As I close out the first third of this project, I encounter the greatest year of music I’ve had the pleasure of tackling so far. And it really isn’t even close.
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone un-turned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #20 in the series. As usual in a new year, I’ll skip the random number generator in order to focus on the music of 2018 in the next installment.
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 1973
It was no surprise when 1967 surfaced as my favorite year of music in the series so far. That is widely held as a watershed period in the evolution of rock music and contains the mythical “Summer of Love”. I still have my eye on 1987, 2000, and a couple others as potential contenders by the time this project wraps up, simply based on my personal canon. 1973 was not really on my radar as one of the century’s greatest years of music, but damned if it didn’t take out ’67 with no problem, and it’s going to be hard to unseat going forward. I sometimes get heartburn over filling the final spot on my list, but this is the first time that I seriously contemplated writing a top twenty to avoid some difficult cuts. Thankfully, I realized that wouldn’t have been good for anybody, least of all me, who is seemingly in a race against my own mortality to actually complete this project. It stings though, because when I first envisioned “Found or Forgotten”, I had a couple specific albums in mind that I was looking forward to writing about, and they both happened to be from 1973. I always knew that I would end up piling on praise to universally revered records like Pet Sounds and Giant Steps, but the real appeal of the project is to shine a light on some less renowned corners of the musical landscape. The quintessential example of that, in my mind, is Mandrill’s 1973 release, Composite Truth. It’s a fantastic funk/rock hybrid that has littered my playlists for years but remains criminally unknown even by seasoned funk and/or rock aficionados. The other cause I was looking to take up was in service of Brain Salad Surgery, Emerson Lake & Palmer’s over-the-top sci-fi masterpiece. ELP take a lot of flak for being self-serious and pretentious, but that album is as much silly fun as you can have listening to music.
Needless to say, neither one of those albums made my top ten for the year, despite being exactly the type of albums I set out to discuss. My top ten also won’t contain the greatest drum solo of all time (courtesy of Billy Cobham crushing Mahavishu Orchestra’s “One Word”), the best Eagles album, or the only great Hall and Oates album. It won’t contain fucking “Free Bird”, man. I’ve been dying to write about one of my favorite artists, Elton John, but his brilliant yet uneven opus, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, didn’t make the cut. Bob Marley put out the two best reggae albums that I’ve covered so far, but you’ll have to go to the Honorable Mentions section to find them. They will be sitting alongside the second-best albums of both Willie Nelson and Marvin Gaye. So, when you read the rest of this post, make no mistake, these ten albums are not marginal recommendations. This is the best top ten I’ve compiled so far, in the best year of music I’ve yet come across as I close out the first leg of this project.
Innervisions – Stevie Wonder
It’s no surprise that Innervisions tops the list, even considering what a stacked year it was. I consider Stevie Wonder to be the most talented artist since the inception of recorded music, and this is my favorite album of his. He wrote, produced, arranged, and sang every song, while also playing 80% of the instruments. That concentration of effort, besides being a clear testament to his genius, provides the recording with an emotional and sonic through-line that ties these very disparate songs together into something transcendent. Setting aside the work of Wonder and his spiritual successor, Prince, any album that is the product of such a singular focus tends to sound very much of a piece. Innervisions is wildly varied in its sound and subject matter, with Wonder fully setting aside the triviality of his 60’s pop output and delving headfirst into political, racial and spiritual themes while traversing the full breadth of black music at the time (plus inventing a couple of new types as well.) It’s heavy stuff on occasion, but executed with peerless grace. With perhaps the lone exception of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, it is the single album that has moved me the most in my lifetime of music listening.
