Firstly, who is it whose ‘classic’ album prompted the above post.
Yes that’s right it’s Lou Reed. creator of 22 studio albums. Yet in rock history and popular consciousness (‘civilian land’) it surely has been reduced to Transformer. Produced by Bowie and Ronson. 5 monsters (Vicious/Perfect Day/WOTWS/Sat of Love/NY Tel Conversation) and not a bad track on it. Perfect Day broke out to a new generation with the beeb version. That cover (who would want say the New Sensations cover on a t-shirt). More or less a perfect rock album. Transformer is currently at no 918 in Amazon’s Cd and Vinyl sales. Berlin is 32,000, Coney Island Baby 64,000.
I am partial to Rock and Roll Heart, Songs for Drella and Magic and Loss (131,000 – presumably the sales at this point are like the R number) but this is not really civilian land. Surely only Transformer, and the songs on it, now has real wider currency.
So other artists whose multi-album career is now more or less reduced to a single album. Any raise on Lou? And yes, Peter Frampton is an answer but I think we can agree Lou is possibly a more significant artist.The ratio we are looking for here (the Reed number) is greater than 22:1.
Bizzarrely Metal Machine Music, on a presumed difference of 5 units per week/day as opposed to 3, is higher up the Amazon chart than many other of his albums. I can only assume these are curious minds driven by the endless recycling of the myths around its creation.
Lou’s one time collaborators * Metallica reduced to The Black Album, which is even their best.
* Lulu – terrible album
Yes that is an excellent answer. Black Album something like 140, Master of Puppets 11000
On behalf of Emerson Lake and Palmer, their Anthology is 2 cds, and damn fine it is.
How timely, as I was just considering whether to include Lou’s Ecstasy in my top ten 1980-1999, but I just read it was released in 2000. So it’s agony for Ecstasy. But that’s my go-to Lou Reed album these days. It’s some of the greatest sounding grinding misery out there. The 18 minutes of dirt and disgust that is Like a Possum is a career high.
I was only five years old in 1972, and thoughts of what Lou Reed was up to were way off in the future (and that’s a bonus). Of course, I can now look back and attempt some critical assessment, based on everything else I’ve heard. But I’m not particularly wedded to those early records. Distilling the output of a prolific artist to one album will be heavily weighted by how you arrived at the artist in the first place. Having said that Rock ‘n’ Animal was my first Reed solo album, and I still hate it.
New York has a good shout to be his definitive album. Certainly more typical “Lou” than Transformer. So not sure I agree with the consensus if indeed there is one.
Maybe not his definitive album but I prefer New a York to Transformer.
Berlin is work of genius but I’d rather listen to Street Hassle. Songs for Drella is the one
I play the most.
Drella is indeed great but not a Lou Reed solo album.
Why it is great maybe.
I actually think Fragments of a rainy season is better than any of Lou Reed’s solo albums.
OK pop pickers, without googling who can guess what Lou’s highest charting album was (in the UK)?
I’d say an album released 2000-2010 because fans always buy the physical product. Before streaming was allowed for properly in the charts, those purchases propeled such platters to high chart placings.
I remember tracks from Set the Twilight Reeling playing on the Virgin instore radio station. Perhaps they wanted to clear the shop for early closing.
@fentonsteve and @Black-Celebration you are incorrect, 1992’s distinctly noncommercial Magic and Loss made it to no. 6, one place higher than Berlin. Going on weeks on charts Transformer wins with 54, New York in 2nd place with 23.
Twilight made 26, he didn’t release much after Ecstacy in 2000 (a no. 54 smash)
Dear Lord! I remember the Virgin FM DJ described Twilight as – cliche alert! – “a return to form”.
Very much a top form era, Lou from 1989 to 2000
In a recent Mojo, Dave Hill cited The Beatles 1 as their best album
Tough one…
Just checked the track listing on that 1 album for the first time. I get it, it’s all the number ones, so The Ballad Of John and Yoko pushes out much better civilian choices, but when it comes to the non number ones they bookend with Love Me Do – where we started – and The Long And Winding Road – where we finished. Surely 8 out of 10 cats would prefer to have Strawberry Fields (2, after all).
And Let It Be has the finality of an ending without bolting on the dismal LAWR to remind everyone things didn’t exactly finish on the up..
Well both those songs were US no. 1s and Strawberry Fields wasn’t so that is why they make it on the album.
Ah! Okay. Fair enough, I suppose..
Not sure of the ratio, but surely Dare by the human league belongs on this list.
We’ve done the numbers and Dare vs Hysteria vs Travelogue gets nowhere near the R number of Lou.
