Best year for albums?

My vote is 1979:

The Clash's debut (US release), London Calling - The Clash
The Specials - The Specials
Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division
154 - Wire
The Undertones - The Undertones
The B-52's - The B-52's
Reggatta de Blanc - The Police
One Step Beyond - Madness
Dub Housing - Pere Ubu
Highway To Hell - AC/DC
Fear Of Music - Talking Heads
True Colours - Split Enz
Armed Forces - Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Repeat When Necessary - Dave Edmunds
Metal Box, Second Edition - Public Image Ltd.
Squeezing Out Sparks - Graham Parker
Entertainment! - Gang Of Four
The Fine Art Of Surfacing - The Boomtown Rats
Dirk Wears White Sox - Adam & The Ants
Do It Yourself - Ian Dury & The Blockheads
Lodger - David Bowie
New Values - Iggy Pop
Setting Sons - The Jam
Machine Gun Etiquette - The Damned
A Different Kind Of Tension and Singles Going Steady - Buzzcocks
Look Sharp! - Joe Jackson
Labour of Lust - Nick Lowe
Drums and Wires - XTC
The Beat - The Beat
Inflammable Material - Stiff Little Fingers
20/20 - 20/20
Replicas - Tubeway Army
20 Jazz Funk Greats - Throbbing Gristle
Candy-O - The Cars
The Crack - The Ruts
Rust Never Sleeps - Neil Young
Damn the Torpedoes - Tom Petty
Dawn of the Dickies - Dickies
Shit Street - Pagans
GI - Germs
Avengers - Avengers
Crawdaddy Express - Crawdaddys

Try to beat that! (1980 came close)

To refresh your memory check this out: http://rateyourmusic.com/albums_by_year

1985 Wasn't too shabby either. Plus I was in college and had a late night show on the University radio station– so most of these are still in our record collection:

Tom Waits: Rain Dogs
R.E.M.: Fables of the Reconstruction  
Talking Heads: Little Creatures   
Camper Van Beethoven: Telephone Free Landslide Victory  
The Replacements: Tim   
The Smiths: Meat is Murder
Hüsker Dü: New Day Rising   
The Jesus and Mary Chain: Psychocandy   
The Pogues: Rum, Sodomy And The Lash   
Minutemen: 3-Way Tie for Last
The Cure: The Head On The Door   
Sonic Youth: Bad Moon Rising
New Order: Low-Life      
Meat Puppets : Up On the Sun
Big Audio Dynamite: This Is Big Audio Dynamite   
The Waterboys: This Is The Sea   
The Fall: This Nation's Saving Grace  
The Cult: Love     
The Sisters of Mercy: First and Last and Always     
Hüsker Dü: Flip Your Wig   
Butthole Surfers: Psychic...Powerless...Another Man's Sac   
Ry Cooder:Paris, Texas [OST]   
The Chameleons: What Does Anything Mean? Basically   
Suzanne Vega: Suzanne Vega   
Kate Bush: Hounds of Love   
Dire Straits: Brothers in Arms     
The Church: Heyday   
Dead Can Dance: Spleen and Ideal   
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: The Firstborn is Dead   
Einstürzende Neubauten: Halber Mensch   
D.R.I.: Dealing With It      
Hoodoo Gurus: Mars Needs Guitars!   
Sting: The Dream of the Blue Turtles   
Sam Cooke: Live At The Harlem Square Club,    John Cougar Mellencamp: Scarecrow   
The Mekons: Fear and Whiskey   
Yello: Stella   
John Fogerty: Centerfield   
Killing Joke: Night Time   
The Dead Milkmen: Big Lizard in My Backyard   
Bryan Ferry: Boys and Girls   
Oingo Boingo: Dead Man's Party   
Dead Kennedys: Frankenchrist   
Shriekback: Oil and Gold      
INXS: Listen Like Thieves   
Beat Farmers:Tales of the New West   
Love and Rockets: Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven   
Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians: Fegmania!   
Richard Thompson : Across A Crowded Room   
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Freaky Styley   
Peter Gabriel: Birdy - Music From The Film   
Simply Red: Picture Book   
Jason & The Scorchers: Lost & Found   
Tom Petty: Southern Accents   
Skinny Puppy: Bites   
The Descendents: I Don't Want to Grow Up   

Ah, the days before college radio was co-opted and sold as "alternative".

-Duke

Interesting site Jab! I can't decide!!! Although I'm leaning towards 1979 too.
Base on their lists, 77'-87' is definitely 'my favorite' decade for music!

