TURN THIS MUTHA OUT! It's the Alternate 1970s Albums Poll on ILX — Results Thread

blimey has voting happened already? ;_;

also wow at horses not making the original 100

For the last 4 weeks! xp

well then i am the one that sucks.

yay at two of my voted albums appearing already!

VAN HALEN SHOULD BE HIGHER - DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS?

I couldn't fit Clube de Esquina to my top 40, but I'm glad it made it. It's such a treasure chest of beautiful songs! That said, I've always thought the sound on it is a bit anemic and thin... That's why I prefer the versions of those songs that appear on Milton, even if half of them are translated to English, with Milton singing them with a rather awkward pronounciation (which I personally find kinda endearing). The sound and arrangements on that album are simply better than on Clube de Esquina.

That's four of mine in already - finally I feel I'm making a mark on the world, even if it is by making Johnny's list a little blander than it might've been.

I think Fleetwood Mac deserved better, but I'm guessing that another album of theirs might've hogged their vote. Horses is really interesting - it looks like everyone thinks it's important somehow, but nobody actually likes it (which is kind of why I lent it a vote).

am willing to bet that about 10 of my choices came within 5 points of getting in *mopes*

Heh, Horses was in my top 50 or 60, but didn't make the 40 after I admitted to myself that I didn't really like it, or couldn't remember more than a small fraction of it.

Wd like to like it more - I don't mind it at all, and it's obviously important, or a supposed influence on various things I've liked more, or something that friends who were cooler than me seemed to be into. But mainly she just looked so damn cool that I wanted her to sound it too. I suppose this means I like Mapplethorpe's photography instead of her music, except she still looks pretty damn cool considering she's as old as my parents.

ilx: hates progressive rock, arty post-punk*; loves 'imagine' by john lennon

*remain in light is not very arty, or good :P

erm oh er patti smith! yeah. saw her live a couple of years ago. she was really good! great inter-song yammering.

ilx hates arty post-punk?

ILX is where I found out about 90% of the arty post-punk I've heard, so, dunno about that there, unless there's been a major shift in ILX since I first thought "you know, apparently there is this thing of arty post-punk, and I don't really have any", which is admittedly some time ago (same is true of prog too but my original 70s prog knowledge is pretty thin so I'll make no claims there)

I think my problem with Patti Smith is that she was not the arty post-punk she was sold to me as but some interminable wheedling guitar under spoken-word recitations of mundane activities in that arty, edgy tone which makes it clear that YOU the listener are not as cool as anyone whose mundane activities can be artily recounted over guitar solos and between cigarettes

admittedly she does this pretty compellingly at times, and got there FIRST, or at least before it became quite such an unbearable recurring theme of local band nights and coffee shops (guess the cigarettes thing has been removed from this theme these days, huh)

ILX loves Warty Pre-Punk

Kinda of a shock realising i didn't vote for Horses since it was record I loved like a sister for a long, long time. Now........ it would take a lot of effort to listen to it all the way through. Two i voted for so far, two i don't know, and one i hate.

Horses was I think 42 or 43 on my list so it didn't make it

ha well i was kinda grumbling there but when xtc and magazine don't make it...

*crosses fingers*

nah, ilm does love some arty post-punk (like wire, who conveniently made the first poll) but i'd say not nearly as much as it did, and with a big USA bias. witness how, say, the chameleons fared in the 80's poll.

ilx: hates progressive rock, arty post-punkprog*; loveikes 'imagine' by john lennon

fixed for yr. convenience.

;^)

p-p-pprog...

Personally I am pretty delighted that Imagine only scraped into the bottom of the "second" 100 - OK, I'm sure it's beaten at least half the stuff I voted for and still more records that I don't even know and would love if I did, but comparing that to how I imagine (err) it would fare in the non-ILM world...

I was interested to see where these were ranked on RYM's 70s list:

ZZ Top- Tres Hombres (#440)
Clube de Esquina (#54)
Chic- C'est Chic (Not ranked)
John Lennon- Imagine (#236)
Patti Smith- Horses (#121)
Van Halen (#212)
Fleetwood Mac (#731)

So Imagine fares better here.

you suggesting ilx is boring and mainstream? ;)

Probably just that we won't have a bunch of Italian prog in our top 200.

i did not vote for a single italian album fwiw, although giorgio moroder probably has gotten into this list because you know ilx has a bone-on for all things dance

and maybe because he's quite good, who knows

i expect to see close to the edge and 'red' by king crimson and approximately bugger-all else

Chic- C'est Chic (Not ranked)

Why I avoid RYM in a nutshell.