Liege and Lief is slowly becoming the only one to reference.
AC/DC – Back In Black. It doesn’t really matter which AC/DC album you buy coz they all sound the same, anyway. BIB has a few well known songs on it.
Bob Marley – Exodus
Queen – Greatest Hits. Do you really need any more?
Elton John – ditto
Bon Jovi – the one with ‘Living On a Prayer.’
Bob Marley – Legend
(he’s got some ego to call his album that …)
Arf!
I think even my gran if asked to name a Queen album would come up with A Night At The Opera. And she died in 1973.
Greatest Hits I am ruling are inadmissable as almost every artist would – indeed should – have a gap between that and their biggest proper album. If not then what were the record company doing? In fact a sidebar – someone else can parse the Amazon charts on this. Which artists have a greatest hits album which is not their biggest selling album. Clearly Guns and Roses. Probably The Beatles. But who else?
With a ratio of 18:1 – Fleetwood Mac
Tusk gets a cursory mention, but Rumours is the “go to”
Tango in the Night was a big selling LP as well though.
I can’t beat Lou’s 22, but I can equal it: Marianne Faithfull has also released 22 studio albums, but only the fantastically brilliant Broken English really stands out in civilian consciousness.
I dislike the slightly sneering tone of “civilian”.
Having said that I very much doubt that the general public would be able to reference Broken English nor any other Marianne Faithfull album.
I think her career would be reduced to the single, As Tears Go By alone.
I really like the term “civilian”, as used here. I’ve always seen it as a humorous synonym for “normal people” that affectionately emphasises what utter nerds we are in comparison. If anything I find it less patronising than considering ourselves separate from the “general public”. It would never have occurred to me that it could be interpreted as “sneering”.
Anyway, I’ve conducted a quick survey and it seems 43% of the British population can name Broken English, but no other MF album. 17% of those questioned attributed As Tears Go By to the Rolling Stones. 3% thought I was offering a pizza delivery service.
I think it is hopefully humorous and self-knowing rather than sneering. Sadly there are no wages for being a ‘professional’ music-lover. I think it also echoes the struggle that many of us have with perfectly reasonable bank-accounts, partners, houses etc that protest against the addition of John Digweed’s 6-CD set Last Night at Output to the household. To take an entirely random example I am in no way contemplating.
I quite like the term “muggles”.
I used to be on a Rolling Stones group where people who went to 1 concert per tour or so were referred to sneeringly as “tourists”, the types who only know the hits.
I joined a forum on the Fall, mentioned the first time I’d seen them live (1991) and got the wrong album tour.
Shot down in flames vv quickly.
REM score 15:1
“That one with Shiny Happy People and the Religion one”
“it’s called Out Of Time”
“Nerd!”
(a transcript of a conversation I once had)
I would have thought Automatic is at least as well-known – Everybody Hurts, Sidewinder, Man On The Moon…it was massive.
Definitely
In “deep civilian land”:
Bruce Springsteen – Born In The USA
Or Born to Run
A load of wonderful writing for others, a number of albums, but Carole King = Tapestry.
Also, Peter Gabriel – So and Paul Simon – Graceland (to Joe/Josephine Public).
Tapestry – 2500, next proper album Music – 98000.
Ok after some Amazoning here are some entrants:
Appetite for Destruction. 52. The highest ‘back catalogue’ album of them – not greatest hits or new releases – all it seems at the moment. Use Your Illusion II 11,000. A monstrous R number, because AFD is such a big seller.
Also Mingus Ah Um vs everything else and Dave Brubeck Time Out vs everything else. I think jazz is particularly prone to the ‘Reed effect’. One monster for the general public, dozens of albums for the fans only.
Which U2 album? Joshua Tree?
I would feel they are two trick ponies: JT and Achtung Baby. But their catalogue is definitely narrowing fast to 2 or 3 albums. ‘Now here’s one from No Line on the Horizon’ is a line few want to hear on their next tour…
Even more so, what about three song ponies? My favourite thing about U2 is the possibly apocryphal story of the heckler and their response to Bonio’s hand-clapping/finger-clicking child-killing superpowers. So I admit I’m not a fan and generally find them deeply silly/tedious…
But I suspect I’d recommend the first three songs on Joshua Tree (Streets, I still haven’t found, With or without you) to a visiting alien wondering what this here rock n’ roll is about. It goes far past simply frontloading an album with your best singles, it’s literally distilling a decades long career into 3/5ths of one side of vinyl for posterity.
The story goes they were struggling with the running order, so Steve Lillywhite said his (then) wife Kirsty Macoll might have a go. After some considered listens, she delivered the magic order on a scrap of paper. Only after it had been pressed did it turn out she had mistakenly thought they’d asked for the songs in order of which ones she liked best.