Great site! That site is SUPER useful for all the dumb-asses out there who say that all 80s music was crap. I always hear "Oh, the 80s that was all the pointer sisters crap, etc." which couldn't be further from the truth- you just had to be listening to alternative stations and making an effort to find the good stuff. There are so many good years there. 85 was excellent, as was 83. Toward the end of the decade, it gets pretty slack.

Now, 90s music is not aging quite as well, is it? There's some classics in there, but I predict so much more of it will be forgotten.

1983: Top REM album- Murmur
1995: Top REM album - New adventures in hi-fi (?!)

If that makes the top 100 of your year, your year is in trouble.

Two of the top ten of 1997 are Bill Hicks albums! No disrespect to the genius of Hicks, but I'm pretty sure it's not music.

Boutiki, your list brought back some great musical memories for me. I just started getting back into old school punk and would love to have my old record collection back. Your lucky to still hhave those!
By the way does you Dead Kennedys: Frankenchrist still have the original poster in it?

Martiki-

Not to rain on your parade about the 80s, but there WAS alot of crap in that decade. In fact it was the decade that forced bands and artists to conform with the dawning of the 'polished image' (for lack of a better term) thanks to MTV, and definitely galvanized musical 'Crap' as a marketable commodity, paving the way for the sea of musical CRAP we live in today. Ask any popular band or industry person where they got their chops to make the CRAP they make today, and they'll say it all started in the 80s. Back then major label bands that had previously been, in my opinion, riding a crest of rock n roll greatness like for example Cheap Trick, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, and others started to go south in the 80s with over-slick production and power ballads.

On the other hand you are totally right! The 80s was one of the last great eras of the underground. SST, Alternative Tentacles, Megaforce, Enigma and all the other labels and bands you used to find in the 'Import' sections (remember those) of your favorite record store. Black Flag, DKs, (early) Metallica, etc. My god...The Minutemen!! U2...they were awesome back then, and even though they've had a few minor hitches over the years, they still are.That kind of ethic really doesn't exist among young people or in the music anymore. It probably never will again. So I would say for 80s the musical highs were pretty high, but the lows were waaaaay low. But hey...anyting is better than the pop music...er....CRAP.... that is out there today, that's fer sure.

Youngsters! Check out '73 and '74-talk about your seminal works.Classic stuff that I grew up with.

On 2005-06-30 10:05, FLOUNDERart wrote:
Boutiki, your list brought back some great musical memories for me. I just started getting back into old school punk and would love to have my old record collection back. Your lucky to still hhave those!
By the way does you Dead Kennedys: Frankenchrist still have the original poster in it?

You know, it's not. And I can't remember if it was there when I got the album or if they had been forced to yank it by the time I got a copy. Most of my records at that time came from my favorite used record store back then, Vinyl Fever on Fletcher in Tampa. Many were promo copies that the radio stations would dump there because they were never going to play the stuff.

I also realized right after I made my post that it was not entirely true. Not all of that old music is in our RECORD collection, several of the albums are on cassette tape! Remember those? Just the other day I was driving and thinking, how can I ever get rid of my old Ford Econoline van? It has a tape deck. I bet you were just like me back then Flounder, wasting countless hours making mix tapes for yourself or for a girlfriend, with your own custom art for inside the tape case.

That site is pretty cool Jab, and it's funny how you skim down a page and start humming all your favorite songs from the different albums. It also reminds you of all the bands you saw live back then. Cool stuff.
-Duke

When i saw the title for this post I thought about a recent revelation... My favorite album on earth, although hard to find just one, the most perfectly crafted album on this crusty planet ranks #2 on Jabs list... The specials. No matter how hard I match 100 of runner ups to this quintessential 80's band (from the 70's) I find myself returning to the 2 tone bliss of 1979. Jab you are right. lock the topic;)

And following hot on the heels of The Specials debut were the great debut albums by The Selecter and the English Beat, both in 1980.

I was awestruck in Portland during the last Northwest Tiki Crawl when I found out Lynval Golding (of the Specials) now plays with Lushy (who performed on Saturday night on the crawl)!

Based on the 'Top 100 LPs' website, I think that 1958 was the best year for exotica music.
#97 'Orienta' The Markko Polo Adventurers
#90 'Hypnotique' Martin Denny
#85 'Exploring New Sounds in Stereo' Esquivel
#76 'Taboo' Arthur Lyman
#31 'Other Worlds, Other Sounds' Esquivel
#30 'Music from Peter Gunn' Henry Mancini

Oddly enough, Martin Denny's 'Quiet Village' did not make the top 100 for 1959, although his 'Afro-Desia' LP made the list that year(#59). Denny's 'Exotica' LP is listed at #75 for 1957

'Eden's Island' by Eden Ahbez is listed at #28 for 1960.