For an opening gambit, Stevie creates a whole new sound. Three seconds into “Too High”, it is clear that this is funk music, but markedly different from anything that phrase has meant in the genre’s brief lifespan to this point. Surely influenced by early Curtis Mayfield and Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Wonder crafts a sound that is dark, heavy, impossibly thick. That opening instrumentation, created with a Fender Rhodes and a Moog bass, blew my mind the first time I heard it, and that was more than a quarter century after it came out. Soon we are hit with background singers scatting a descending scale that approximates a sonic downward spiral, and the opening line “I’m too high, I’m too high, but I ain’t touched the sky.” You don’t have to have experience with drugs to feel the oppressive weight of the music and connect to the song’s meaning. Wonder returns to that line throughout the track, altering the second verse until it finally turns into “…and I feel like I’m about to die.” It’s a sharp observation about chasing a high and how it can ironically drag you down to your lowest point. The next track is even more inimitable. The haunting “Visions” is neither funk or soul or pop, or really any classifiable genre of music. It is, however, perhaps the most startling and nakedly heart-felt song in his catalog. It’s a stirring meditation on the blindness of hatred that Stevie metaphorically contrasts with his own sightlessness. It marks the second stop-in-your-tracks performance in as many songs, and it’s far from the last.
I’m going to pull myself back from going into depth on every song from this album, but it is no doubt deserving of that treatment. There are so many impassioned and brilliant vocal performances, from the outrage as “Livin’ for the City” reaches its climax to the rich heartache of “All in Love is Fair” to this angry rejoinder to “Too High” from “Jesus Children of America”:
Tell me, junkie, if you’re able, Lay your cards on the table, Are you happy when you stick a needle in your vein?!
Wonder crafts the type of complex vocal arrangements that have stymied American Idol singers for countless seasons, yet tackles them so effortlessly that they only feel complex when someone else fails miserably at performing them. Far from a single-threat, however, the instrumentation on the album is equally as ambitious and flawless, particularly the intricate yet wildly expressive funk tracks like “Higher Ground”. As I listen while writing this, I find myself wanting to call out specific transitions between songs as being particularly elegant but realizing that praise applies to every single transition on the album. It’s hard to put my love for this piece of art in words without devolving into sycophantic babbling, so suffice it to say that it would sit near the top of my ten greatest albums of all time, not just 1973.
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Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd
The exact parameters of what constitutes a concept album are muddy at best. Opinions vary on what does or does not qualify, though most music scholars adhere to the unspoken criteria that it originated with rock music, despite the fact that jazz, folk and country artists had been composing or curating songs on a central theme for many years by the time the sixties rolled around. Many will point to the classic tryptic of Rubber Soul -> Pet Sounds -> Sgt. Pepper’s as the origin of the form, but that was really just the Beatles and Beach Boys inspiring each other to move the nascent rock genre from collections of songs to albums. None of them has a unifying concept to speak of, despite the musical cohesion. No matter what you think constitutes a concept album, no one can argue that Dark Side of the Moon isn’t a shining example of the form. It has been the most universally beloved concept album since its release, its only rival being Radiohead’s OK Computer some twenty years later. What makes it perhaps the most popular rock recording of all time?
The term “concept album” often implies a level of pretentiousness or intellectualism that can turn off casual music fans. To Roger Waters’ credit, he avoids those pitfalls completely. The theme of the album is both universal and easy to grasp – It starts with birth, ends with death, and the middle is comprised of broad concerns that affect the human condition. The song about the inexorable march towards death is called “Time” and preceded by 30 seconds of alarm clocks going off, and the one about the folly of consumerism is called “Money” and incorporates the sound of cash registers into its instrumentation. You don’t need a post-graduate degree in philosophy to make sense of these ideas. That accessibility of theme helps make palatable what is a pretty formally ambitious record for ultra-mainstream rock. Of the first five tracks, only two have lyrics, and one, “On the Run”, sounds like an impending heart attack. When you consider the more traditional rock tunes, I would argue that the band’s premier standalone singles actually reside on other albums. What makes Dark Side such a resilient piece of art is the hauntingly gorgeous way that the band strings together all of these different elements. It’s a masterclass in flow and album composition, a talent that is becoming less and less prevalent in the digital music age. I find that listening to a great album uninterrupted is an incredibly rewarding way to consume music, but even I fall into the “shuffle” mindset more often than not. Make no mistake, though, this is an album that is intended for continuous play-through, from the seamless transitions between tracks, to the sonic echoes between songs like “Breathe” and “Time”, to the dueling crescendos of side one (“The Great Gig in the Sky”) and side two (“Eclipse”). It’s a great testament to Pink Floyd that they were able to create something this thoughtful, accessible and timeless. And while it isn’t my favorite concept album, or even my favorite Floyd album, it is our collective favorite, and that has to stand for something.