Let’s Dance?
Prince is the once and future Purple Rain guy.
To go with Mingus and Brubeck above:
Marvin Gaye, James Brown, John Coltrane, Miles Davis – one (perceived) standout album each?
I expect a lot of Beach Boys collections consist of one hits album and “Pet Sounds.”
Mike Oldfield? 26 albums, only one of which is Tubular Bells.
OK maybe 3 or 4 of them are Tubular Bells
An excellent answer. Reduced to the Tubular Bells hitmaker surely.
Tubular Bells currently stands at 1,161 in amazon.co.uk’s sales rankings for cds and vinyl. The crushing disappointment that is Return to Ommadawn, the last of his 26 albums, stands at a very respectable 1,324, with 1,065 customer reviews!
I was thinking about this the other day, while listening to The Millennium Bell or some such. I am far from being a civilian when it comes to Mike Oldfield – more like tooled up with Special Weapons and No Tactics – and it struck me that every now and then he has brought out gems in his later catalogue, but the public only bought if it was marketed as an iteration of Tubular Bells.
I clocked on the recent survey of non-civilians here, how much love there was for Hergest Ridge.
Hergest Ridge Hergest Ridge Hergest Ridge. Just trying to increase the google traffic and maybe attract some more Mike Oldfield fans to this site.
Much as I hate to admit it (because personally I think Ommadawn and Hergest Ridge are on a par with Tubular Bells) I think Skud is right. In the great public consciousness, Oldfield is just the Tubular Bells guy.
Hm…. although… Moonlight Shadow? In Dulci Jubilo? Aren’t they just as well known?
I have 4 Mike Oldfield albums.
They are his first four albums:
Tubular Bells
Hergest Ridge
Ommadawn
Incantations
I like ’em all.
Sometimes I think “duco, why don’t you buy one of the later Mike Oldfield albums?”
But the answer I always give myself is “No. Best not to. It probably won’t be any good”.
I envy you for your will power. The fact that the first thing he did after Incantations was fly to New York and record a disco single is probably all the warning you need. You are better off stopping where you are.
No.
Thanks. 🙂
One song, and stuff the dozen or so albums, Whiter Shade of Pale.
Oh yeah, good one. I think you would need to ask a lot of people before you found someone who could name a single other song they did.
Heart of Gold hitmaker?
You’ve Got a Friend hitmaker and he didn’t even write it…….
In the end it all comes down to the track your next door neighbour may have heard of.
At least Lou Reed’s back catalogue has been reduced to an album. What about acts like Golden Earring?
26 albums, 74 singles, only one song that anybody knows. (See also: Steppenwolf & Blue Oyster Cult)
Another thread but the point is well made. This can be checked on Spotify or any other streaming service – the ratio between their top and next streamed track. Albums however need the R number checking on amazon.
Meat Loaf – Bat Out Of Hell
Boston – First Album
Derek and Clive – Live
Come Again and Ad Nauseum have their moments
All three Derek & Clive albums are best known for one particular word, repeated constantly. Pete & Dud, however, are immortal.
Not a single album, more an unwieldy slab of box set coked-up rawwwkkkk.
“Gee, thanks Phil, you’re a pal.”
George Harrison – All Things Must Pass.
Don’t the other Fabs kinda have their representative, largely dull, album?
Namely, Imagine, Band On The Run, and Ringo.
Coked-up rawwwkkk? Definitely not. A beautiful album, and quite laid back all in all, bar a few good rockers as well. I don’t think George was that heavily into the old Peruvian Shake n Vac at this point, either. The jam side doesn’t get played much at all, but the rest of it certainly does. The best solo Beatles album by far, and a stand alone magnificent classic as well.
Listen to what the man said – er, hang on…
Oof… “the best solo Beatles album by far”…. that’s some statement. But thinking about it… I suppose you’re right. Maybe Ram edges it? And I’m quite partial to JL/Plastic Ono Band.
But I suppose All Things Must Pass has the highest number of great songs. I just find the whole thing so long and samey though. I hardly ever listen to it. And the production is a bit overblown with all that reverb (sorry Mr Spector).
I’m hoping for a 50th anniversary remix by Giles? What do you reckon?
I hope not. I didn’t particularly like the White Album remix, unlike the excellent job he did on Pepper. The George songs definitely benefited, especially Savoy Truffle, but for me that special overall character/feel was lost. I’ll stick too the 2009 Stereo/Mono remasters. Love them both.