It's not entirely your fault. If you'd bought any of the 70s albums on cd before 2006, you'd have gotten the piss-poor mismastered crap WB releases from the '80s. Rhino only recently went back to the original versions for their batch of reissues.

― Johnny Fever

I didn't know they were reissued - I have vinyl rips a friend made for me. Guess I can buy 'em now!

Van Halen was jobbed. Great, great album.

93. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Cosmo's Factory (1970) [81 points, 11 votes]

http://i50.tinypic.com/fut06x.jpg

Creedence were about the only late-'60s Bay Area band who didn't jam aimlessly. they barely "jammed" at all! two long songs on Cosmo's Factory /= "a tendency"

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Saturday, June 3, 2006 1:39 PM (3 years ago)

I've stated before that Creedence Clearwater Revival is one of my favorite bands. They have one of the best singles runs of any band in the last 50 years. Every Creedence single was a double A-side. "What's your favorite Creedence song?" you might ask. And I would say "Whichever one is currently playing or is about to play next, depending on the physical proximity I have to one or the other."

― kingkongvsgodzilla, Sunday, October 7, 2007 8:31 PM (2 years ago)

CCR kicks the Stones six ways from Saturday because they took mountain and country music as their stepping-off point AS WELL as Chicago blues - CCR annealed it all into a singular, totally unmistakable, champion sound. agreed that Jagger was surely one of the most mythological characters in all rock - CCR never had that mystique, if that's the kind of thing you go for - but i mean seriously, the Stones sound like copyists next to them (Brian Jones: "no other group is as close to the Negro sound as us"). particularly good and interesting copyists, sure, "it's what the Stones got WRONG just as much as what they got RIGHT" etc but with CCR it's totally about what they got right, full stop.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Tuesday, January 28, 2003 3:47 PM (6 years ago)

too low, one of the great rock records

People always take Creedence for granted.

too much Southern prejudice to consider CCR beyond redneck rock. see also Skynyrd.

"ramble tamble" makes me feel like starting a new country so it can be the national anthem

So far I am not so keen on this poll. Hopefully my disinterest in the lower reaches means that La Dusseldorf have won.

milton placing makes me hope brazil accounts for 5% of the poll at min

i don't expect my number one to make the top 100 any more. but the other more famous record by him will make it, i guess.

So far I am not so keen on this poll.

We're not really damning the canon yet, that's for sure.

will we damn it l8r?

I'd say there's well over 500 albums in the 70s that are comfortably canon-ish. I think the nominations is a great list as is, but I'm all for seeing who gets ranked.

I have the singles comps, and listened to the CCR complete box set all the way through, but it was a chore. Just can't get into them - they were pounded too far into my brain via 70s/80s radio, I can't help but be sick of them.

I missed Creedence but I wish I'd voted for it.

I'm going to read this poll as an opportunity to find out about albums I've neglected, b/c if I'm looking for confirmation of my taste I'm sure to be disappointed---there were so many choices that it's kinda amazing anything got more for a couple of votes. Well, I don't know about that. Tres Hombres was my #2, and it got #100, so it takes some consensus to place here.

92. Blondie - Eat to the Beat (1979) [82 points, 9 votes]

http://i50.tinypic.com/289jwjp.jpg

UNION FUCKING CITY BLUE

― Bimble, Sunday, October 14, 2007 4:37 PM (2 years ago)

Eat To The Beat didn't win! I'm going to have to step outside with you guys. This is WRONG.

― Bimble, Saturday, October 6, 2007 3:16 AM (2 years ago)

one of the (possibly) top 5 memories of my whole life is going to my first ever concert which was blondie at edinburgh odeon (january 12th 1980 - these things stay with you forever) on the "eat to the beat" tour and them starting off with "dreaming". much as i was in total awe of debbie, clem burke beating hell out of that drum kit with the arrows on the bass drum (a la "atomic video") completely blew my mind and is possibly responsible for a life long obsession with DRUMS.

― stirmonster, Monday, October 8, 2007 1:54 AM (2 years ago)

(fyi, I will be including Bimble in these postings as often as possible. so much joy!)

Wow, I expected that a lot higher! Bimble OTM. Did it seem too obvious/canonical to people? Really not sure which way the rest of the poll will go now, whether people have deliberately voted for slightly obscure things or whether they've been crowded out completely.

Also Eat to the Beat is a JOY - Union City Blue and especially Atomic were (while not new) exciting reminders to me when young of how music could be shimmering and otherworldly and brilliant catchy pop, all at the same time, just when I was beginning to see a divide between the two

Yes, that really did take me 5 minutes, with all the deleting and undeleting and wishing I could do it better justice. But there it is.

