts like Bob Seger, KISS and Cheap Trick exploded into the mainstream with live albums. The Band, The Stooges, and Velvet Underground put their final gigs on vinyl. Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young (as his ongoing archive series shows), and Jackson Browne recorded entire sets of new songs onstage. The Grateful Dead released several official live albums (and continue to do so) that only made fans want to bootleg shows on their own more. With the 50th anniversary of a landmark live album, Th...
The 50 Best Albums of 1971
It’s become a cliché, even for post-Baby Boomers, to look back wistfully on the early ’70s as some kind of untouchable golden age for popular music. But when you survey all the era’s best albums in list form, it’s hard not to trust that instinct. I mean…holy shit. In 1971, the psychedelic era hadn’t completely wilted; prog was nearing its popularity apex; Motown was still a revolutionizing soul music; the folk-rock movement was in full flight. The possibilities were limitless. You know it’s a banner year when 50 albums don’t begin to scratch the surface — when both John Lennon and Paul McCartney release definitive LPs and neither make the top 10. Was 1971 the greatest album year ever? We’ll save that debate for another time (or maybe another list). For now, we present 50 stone-cold cl...