I’ve still never heard anything convincing enough to drag me away from my 1988 white album CD! Sounds perfect to me.
None of the Giles remixes have really piqued my interest. I think I’m just too stuck in my ways.
I’m not much of a fan of remixes in general, a few Steven Wilson Tull jobs aside. Why repaint a Rembrandt? A genuinely good remaster is a different matter. Not a cynical cash grabber, but one that really does benefit the music re. advances in audio tech or just a downright crappy original master.
In the case of All Things Must Pass, even George wanted a remix. There’s just too much of Phil Spector’s kitchen sink.
Initially, yes, but he grew to like it very much and that’s why when it was remastered he didn’t change a thing.
I’d put Band On The Run, Ram and POB as the runners up.
It would be even better without one trick pony (admittedly a very good trick) Spector’s ludicrously OTT production, which IMHO is totally unsuited to the vast majority of the songs.
I don’t agree. George didn’t like the production, at first, and ‘Early Takes’ is a good unplugged but there’s no doubt that the Spector effect was integral eg ‘Isn’t A Pity’.
Completely wrong ATMP is a masterpiece, as reflected in a high position in the recent Afterword Top 100.
Top 5 solo
ATMP
Ram
Plastic Ono Band
Band on the Run
Imagine
6-10
Chaos and Creation in the Backyard
George Harrison
Walls and Bridges
Tug of War
Cloud 9
33 & 1/3 and Brainwashed are fine albums too. Living In The Material World as well, but I get how the overt Krishna consciousness element might not be everyone’s cup of chai, but it doesn’t bother me.
First 2 pretty good, find Material World to be much less so.
Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth) might be his best song. It’s the perfect fusion of his musical and devotional sensibilities. A beautiful, uplifting pop-rapture, it stands out as something special. For me, its the essence of GH.
That is great of course. Material World is in the select group of LPs that I have bought, sold, then bought again. The other being Wish You Were Here. Presume I was short of money at times.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=zAmpGsfw3FI&feature=share
The same happens to a lot of writers. How many people could go beyond The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, A Clockwork Orange, Lucky Jim, Portnoy’s Complaint or Lord of the Flies in listing the works of their well-known authors?
It can be difficult with any artist to know what’s worthwhile. I suppose if you admired someone like John Updike, and were more or less his contemporary, it would be quite easy to keep up as he issued a book of one sort or another every year or so. But to someone like me, who heard of him in the eighties, there was so much already in print that I didn’t know where to start. Reviewers seemed to have decided on the Rabbit books as his best, more or less because it was a way of branding him, and the rest of his works could be seen as filling his career out. I’ve never read enough of his fifty books to know if it was accurate, but when he died, its’s how the obituaries saw him.
Kerouac would be a good example, obviously. I think Desolation Angels is his best single work. He’s one of the few writers who actually benefits from a compendium. Ann Charters’ ‘Portable Kerouac’ definitely cherry picks the best of his writing.
I haven’t checked this with Amazon’s rankings but..
Frank Zappa = “Hot Rats” and about 90 also-rans (so far) of variable unpopularity.
Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Apostrophe and Joes Garage all within the top 10,000 daughter says
Maybe in the UK, but probably not in the US, where Apostrophe and Sheik Yerbouti were bigger sellers. Plus he did have a hit single over there with Valley Girl.
I did think about that after I posted. Probably only in Europe for Hot Rats. #9 in the UK album chart but it completely bombed at the time in the USA.
Apostrophe is probably the big one in the USA. It got to #10 there, which I think is his highest album chart position of all. “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” is still a pretty memorable catchphrase to this day, as is -to a lesser extent- “The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe”.
No Parlez?
The classical music field is full of them. Can anyone who isn’t a buff name anything else Holst did apart from The Planets?
Strauss (both of them) and Dvorak as well probably.
I take it you mean the Johanns of that ilk? Richard knocked out one masterpiece after another.
I’m showing my ignorance then! I’ve just seen 2001 and that’s about it….
Poor old Pachelbel is reduced to one riff – though it’s an extremely good one. And to be fair, everything else he did was rubbish.
Albinoni gets reduced to an ‘Adagio’ that wasn’t even written by him (pumped out by a fan in the 1940s, based on a ‘fragment’), but in his case, he does actually have a masterpiece in the wings…. and it’s another adagio! The adagio from Oboe Concerto op.9 no.2:
I’ve got that album – it’s great. Albie wrote some violin concertos too, but he’s no Vivaldi.
Poor old Pachelbel wrote loads of other stuff – the box set of his complete keyboard works runs to 13 CDs, but an awful lot of it is organ music, which doesn’t (OOMBA) really register in most modern minds. Music for falling asleep in church to.