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Fresh – Sly & the Family Stone
If you consider great album runs by any artist, I’m not sure you can get to one more spectacular, or as diverse, as Stand! (1969), There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971) and Fresh. The former two are the more universally and critically acclaimed, but Fresh is my favorite. It balances the explosive optimism of Stand! with the hazy nihilism of Riot, presenting a Sly who is world-weary and reflective, but seemingly in a better place after a couple years of drug-fueled distress. The album kicks off with “In Time”, a track that combines wry lyrics with a loping synth line and a sophisticated, dynamic blend of programmed and live percussion. Sly sings a flurry of evocative lines that tip their hat to the particular excesses of his celebrity (unless you think “I switched from coke to pep, and I’m a connoisseur” is about soda preference). The band then slides into the smoothest intro to one of the smoothest songs ever produced, “If You Want Me to Stay”. Its warm ebb and flow reminds me of Al Green, as does the opportunity for Sly to work out his incredibly elastic voice with exacting control. Later, on “Skin I’m In”, he does the same thing without the restraint, resulting in my sleeper jam of the album. There are times where he gets introspective and spiritual and times where he gets explicitly socio-political. Sometimes he sings shit like “Have you ever ever stopped a rainbow?”, and if I don’t know what he means it’s clear that he does and that’s good enough. Each song is its own little miracle, from the way “Babies Making Babies” opens with the bubbliest bass line ever committed to wax, to the way that Sly and sister Rose find years-in-the-making catharsis on a cover of a song originally recorded by Doris Day for a Hitchcock film in the 50’s. There are sporadic highlights in Sly’s post-Fresh works, but it’s probably fair to say that this is his final full statement before drugs and fame swallowed him up completely. There’s a real tragedy to that, but it’s probably a gift that we got as much out of him as we did. I don’t think we have collectively reconciled how important Sly & the Family Stone was to the ecosystem of popular music in America and globally, but I believe it’s massive in the way that we already recognize James Brown’s and the Beatles’ impact as being.
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Head Hunters – Herbie Hancock
1973 was a huge year for funk music. Intuitively, the genre’s biggest year is likely to be from the early-to-mid seventies, but I sort of thought that P-Funk would play a bigger role in it. If you fast-forward a decade to the early 80’s, acts like the Gap Band and Rick James were almost exclusively playing party music. Yet if you look at the funk that Stevie, Sly and James Brown were producing in ’73, it is as varied in concept and topicality as any other genre. Musically, it is also incredibly diverse and accomplished, and that’s where Herbie Hancock’s instrumental funk opus fits in. I can’t remember an album that sounded so vibrant, so alien, so prodigiously funky as Head Hunters did the first time I heard it. The album has roots in jazz, as you would expect, but it avoids the awkward dissonance that confounds many fusion records. From the bumping synthesizer that opens “Chameleon”, to the rambunctious beats of Herbie’s Sly Stone tribute, there is no mistaking this for anything but capital-“F” funk. Even “Watermelon Man”, originally a straight-forward hard bop tune from the early 60’s, is re-imagined into a swinging, afrobeat-influenced piece of soul. Threading that needle has such a high degree of difficulty that even Hancock’s other attempts at the same aesthetic (Sextant, Thrust) fall far short of the bar he sets here. To a man, the musicians on Head Hunters are pulling off jaw-dropping instrumentation that rivals the near-telepathic synergy achieved by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a collective fronted by another former Miles Davis sideman that dropped a genius jazz-fusion bomb in ’73. The difference is that Hancock’s band makes it sound so loose and ebullient that you hardly notice how hard they are working. If you love music, you get a bit of a thrill out of the communal experience of being turned onto something great and also sharing great things with others. Head Hunters is an album that stands out for me on both sides of that spectrum, a true joy that begs to be passed around.