Vern

Jab-

I'd have to agree with you that 1979 was a great year. I want to say that 1969 was great, but I was a mere toddler then. '79 was probably the first year that I became fully conscious to the mighty Rock temple. That year a new record store sprang up in my neighborhood and I went in there just about every day. I was 13 and hardly ever had any money to buy stuff. The owner looked like Sting and after a while he got real aggravated with me because I never bought anything. I was just hanging around bothering him. I was so naive, I couldn't understand why he was pissed.

He did however have a real Wurlitzer jukebox in the place that played songs for free. It was stacked high with a lot of the newest songs from that year, and as I mentioned in another thread, they sounded so weird and foreign to my young ears. It really did blow my mind. Some of the tunes were:

Video Killed the Radio Star-The Buggles
Sex & Drugs & Rock n Roll-Ian Dury
Hit Me With Your Rythym Stick-Ian Dury
Message In A Bottle-The Police
Money-The Flying Lizards
Rock Lobster-B52s

These were all brand spankin' new songs at the time.

On the walls of the record store I remember that there were huge poster sized pictures of the album covers for Tom Petty-'Damn the Torpedos', the first (yellow) B52s record, and Neil Young's 'Rust Never Sleeps'. Pretty cool. There were also smaller posters for other bands that came out that year but never went anywhere like Flash and the Pan, and Bram Tchaikovsky.

Cheap Trick 'Dream Police' came out that year too. I won an autographed copy of that record in a raffle at the same record store. AC/DC "Highway to Hell" came out as well.

I'll never forget how cool it was at that time to hear Neil Young's 'Hey Hey, My My' crackling from my clock radio in my room real late at night with the lights off. Cool. And as far as Talking Heads' song from that year, "Life During War Time", I just thought it was cool and weird that they said 'peanut butter' in that song.

Some other tunes that I was hearing on the radio that were kinda off the beatin' path were:

Sniff & the Tears "Driver's Seat"
The Fabulous Poodles "Bionic Man"
Tim Curry "I Do the Rock"

The station I used to listen to back then, K-102 in Ft. Lauderdale did these crazy advertisements for a place called 'Vibrations' a huge head shop in Miami. The copy read something like 'we have all the best toys for your head'. Jeez can you even imagine hearing an ad for a head shop on the radio anymore?

Definitely a cool year. Glad I was old enough, or should I say, young enough to experience it.

[ Edited by: donhonyc on 2005-06-30 23:44 ]

[ Edited by: donhonyc on 2005-07-01 08:58 ]

Nice story donhonyc.

I had a similar favorite store in San Diego (actually in El Cajon, a suburb of SD) called Blue Meanie. I'm sure shipwreckjoey remembers it. They stocked everything new and old, including tons of imported picture sleeve 45s, numerous bootleg LPs, loads of badges, and all the magazines that were around then like Bomp, Trouser Press, Creem, Crawdaddy, Bam Balam, Zigzag, New York Rocker, Slash, etc. They always had a TV on showing clips from old TV music shows, or music movies like the TAMI show, and even British TV music shows like Top of the Pops. I used to hang out there for hours watching clips of bands like the Jam. This was 3 years before MTV so most music videos were not available (once in a while you could catch good ones on Night Flight - a late night TV show). The staff was real cool. And often someone you knew or some local musician would stop in.

Later I used to shop a lot at Off The Record as well but Blue Meanie was the first store of it's kind that I knew about.

Does any San Diegan remember Encore Records on El Cajon Blvd. near Hoover High School? They had thousands of 45s, all for 35c each.

I love this thread, and the site Jab posted! So many of those records are on my top lp's ever list.

My favorite record store was the Philadelphia Record Exchange, and when I got older, and moved to the city, I became friends with the guys who own it. But when I was a teenager, I remember going in there for the first time, and making my mom wait outside, while I bought the Mekons 'Fear an Whiskey', it was an IMPORT!! When I was in college, we had a party and I was chatting with one of the owners, and I told him about the first time I went in there, and made my mom wait outside, etc. And he remembered me, because most of the dorky suburban kids made their parents wait around the corner, out of sight, and they never bought anything as 'sophisticated' as the Mekons! (I guess the kids were buying Suicidal Tendencies or something) Then I started making weekly pilgrimages there, buying stuff like the Feelies, Naked Raygun, The Wipers and all sorts of weird/great stuff! When I was a teenager, I thought I was SO cool, but I was really bluffing, and later, when I actually was a little bit cool, I realized what an incredible DORK I was. But I did always have good taste in music!

Jab, Blue Meanie's still there. They say they miss you: you never call, you never write.