Eat to the Beat is my favorite sounding Blondie album. The first three sound kind of stuffy/boxy, and the ones that followed sounded too glossy. Everything about Eat to the Beat is just really crisp and bright and that probably has as much to do with the recording as it does the songs.

Cosmo's Factory was among the handful of albums I got on eMusic in the last few weeks while I was looking for stuff I didn't had but would probably like, so I'm glad to see that it being on my ballot helped it make the cut. I mean I've been hearing half that album literally my entire life, and the other half is pretty good too.

Hurrah for bimble posts. Im sure he would've loved this poll almost as much as his beloved 80s.

I always kind of think of Eat to the Beat as one of the first albums of the 80s, but I couldn't say why. Maybe it's the cover art, maybe it's because "Dreaming" was the first big anthem-y song Blondie wrote. Whatever the reason, it seems to have less in common with the 70s than it does the 80s.

Part of what's great about the '70s as a decade is that the late '70s did foreshadow a lot of what was great about the early '80s. But it seemed like the last '70s poll was overweighted towards the late '70s and New Wave, so I hope the same thing doesn't happen with this one. So far they've been fairly evenly distributed.

91. Miles Davis - Agharta (1976) [82 points, 10 votes]

http://i48.tinypic.com/rbkzfp.jpg

Agharta and Pangaea totally swept me away like a tidal wave the first time I heard them. These days, I don't have the stamina to listen to them all the way through (though I can still bang my head to Dark Magus no problem). The thing about Agharta and Pangaea is, you gotta try to find the Japanese Sony MasterSound editions, because there's more music on 'em (10 extra minutes on Disc 2 of Agharta, 3-4 extra minutes on Disc 2 of Pangaea). It's mostly entropic stuff, keyboard sounds and percussion rattles, at the end of long pieces. But it really adds much more than I thought it would when I first heard about it, when I was still listening to the American versions. I wish Sony US would put out a 4CD box with the Japanese versions all together, like they recently did with the Blackhawk live stuff.

― Phil Freeman (Phil Freeman), Thursday, June 10, 2004 8:20 AM (5 years ago)

I'm sure Geir would consider Dark Magus and Agharta to be unlistenable too haha.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, November 16, 2006 1:20 PM (3 years ago)

I ended up submitting this as an unranked list (bolded the ones that made it):

Colón, Willie & Ruben Blades Siembra
John, Elton Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player
Kuti, Fela Sorrow, Tears and Blood
Kuti, Fela No Agreement
Coltrane, Alice Journey in Satchidananda
Electric Light Orchestra A New World Record
Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac
John, Elton Honky Chateau
Haris Alexiou Ta Tragoudia Tis Haroulas
Fairouz Oriental Evening
Canales, Angel El Sentimiento del Latino en Nueva York
Feliciano, Cheo Cheo
Colón, Willie El Juicio
La Sonora Ponceña Explorando
Rivera, Ismael Eclipse Total
Valentin, Bobby Afuera
Lavoe, Héctor La Voz
Ronstadt, Linda Greatest Hits
Fripp, Robert & Brian Eno Evening Star
Fripp, Robert & Brian Eno No Pussyfooting
Eagles Their Greatest Hits (1971-75)
Burning Spear Garvey's Ghost
Burning Spear Marcus Garvey
Ashley, Robert Private Parts (The Record)
Cars, The The Cars
Scaggs, Boz Silk Degrees
Carpenters, The The Singles 1969-73
Pipes of Pan at Jajouka, The Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka
Raincoats, The The Raincoats
Palmieri, Eddie Unfinished Masterpiece
Armatrading, Joan Joan Armatrading
Lennon, John Imagine
Ono, Yoko Plastic Ono Band
Elvis Costello & The Attractions Armed Forces
Earth, Wind & Fire That's the Way of the World
Steely Dan Aja
Mitchell, Joni Hejira
Kraftwerk Autobahn
Soft Machine Third
T.Rex The Slider (except I changed this to Joan Armatrading s/t, forgetting I had already included that album, so not sure it was counted)

OK I'm posting this to out the person who placed In Too Much Too Soon at #1...