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Call Me – Al Green
Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, a skeletal backbeat, some whisper-thin organ and a barely audible moan can trump a mighty wail over lush, swelling orchestration. If you were to put any of the tracks off of Call Me on a soul compilation next to Aretha Franklin or Wilson Pickett, they’re going to sound out of place. Compared to most soul or R&B artists, there is no muscle, not in the music or the vocals. It’s not that Al Green doesn’t have the ability to throw down, it’s just that he chooses a different tactic with this record. And while you might be able to resist his spell for 3 1/2 minutes at a time, the effect of all of these tracks taken together is delirious and intoxicating. Instead of coming to you, Al never raises his voice. He makes you lean close, really pay attention. He teases and seduces and withholds gratification until even the slightest breath is devastating. “Have You Been Making Out O.K.” is aimed at an ex-lover, and designed to buckle her knees by the end of the first verse. The two country standards lose none of the heartache of the originals but are completely re-conceptualized in a soul setting so that they’re sexy and barely recognizable. “Jesus Is Waiting” is a sultry come-on to examine your faith, somehow balancing the secular and the holy while doing neither a disservice. Even the two peppier, more conventional singles (“Here I Am”, the title track) find Green laying back in the cut, convinced that you will be compelled to meet him where he’s at rather than trying too hard for your attention. It’s a supremely confident performance that never fails to captivate in it’s brief, sweetly perfect 35 minutes.
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Honky Tonk Heroes – Waylon Jennings
I’m tempted to call Honky Tonk Heroes the best country music album. It isn’t quite my favorite, but it feels like the platonic ideal of what a country album should be. The genre is built on salt-of-the-earth credibility, where “simple” and “relatable” are the key touchpoints. It’s always struck me as strange, then, that the target aesthetic has historically been at odds with a general fussiness in the music’s production. In the forties and fifties, you had superfluous string arrangements and backing vocals cluttering every song. In the eighties it was session musicians on saxophone and keyboard. Turn on the radio today, and you have barely disguised dance-pop underneath the beer commercial platitudes about pickup trucks and pretty girls in jeans. Honky Tonk Heroes cuts through all of that nonsense and presents a crisp, no-frills set of songs in a single voice (songwriter Billy Joe Shaver), with Waylon and his live band trucking through eleven tracks in a clean thirty minutes. The fanciest they get is Jennings’ double-tracked vocals on “Omaha”, and you get the sense that the loose, jovial, beer-fueled recording session depicted on the album cover is 100% accurate. Waylon’s vocal range could charitably be described as narrow, but his lack of polish and the richness of his tone make him an iconic singer. Emboldened by the most creative freedom he’d ever been afforded and material that he really believes in, he turns in the best performance of his career. There isn’t any artifice to his singing, and he comes across less as a performer playing an outlaw than an outlaw who happens to be performing. The overarching theme of the album seems to be the push and pull of life on the road. It presents the vagabond life as a siren song that is paradoxical to the pain and suffering it inflicts on its victims. As he sings in “Ain’t No God in Mexico”, “If I never saw the sunshine, I would not curse the rain.” Or in “Black Rose”: “The devil made me do it the first time, the second time I done it on my own.” The narrators are stuck in the patterns that are tearing them down, but they wouldn’t have it any other way. The fact that Waylon can lay that out so plainly, yet still instill in us the allure of a life on the road is a testament to his conviction and the perfect example of the credibility I mentioned at the top.
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Quadrophenia – The Who
If you’ll allow me to journey deeper into the concept album rabbit hole for a moment, let’s have a chat about the “Rock Opera”. Rock operas are a subset of concept albums that don’t just focus on a central theme, but endeavor to tell a cogent story along the way. They have characters, a plot, repeating musical phrases that carry through multiple tracks – they are basically as close as rock music gets to musical theater. Now, I’m not really a musical theater guy per say (I mean, I love Hamilton, but he’s quoting Mobb Deep by the third song so I never really stood a chance). Yet, there are more than a few worthwhile, and even excellent, rock operas out there. My favorite is easily Operation Mindcrime by 80’s metal act, Queensryche, but Quadrophenia is probably next on