Morrison Hotel
Artist: The Doors
Community Score: 6.79

The Doors returned to crunching, straightforward hard rock on Morrison Hotel, an album that, despite yielding no major hit singles, returned them to critical favor with hip listeners. An increasingly bluesy flavor began to color the songwriting and arrangements, especially on the party'n'booze anthem "Roadhouse Blues." Airy mysticism was still... Read More

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
Artist: Bruce Springsteen
Community Score: 7.97
The Velvet Underground
Artist: The Velvet Underground
Community Score: 8.17

Upon first release, The Velvet Underground's self-titled third album must have surprised their fans nearly as much as their first two albums shocked the few mainstream music fans who heard them. After testing the limits of how musically and thematically challenging rock could be on The Velvet Underground and Nico and White Light/White Heat, this... Read More

1969: Velvet Underground Live
Artist: The Velvet Underground

Sadly, outside of a handful of audience tapes of extremely variable fidelity, no one thought to make a live recording of The Velvet Underground during their 1967-68 peak period with John Cale prodding Lou Reed into remarkable flights of noise rock fancy. However, in 1969 a VU fan who was a recording engineer brought a reel-to-reel tape machine... Read More

1969: Velvet Underground Live, Vol. 1
Artist: The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground were little more than a rumor when Lou Reed left the band in 1970, but by 1974, thanks to Reed's success as a solo artist, the Velvets had become a bona fide cult item, and that year Mercury Records released a two-record set compiled from tapes from shows in Dallas and San Francisco entitled 1969: Velvet Underground Live.... Read More

1969: Velvet Underground Live, Vol. 2
Artist: The Velvet Underground
Community Score: 8.00

Maureen Tucker once said that one of her greatest regrets about her tenure in the Velvet Underground is that the band didn't record their shows, and while the live tapes that do survive of the group's performances document an extraordinary band, sadly there aren't very many of them. 1969: Velvet Underground Live, a two-record set released in... Read More

Silver Pistol
Artist: Brinsley Schwarz

Silver Pistol isn't the definitive pub rock album, but it is the first great record to surface from the scene. Like much of the first wave of pub rock, Silver Pistol is quiet, laid-backm and low-key -- with its warm, rustic sound and a gentleness that infuses even the rockers, this is the closest to the Band that the Brinsleys got. There are... Read More

Nervous on the Road
Artist: Brinsley Schwarz

Silver Pistol wrote the blueprint for Brinsley Schwarz's pub rock, but Nervous on the Road perfected the group's sound, helping Brinsley to become the definitive pub rock band in the process. Nervous on the Road has a fuller, more detailed production than its predecessor, as well as a looser feeling -- even with the smooth production, it sounds... Read More

Where's the Money?
Artist: Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks
Community Score: 5.00

Before they could release a second album of their patented good-time hippie acoustic swing, Hicks and his band parted company with Epic records. That their fresh start would be marked by the release of a live set may seem odd at first. But the album does in fact capture a certain intimacy missing from their studio debut. Songs that would remain... Read More