Hah! I just found the other weirdo person who voted for Hoboken Saturday Night

This was my ballot, unranked:

Adam & The Ants Dirk Wears White Sox
Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Les Stances a Sophie
Barrett, Syd The Madcap Laughs
Ben, Jorge África Brasil
Cale, John, Vintage Violence
Clash, The, Give 'em Enough Rope
Coltrane, Alice, Journey in Satchidananda
Damned, The, Damned Damned Damned
Dead Boys, The, Young, Loud and Snotty
Devo, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
Electric Light Orchestra, Out of the Blue
Fahey, John, America
Gil, Gilberto, Gilberto Gil
Gorageur, Alain, La Planete Sauvage (Motion Picture Score)
Hazlewood, Lee, Cowboy in Sweden
Jam, The, All Mod Cons
Kinks, The, Muswell Hillbillies
Kraftwerk, Autobahn
Lowe, Nick, Jesus of Cool
Magazine, Real Life
Mayfield, Curtis, Curtis
Meters, The, Look-ka Py Py
Murvin, Junior, Police and Thieves
Nelson, Willie, Red Headed Stranger
Newman, Randy, Sail Away
Otis, Shuggie, Inspiration Information
Parton, Dolly, Jolene
Ramones, Rocket to Russia
Reed, Lou, Transformer
Rezillos, Can't Stand the Rezillos
Saints, The, I'm Stranded
Shoes, Black Vinyl Shoes
Stiff Little Fingers, Inflammable Material
Sun Ra, Lanquidity
Swell Maps, A Trip to Marineville
T.Rex, Electric Warrior
Toots & The Maytals, Funky Kingston
Undertones, The, The Undertones
Withers, Bill, Still Bill
Wonder, Stevie, Music of My Mind

1. New York Dolls in Too Much Too Soon
2. X Ray Spex Germ Free Adolescents

these were my top two also, tho ranked in reverse order. ;^) Ubu's Datapanik ep at no. 3, mofos.

This was my (ordered) ballot, 9 of which placed:

1 Yes Close to the Edge
2 Rolling Stones, The Black n' Blue
3 Gong Camembert Electrique
4 Genesis Selling England By the Pound
5 Gong You
6 Ayers, Kevin Whatevershebringwesing
7 Otis, Shuggie Inspiration Information
8 Martyn, John Solid Air
9 Undertones, The The Undertones
10 Abercrombie, John Gateway
11 Ayers, Kevin Bananamour
12 Morrison, Van Veedon Fleece
13 Davis, Miles Live Evil
14 Marley, Bob & The Wailers Rastaman Vibration
15 Faithfull, Marianne Broken English
16 Buzzcocks Another Music in a Different Kitchen
17 Mayfield, Curtis There's No Place Like America Today
18 Pere Ubu The Modern Dance
19 Queen Queen II
20 ABBA Waterloo
21 Eno, Brian Ambient 1: Music for Airports
22 Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band Clear Spot
23 Ramones Leave Home
24 Kraftwerk Autobahn
25 King, Carole Tapestry
26 Siouxsie & The Banshees The Scream
27 Little Feat Feats Don't Fail Me Now
28 Dury, Ian New Boots and Panties!!
29 Cockney Rebel The Human Menagerie
30 Carpenters, The The Singles 1969-73
31 Osmonds, The The Plan
32 Tangerine Dream Phaedra
33 Penguin Café Orchestra Music from the Penguin Café
34 Fleetwood Mac Tusk
35 Oldfield, Mike Ommadawn
36 Soft Machine Third
37 X Ray Spex Germ Free Adolescents
38 Marley, Bob & The Wailers Natty Dread
39 Chic C'est Chic
40 Ayers, Kevin Shooting at the Moon

How is this different from Kenny G or Grover Washington or what have you?

Give or take some alleged irony, I'm not sure it is that different from Grover Washington Jr. and what exactly is so wrong with Grover Washington, Jr. anyway? I think you'd be surprised by how many serious jazz cats respect Grover Washington Jr. I bet you Byard Lancaster slips on some Grover Washington Jr. now and then. I bet you Odean Pope doesn't mind Grover Washington Jr. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. I wouldn't try putting down Grover Washington Jr. around jazz heavies in Philadelphia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oxb4LayC7A

But you're entitled to your opinion of course.

I'm not saying Grover Washington Jr. is bad, but I can't see any album of his ever placing in an ILM poll, so I was only wondering what makes Steely Dan so different that they always do?

Either this poll was held at an awkward time or there wasn't enough time given to nominate, but I missed sending in my noms

Late-period Steely Dan goes more deeply into the smooth jazz/funk stylings, but their albums are overall pretty diverse. Try some of these tunes: "Peg", "My Old School", "Reeling in the Years", "Barrytown", "Kid Charlemagne", etc. These are more poppy, I think.

Who else voted New York Dolls: In Too Much Too Soon as their #1???????????

Either this poll was held at an awkward time or there wasn't enough time given to nominate, but I missed sending in my noms

Noms only lasted a few days, but we came up with a master list of 1,258 albums. Surely something you like made the cut.

Goddammit tinypic, there are 10-12 year old posts all over the internet ruined by your wack service!