the list. I’m not actually a big fan of the Who’s more famous entry into the genre, Tommy, and there’s something to the fact that the complex conceptual thrust of Who’s Next completely fell apart while they recorded, yet it turned out to be their best album. It seems that a lot of the effort that goes into crafting an intelligible story and scoring the dramatic throughlines can distract from the primary function of a rock band: Namely, performing kick-ass rock songs. Luckily, Quadrophenia sidesteps many of the rock opera snares with some of the band’s strongest material, like “5:15” and “The Real Me”. The story involves a young, disenfranchised Mod who struggles with four different personalities that reflect each of the four band members. Pete Townsend sent out reading materials to critics ahead of the album’s release, providing some backstory and information necessary to interpret the lyrics, but I’m pretty sure Townsend is still the only one who understands what’s going on. And that’s probably the point I’ve been laboring to make so far in this review – the success of a given rock opera, in my mind, is always going to have more to do with the elements that make any rock album successful and less to do with the “opera” part. What really resonates about Townsend’s vision is that the Who is a band with four very distinct personalities, and all of those personalities shine through on this album. John Entwistle has always been the secret MVP of the group, and that is never more evident than on a track like “The Punk and the Godfather”. The winding, effervescent bass-playing is by far the most dynamic thing going on in the mix, even outpacing his maniacal partner in rhythm, Keith Moon. That track also illustrates the central tension of the album, which is the divergent vocal styles of Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend. Daltrey is all muscular rock god, while Pete is the sensitive introvert. Both voices are necessary to the narrative, and sell the multiple-personality concept more strongly than you might imagine possible. It all culminates in the masterful epic, “Love Reign O’er Me”, which somehow combines the virtuoso instrumentation with the emotive lyrics and strident performance of Daltrey to close the album out in a fashion that is fittingly ambitious and powerful for a self-described opera. Its truly an exceptional work of restless creativity.
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Houses of the Holy – Led Zeppelin
It always seems strange when someone asks me where they should start with Led Zeppelin’s catalog. They’ve been such a part of my life since I was a teenager that I kind of forget that’s not necessarily the case for everyone. I’m not sure that Houses of the Holy is even a top four Zeppelin album for me, but I do believe it’s the best entry point. The first three tracks sort of ease you into mid-period Zep with dynamic rock tunes heavy on themes of mysticism. They had moved on from the psychedelic blues and folk found on their early quartet of self-titled albums, and all those elements sort of coalesced into a signature sound that would carry them through the next period of their career (until Jon Paul Jones discovered synthesizers, anyway). All three songs are awesome, and exuberant in a way that their music rarely is. “The Rain Song” is the centerpiece of the early part of the album, recalling their most famous track (“Stairway to Heaven”) in the way that the drums come in towards the end of this lovely ballad and create a transition that makes the song exponentially more powerful. The rest of the album is comprised of a series of experiments of sorts, exploring different branches of music that were novel for the band. The least successful of these, “The Crunge”, tackles James Brown in a mash-up that never clicks for me. It’s probably the single track keeping Houses of the Holy out of my top five. For many others, the big head-scratcher of a track is the band’s foray into reggae, “D’Yer Mak’er”, with its corny pun for a name and stilted, halting rhythm. It’s a favorite of mine, though, and I remember an Axl Rose interview where he cited it as the song that single-handedly got him into hard rock. He explained his obsession with it starting from a place of bewilderment and even ridicule, before gradually realizing he actually loves the song. I appreciate his articulation of a phenomenon that I’ve experienced many times before (Steve Perry’s “Oh Sherry”, Kanye and Jay’s “N****s in Paris”, MMJ’s “Highly Suspicious”). There are those times that a song challenges your perceptions of what is acceptable to like so much that your brain takes some time to reconcile what your gut already knows. Anyway, unlike Axl, I’ve always known “D’Yer Mak’er” is a banger. Rounding out the album with ringers “Dancing Days”, “The Ocean” and “No Quarter”, Houses of the Holy feels like a collection of songs where you may not dig each one, but if you can’t find something to love in there then Zeppelin just ain’t for you.