John Finnemore empathises with Pachelbel:
Brilliant!
This reminded me of this cartoon.
Yes. Vivaldi is another one. He wrote mountains of stuff but Four Seasons is the one everyone knows.
Vivaldi wrote 94 operas (he said), but fewer than 50 have been identified. That’s a lot of operas either way. Plus 500 concertos. Must have been really irritating at his gigs, with the crowd baying for Four Seasons.
There must be Metal Machine Music equivalent in there.
Maybe he just wrote 47, then claimed to have written a new one when it was one of the old ones with a different title?
Growing up, some of the more “sophisticated” members of the church choir I sang with would dismiss Vivaldi saying he only wrote one tune.
He did have a favoured chord sequence he used a lot – basically it’s the chorus from Hazel o’ Connor’s Eighth Day.
Well, that IS new information.
True that, if unnecessarily snooty. But Procol Harum got there first with the chorus to Homburg.
You mean this Vivaldi bloke is a plagarist, as well as a one-trick pony?
He was an energetic self-plagiarist too:
You could sing ‘Your trouser cuffs are dirty…etc’ to that.
Re. Holst.
Savitri – Choral Hymns From The Rig Veda
Hymn To Dionysus
The Cloud Messenger.
All magnificent.
Thanks for the tips! I was looking for where to go next with Holst and I keep wandering into things I don’t like.
I love The Perfect Fool ballet suite though. Do you know that one? It’s brilliant, like a version of the Planets condensed into 15 minutes.
No I don’t. Thanks for the heads up : )
Stockhausen’s fifty-year career seems to be mostly remembered for the early tape works, Gesang der Junglinge or Kontakte, which keep cropping up on compilations.
I have sneaky feeling what John Cage’s best remembered piece might be. And you can’t even whistle it!
But we can all play it.
Mike Batt probably wouldn’t.
Does he have ADHD and is unable to sit still long enough?
Has Orinoco put itching powder in his Womble costume again?
From 2002…
“British composer Mike Batt found himself the subject of a plagiarism action for including the song, “A One Minute Silence,” on an album for his classical rock band The Planets.
He was accused of copying it from a work by the late American composer John Cage, whose 1952 composition “4’33″” was totally silent.
On Monday, Batt settled the matter out of court by paying an undisclosed six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust.”
It started as a joke, backfired badly….https://edition.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/uk.silence/
Jeez! Really? Surely with 4’33” the duration is at least as fundamental as the silence and they are inextricable?
John Lennon got away with Nutopian International Anthem – 3 seconds of silence. Perhaps, the John Cage Trust didn’t notice. It’s easy to miss if you don’t read the tracklisting.
How can you copyright no sound, though?
You’d have to prove intent to copy the concept behind doing nothing, otherwise the 2 second pauses between tracks on millions of albums would be in breach of copyright.
Possibly because according to the article
Batt credited “A One Minute Silence” to “Batt/Cage.”
Yep. That would probably do it.
I expect Mike Batt did it as a pisstake and that would have offended Cage’s lot.
Did Lloyd Cole ever do anything other than Rattlesnakes?
The first Lloyd Cole album, intriguingly titled “Lloyd Cole”, is a nice record, I think.
I never tire of Lost Weekend and the Easy Pieces album is ok too, no Rattlesnakes admittedly. Like a lot of stuff, it takes me back to a particular time and place.
That would be Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, 3 decent albums, probably all sold not dissimilar amounts.
Mainstream, their bid for, er, mainstream success, is a very good listen.
UK Subs? 26 Albums, 66 members and one song. Stranglehold.
See also 999, Eddie and the Hot Rods, Dr Feelgood.
The Alarm – 68 Guns. Can anyone name another Alarm song?
Where were you standing when the storm broke?
Spirit of 76
Rescue Me.
Absolute Reality
And that’s without checking the Music app.
The Fall. 546 career albums and now known for, er, um..,
I like the Fall btw.
Probably best known for Totally Wired because of the car advert. The Infotainment Scan is easily their most successful album, making top ten. There’s A Ghost In My House is their best selling single.
Sorry Tiggs, was it not Touch Sensitive…hey hey hey?
But yes, a top ten album!
ABC Lexicon of Love. Look no further.
As far as the critics are concerned, you can dispense with the other 12 of Dusty Springfield’s records and just settle for Dusty in Memphis. It is indeed an almost perfect synergy of the best singer, the best songs, the best musicians and the best production, and I love it as much as the next music nerd. But, you know, you can make a decent case for See All Her Faces, Cameo, Where Am I Going or Dusty … Definitely.