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The Payback – James Brown
James Brown released more than 50 studio albums dating back to the late fifties, but most of them were vehicles for a hot single or two with little care given to the surrounding material. Had he cut his output by 75% and spent that extra time crafting coherent albums made up of his best songs, he might be rightly considered the greatest recording artist of all time. As it stands, though, outside the occasional live recording, Brown didn’t release a great album until 1973’s The Payback. This is a thoughtfully composed work, consisting of eight songs averaging more than nine minutes a piece. Now, length isn’t necessarily an indicator of quality, but when the grooves are this strong and the musicians this great, the “more is more” approach pays off. Maceo Parker is probably the biggest name in the lineup, but MVP has to go to Fred Wesley. Not only do his soloes slay just as much as Maceo’s (just listen to their tete-a-tete on “Shoot Your Shot”) , but his trombone gives the horn section a bottom end that makes the music sound tougher, more serious. This isn’t party music, these cats mean business. James is not a technical singer but he’s a great one, nonetheless. He can use his voice to forcefully impose his will, channeling righteous fury as he does in the title track, but he is also capable of intense vulnerability. On the two ballads, “Doing the Best I Can” and “Forever Suffering”, his voice cracks and strains under the pressure of his lost love, and his backing singers insistently underline the pathos with an almost chant-like repetition of his core message (“I’m for real” and “Suffering”, respectively). The album closes on another masterpiece that has been the foundation of nearly as many hip hop samples as the title track: “Mind Power”. It’s telling that the songs that have had the most influence on later generations of musicians are among the darker and heavier entries into Brown’s vast repertoire. “I Feel Good” has its place, but we all reap the rewards when a certified genius turns his focus from chart performance to expressing the full range of human emotion.
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Live at Carnegie Hall – Bill Withers
I don’t rate a lot of live albums in these lists. They tend to be as superfluous as greatest hits albums, with the added challenge of sounding terrible half the time. Particularly in recent years, I’m not sure anybody even releases them anymore. Occasionally, though, the stars will align to make a live recording the definitive text for a particular artist. Sinatra at the Sands, The Allman Brothers’ Live at Filmore East, Rory Gallagher’s Irish Tour ’74: All albums that represent the pinnacle of their respective artist’s career. Live at Carnegie Hall is undoubtedly in that category, to the point that it virtually renders his very good studio albums moot. It is possibly the best live recording of a soul show that I’ve ever heard. As an artist that has a handful of all-time great songs, but perhaps not the storied and versatile career of some of his contemporaries, Withers strikes gold by collecting the best he has to offer in a single package and breathing new life into all his classics. His band straddles the line between lively funk and sophisticated soul, transforming something like “Lean On Me”, a track I typically find kind of mushy, into a show-stopping highlight. Bill’s voice is phenomenal throughout, whether he’s getting down on “Harlem” or pouring out his emotions into the heart wrenching “Hope She’ll Be Happier”. Of course the two undeniable killers are “Use Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine”, a fact which Withers leverages by extending them out and whipping the audience into a frenzy. He proves to be a great and enthusiastic host, taking time to rap with the crowd a bit, but stopping just short of hurting the album’s momentum. It’s the perfect document of one of our most unsung soul heroes in his prime.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock/Pop: Brain Salad Surgery – Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Aladdin Sane – David Bowie; Band on the Run – Paul McCartney & Wings; Hard Nose to the Highway – Van Morrison; Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – Elton John; Abandoned Luncheonette – Hall & Oates; Desperado – Eagles; (Pronounced ‘Leh-‘nerd ‘Skin-‘nerd) – Lynyrd Skynyrd; Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player – Elton John; Billion Dollar Babies – Alice Cooper; Goat’s Head Soup – The Rolling Stones; Ass – Badfinger; Vagabonds of the Western World – Thin Lizzy; Raw Power – The Stooges; Sabbath Bloody Sabbath – Black Sabbath
Soul/Funk: Composite Truth – Mandrill; Afrodisiac – Fela Kuti; Cosmic Slop – Funkadelic; Africadelic – Manu Dibango; Deliver the Word – War; Back to the World – Curtis Mayfield; Livin’ for You – Al Green; Wild and Peaceful – Kool & the Gang; Masterpiece – The Temptations; Happy Children – Osibisa; Ship Ahoy – The O’Jays; Second Time Around – Cymande; Tower of Power – Tower of Power; You’ve Got It Bad Girl – Quincy Jones; Head to the Sky – Earth, Wind & Fire; Let’s Get It On – Marvin Gaye
Country: Shotgun Willie – Willie Nelson; GP – Gram Parsons; Lonesome, On’ry and Mean – Waylon Jennings
Reggae/Jazz/Other: Catch a Fire – Bob Marley & the Wailers; Burnin’ – Bob Marley & the Wailers; Birds of Fire – Mahavishnu Orchestra; Love Devotion Surrender – Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin; Primo – Cal Tjader
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